others--as they affect another of our senses. But the vital activity in
matter is a concrete reality. With it there goes the organizing tendency
or impulse, and upon it hinges the whole evolutionary movement of the
biological history of the globe. We can do all sorts of things with
water and still keep its aquosity. If we resolve it into its constituent
gases we destroy its aquosity, but by uniting these gases chemically we
have the wetness back again. But if a body loses its vitality, its life,
can we by the power of chemistry, or any other power within our reach,
bring the vitality back to it? Can we make the dead live? You may bray
your living body in a mortar, destroy every one of its myriad cells, and
yet you may not extinguish the last spark of life; the protoplasm is
still living. But boil it or bake it and the vitality is gone, and all
the art and science of mankind cannot bring it back again. The physical
and chemical activities remain after the vital activities have ceased.
Do we not then have to supply a non-chemical, a non-physical force or
factor to account for the living body? Is there no difference between
the growth of a plant or an animal, and the increase in size of a
sand-bank or a snow-bank, or a river delta? or between the wear and
repair of a working-man's body and the wear and repair of the machine he
drives? Excretion and secretion are not in the same categories. The
living and the non-living mark off the two grand divisions of matter in
the world in which we live, as no two terms merely descriptive of
chemical and physical phenomena ever can. Life is a motion in matter,
but of another order from that of the physico-chemical, though
inseparable from it. We may forego the convenient term "vital force."
Modern science shies at the term "force." We must have force or energy
or pressure of some kind to lift dead matter up into the myriad forms of
life, though in the last analysis of it it may all date from the sun.
When it builds a living body, we call it a vital force; when it builds a
gravel-bank, or moves a glacier, we call it a mechanical force; when it
writes a poem or composes a symphony, we call it a psychic force--all
distinctions which we cannot well dispense with, though of the ultimate
reality for which these terms stand we can know little. In the latest
science heat and light are not substances, though electricity is. They
are peculiar motions in matter which give rise to sensations in certain
living bodies that we name light and heat, as another peculiar motion in
matter gives rise to a sensation we call sound. Life is another kind of
motion in certain aggregates of matter--more mysterious or inexplicable
than all others because it cannot be described in terms of the others,
and because it defies the art and science of man to reproduce.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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