Now, relying on these discoveries, as well as upon the successful demonstration, by inorganic means, of organic acids in chemistry, and starting from the supposition that the first appearance of life must necessarily be explained by those agencies which are already active in the inorganic nature, many scientists have attempted the so-called _mechanical explanation of life_. This attempt has been made most logically and systematically by Haeckel. He says that organic _matter_, organic _form_, and organic _motion_, in the lowest stages of the organic, which are almost the only ones to be taken into consideration when the problem of the origin of life is discussed, contain nothing at all which does not also pertain to the inorganic. In his opinion, organic _matter_ is an albuminous carbon combination, of which we have to presuppose that, like all chemical combinations, under certain physical and chemical conditions it can also arise in the realm {134} of the inorganic in a purely chemical and mechanical way. Organic _form_ which, in its lowest stages, is so simple, like the moneron and the bathybius, and which stands still lower than a cell, is, moreover, something which there is no difficulty in explaining from inorganic matter. Finally, organic _motion_ which alone is the last and lowest characteristic of the organic in its lowest stage--in which the process of life properly consists, and in which, therefore, we have to recognize the _punctum saliens_ of the whole question--is only an increase and complication of the merely mechanical motion of the inorganic, likewise explainable by mechanical causes. This view Haeckel expounds in the thirteenth and partly also in the first chapter of his "Natural History of Creation," and explains the origin of the first and most simple organic individuals either through what he calls _autogony_ in an inorganic fluid, or through _plasmogony_ in an organic fluid--a plasma or protoplasma. In fact, according to him, the only correct idea is that all matter is provided with a soul, that inorganic and organic nature is one, that all natural bodies known to us are equally animated, and that the contrast commonly drawn between the living and the dead world does not exist. This is but a repetition, in a more rhetorical way, of the same idea which "Anonymus" expressed in discussing the question as to the origin of sensation. DuBois-Reymond--who, in his lecture at Leipzig, pronounced the origin of _sensation_ and of _consciousness_ a problem of natural science, never to be solved--is also of the opinion that the explanation of _life_ from mere mechanism of atoms is very probable, and only a question of time. It is well known that the experimental {135} attempts at originating the organic through chemistry are at present pursued with an eagerness that can have its stimulus only in the hope of success.