and chemists as indicative of the lack of distinction between the organic and the inorganic point to no such conclusion. Sugar is built up in the cells of the green plant from the inorganic compounds, water, and carbon dioxide, and is therefore a compound prepared by life--that of the plant organism. But sugar may also be built up in the laboratory from inorganic compounds, which may further have been synthesised by the chemist from their elements. Does this destroy the distinction between compounds formed by the agency of the organism and those formed by inorganic agencies? Obviously it does not, for in the green plant the sugar was formed as the result of the vital agency of the living chlorophyllian cell, while in the laboratory it was built up because of the intelligence of the experimenter. Apart from this intelligence or vital agency, the series of chemical transformations beginning with the elements carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, and ending with the substance sugar, would not have occurred. We have no right to say, therefore, that such syntheses destroy the distinction between the organic and the inorganic. What they do indicate is the distinction between the tendency expressed by the second law of thermo-dynamics (inorganic processes), and those that occur as the result of direction conferred upon processes taken as a whole, either by the vital agency of the living cell, or by the intelligence of man (vital processes). The direction, therefore, that may be conferred on a series of physico-chemical processes is what we must understand by the “vital impetus” of Bergson, or the “entelechy” of Driesch.