life and vegetable life have a common physical basis in protoplasm, and all their different forms are mere aggregations of cells which are constituted alike and behave alike in each, and yet in the one case they give rise to trees, and in the other they give rise to man.  Science is powerless to penetrate this mystery, and philosophy can only give its own elastic interpretation.  Why consciousness should be born of cell structure in one form of life and not in another, who shall tell us?  Why matter in the brain should think, and in the cabbage only grow, is a question.

The naturalist has not the slightest doubt that the mind of man was evolved from some order of animals below him that had less mind, and that the mind of this order was evolved from that of a still lower order, and so on down the scale till we reach a point where the animal and vegetable meet and blend, and the vegetable mind, if we may call it such, passed into the animal, and still downward till the vegetable is evolved from the mineral.  If to believe this is to be a monist, then science is monistic; it accepts the transformation or metamorphosis of the lower into the higher from the bottom of creation to the top, and without any break of the causal sequence.  There has been no miracle, except in the sense that all life is a miracle.  Of how the organic rose out of the inorganic, we can form no mental image; the intellect cannot bridge the chasm; but that such is the fact, there can be no doubt.  There is no solution except that life is latent or potential in matter, but these again are only words that cover a mystery.

I do not see why there may not be some force latent in matter that we may call the vital force, physical force transformed and heightened, as justifiably as we can postulate a chemical force latent in matter.  The chemical force underlies and is the basis of the vital force.  There is no life without chemism, but there is chemism without life.

We have to have a name for the action and reaction of the primary elements upon one another and we call it chemical affinity; we have to have a name for their behavior in building up organic bodies, and we call it vitality or vitalism.

The rigidly scientific man sees no need of the conception of a new form or kind of force; the physico-chemical forces as we see them in action all about us are adequate to do the work, so that it seems like a dispute about names.  But my mind has to form a new conception of these forces to bridge the chasm between the organic and the inorganic; not a quantitative but a qualitative change is demanded, like the change in the animal mind to make it the human mind, an unfolding into a higher plane.

Whether the evolution of the human mind from the animal was by insensible gradations, or by a few sudden leaps, who knows?  The animal brain began to increase in size in Tertiary times, and seems to have done so suddenly, but the geologic ages were so long that a change in one hundred thousand years would seem sudden.  “The brains of some species increase one hundred per cent.”  The mammal brain greatly outstripped the reptile brain.  Was Nature getting ready for man?