It would seem difficult not to recognize in these changes a likeness to what you know in yourself as intelligent action. Studying them it is hard for any but a confirmed mechanist to resist the contention of men who tell us that the vital _is_ the intelligent. Whereas purely material changes, if they are left to themselves, follow the way of least material resistance, life, whether in the cell or in the organism, moves in an opposite direction. The living vegetable cell raises carbon and other elements from relative inertness to a condition charged with newly available power. And in these developmental changes the organism seems to manifest itself as in very truth 'a living, active, responsive thing, quite capable of relinquishing at need the beaten track of normal development,' like ourselves as we make our bodily, intellectual, moral and spiritual decisions. The mechanist is ready with his retort when we say this, but it is a poor retort. He tells us of mysterious 'specific organ-forming substances' which are not ordinary chemical substances of any kind; and which no research is able to detect, except it be as pictured behind the very processes of growth that are telling _us_ of the organ-forming determination of a specific mode of life. For both us and the mechanist there is the same process and result. He sees, but only with his mind's eye, these utterly mysterious 'substances' he has himself invoked; we see, with our mind's eye, the sea-urchin's, or the newt's, life issuing in that purposeful endeavour which always and everywhere, we say, is a mark of the life we know. We may even admit the possibility of the existence of his organ-forming substances, but only as conditions of life's organ-forming, not as effective causes—a distinction of fundamental importance for the careful thinker not content to be arrested by the look of things, however scientific. We cannot rest in a mechanical interpretation which at best only thrusts the problem one stage farther away, as does the pseudo-physicist-philosopher's ether-God. Life to us seems effective, and under all conditions determining, within the limits of those conditions. Organ-forming substances there may be; but they are either the co-operative servants of life (if they exist at all) like other substances, or they are no better than names for the modes in which life is at work. To us life seems, from its first entrance into possession of a body, when it gave to material substances a higher status, to have worked always towards dominance over the established laws and customs (that is the habits) of matter, as no substances have ever worked. At first it did little more with matter than lift physical or chemical elements upward in heightening states of energy, within a body, against physical or chemical tendencies that would take them downward to their physical or chemical equilibrium; later it went on, through the organizing of an ever more and more complex and variable nervous system, to a