It is bewildering to be told by so competent a person as Professor Schaefer that at bottom there is no fundamental difference between the living and non-living.  We need not urge the existence of a peculiar vital force, as distinct from all other forces, but all distinctions between things are useless if we cannot say that a new behavior is set up in matter which we describe by the word “vital,” and that a new principle is operative in organized matter which we must call “intelligence.”  Of course all movements and processes of living beings are in conformity with the general laws of matter, but does such a statement necessarily rule out all idea of the operation of an organizing and directing principle that is not operative in the world of inanimate things?

In Schaefer’s philosophy evolution is purely a mechanical process—­there is no inborn tendency, no inherent push, no organizing effort, but all results from the blind groping and chance jostling of the inorganic elements; from the molecules of undifferentiated protoplasm to the brain of a Christ or a Plato, is just one series of unintelligent physical and chemical activities in matter.

May we not say that all the marks or characteristics of a living body which distinguish it in our experience from an inanimate body, are of a non-scientific character, or outside the sphere of experimental science?  We recognize them as readily as we distinguish day from night, but we cannot describe them in the fixed terms of science.  When we say growth, metabolism, osmosis, the colloidal state, science points out that all this may be affirmed of inorganic bodies.  When we say a life principle, a vital force or soul or spirit or intelligence, science turns a deaf ear.

The difference between the living and the non-living is not so much a physical difference as a metaphysical difference.  Living matter is actuated by intelligence.  Its activities are spontaneous and self-directing.  The rock, and the tree that grows beside it, and the insects and rodents that burrow under it, may all be made of one stuff, but their difference to the beholder is fundamental; there is an intelligent activity in the one that is not in the other.  Now no scientific analysis of a body will reveal the secret of this activity.  As well might your analysis of a phonographic record hope to disclose a sonata of Beethoven latent in the waving lines.  No power of chemistry could reveal any difference between the gray matter of Plato’s brain and that of the humblest citizen of Athens.  All the difference between man, all that makes a man a man, and an ox an ox, is beyond the reach of any of your physico-chemical tests.  By the same token the gulf that separates the organic from the inorganic is not within the power of science to disclose.  The biochemist is bound to put life in the category of the material forces because his science can deal with no other.  To him the word “vital” is a word merely, it stands for no reality, and the