{70} The matter of the universe, it is felt, must be in existence before the movement which vivifies it. The dead inert stuff must be created before it can receive the breath of life. And if God the creator is conceived as living before the matter which He has created, it is as an external principle, the relation of which to the creation is by most religious minds thought to transcend the power of the finite understanding to conceive. The same fundamental conception of the primacy of matter over movement is evident in the scientific theories of the nature and origin of life. Life appears to science as a form of energy that requires things, matter occupying space, to support it. According to one view, life is the result of a certain combination or synthesis of chemical or physical elements, previously existing separately--a combination of very great complexity, and one that may possibly have occurred once only in the long process of nature, but which nevertheless might be, and some think probably, or even certainly, will be brought about by a chemist working in his laboratory. This is the mechanistic or materialist view. On the other hand, there is the theory of vitalism. Life, it is contended, cannot be due to such a synthesis of material elements as the mechanistic view supposes, because it is of the nature of an "entelechy"--that is, an individual existence which functions, as a whole, in every minutest part of the organism it "vitalises." Life has supervened upon, and not arisen out of the material organism which it guides and controls not by relating independent parts, but by making every part subserve the activity and unity of the whole. But the vitalist theory, as well as the mechanistic theory, conceives the movement and change which is life as dependent on the previous existence of a matter or stuff which is moved or changed. The philosophical {71} conception differs, therefore, from both these theories. It is that life is an original movement, and that this movement is the whole reality of which things, inert matter, even spatial extension, are appearances. True duration is change, not the permanence of something amidst change. There are no unchanging things. Everything changes. Reality is the flux; things are views of the flux, arrests or contractions of the flowing that the intellect makes. The appearance of the world to us is our intellectual grasp of a reality that flows. This original movement is the life of the universe. Briefly stated, the argument on which the theory is based is that it is logically impossible to explain change by changelessness, movement by immobility. Real change cannot be a succession of states themselves fixed and changeless; real movement cannot be the immobile positions in which some thing is successively at rest. On the other hand, if movement is original, the interruption of movement, in whatever way effected, will appear as things. The experience which confirms this