Biology, as a science, answers ‘no.’ Says the greatest master of all the facts, Professor Huxley: ‘The properties of living matter distinguish it absolutely from all other kinds of things, and,’ he continues, ‘the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living.’[15] Then what lives is, in its qualities, utterly unlike—sharply marked off from—what is not living. Yet the elements that make up the living stuff are the most common on the earth. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen: we know them each and all; we know their properties and reactions on each other, and on all the minor elements of the living matter; but that knowledge only complicates the nature of the problem. The mystery of life is, not that any occult elements compose the matter in which it dwells; the mystery of life consists solely in the question, _how_ the elements that make up protoplasm can be so combined, as, by their combination, to acquire the splendid and solitary properties of that which lives. Manifestly, then, there was a time in the past history of the globe, when its matter was without life, and therefore there must have been a time, perhaps at a point of intense activity in the not-living matter of the globe, when it became endowed with the properties of life. [Footnote 15: _Ency. Brit._ art. ‘Biology,’ vol. iii. p. 679.] By what agency that transcendent upward movement was wrought, science claims no vocation to inquire. But let the earth, and air, and sea, with all their teeming denizens, attest,—that power was competent. Now let us ask, can we as rational beings account for all the properties of living things in terms of matter and motion? Will vibrating atoms, with millenniums of ages to work in, but no power to direct them, explain the wonder? Was the transmutation of not-living matter into living brought about merely by what we can reduce to solid geometry and transcendental numbers? atoms, which we can approximately measure, dancing to the rhythm of complex motion? All that mechanical evolution has to work with, is atoms and motions. Pile the atoms into complexities too large for clear thought, cluster molecule round molecule, and let them beat in multitudinous harmonies defiant of conception, yet all you have is matter in motion. It is not life with its sentiency; it is not life with its self-chosen movement; it is not life with its power to construct its own substance out of matter that is dead, and to multiply its kind _ad libitum_. And yet Mr. Spencer begins by taking what no mental manipulation of the naked formula of his philosophy could provide, the ‘elements’ of our present chemistry; and by imagining higher and higher complexities of atomic structure a complicated molecule is reached; and then, by a change in name, which is justified by no change in the facts, he calls the complex substance organic matter; and by simply continuing this process, thinks he sees it become living.[16]