It is clear that the main point of the question does not lie in organic matter or in organic form, but in organic _motion_, for even the specific of the organic _form_ originates only first through _organic motion of life_. If, therefore, life is to be explained from mechanical causes, it must also be shown that the merely mechanical motion of inorganic matter produces that motion which we know as organic motion, and _how_ it produces it. The idea of "increase and complication of the inorganic, merely mechanical motion," with which Haeckel throws a bridge from the living to the lifeless or from the organic to the inorganic, does not yet give us that proof; it seems rather to be one of those pompous phrases with which people hide their ignorance and make the uncritical multitude believe that the explanation is found: a manipulation against which, among others, Wigand, in his great work, repeatedly protests, as also does the Duke of Argyll in his lecture on "Anthropomorphism in Theology," having especially in his mind the deductions of Spencer. For we may review the whole known series of mechanical motions and their mechanical causes, and imagine their mechanical increase and their mechanical complication the largest possible; and still the life-motion of the organic will never result therefrom. If such a keen psychical and physiological investigator and thinker, and such an authority in the realm of the motions of atoms and molecules, as Gustav Theodor Fechner--"Einige Ideen zur Schoepfungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen" ("Some Ideas about the History of the {136} Creation and Development of Organisms"), Leipzig, 1873, p. 1, f.--can find the whole lasting and effectual difference between the organic and inorganic in nothing else than in the way and manner of _motion_--namely, that the motion of the _organic_ molecules is different from that of the _inorganic_ molecules--and when he traces this difference with mathematical exactness, then an assertion which simply denies that difference, without attempting to show the identity of the two motions, to say nothing of proving this identity, is nothing more than a clear evidence that the mechanical theory has not yet succeeded in explaining the origin of life, and that those scientists who so haughtily look down upon the abuse of "_vital power_," to the efficacy of which their antagonists began to resort when their knowledge came to an end, make exactly the same abuse with their "_mechanism_." That organic motion, even the organic motion of molecules, _once present_, comes into dependence on the well known laws of mechanism, we naturally will not deny; any more than that the human body, when serving the will of the mind, follows in its motions the laws of physiology and mechanism.