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have just said, individuals belonging to species which breed early, And this, generally speaking, Indeed, it is the only general prin

or breed often, ought to die young.

is what we find to be the case. ciple that can be found to hold throughout both the vegetable and

animal kingdoms.

Prof. Ray Lankester, in his essay already alluded to, ascribes this correlation to exhaustion of vital energies in a measure proportional to the amount and rate of propagation. But according to the views here advocated, the correlation is really due to natural selection, and, as such, has a directly adaptive meaning.

GEORGE J. ROMANES.

THA

TO BE ALIVE, WHAT IS IT?

HAT subtile, matter-quickening something we call life, in what does it consist?

The mere mention of its name conjures up a vision of all that is most marvellous in the sense-revealed universe. For the most part it is regarded as a mystery transcending naturalistic conception; as an alien influx into nature, baffling scientific interpretation. Philosophers, ancient and modern, have declared the vivification of the material composing living beings to be the work of an altogether exceptional, hyperphysical agency. And eminent scientists, satisfied that spontaneous generation nowhere occurs, have conjectured that the germ of life has meteorically descended on our planet from the skies.

It is true, physiologists, not long ago, entertained the hope of solving the problem of vitality by means of the hypothesis of atomic mechanics. It has, however, become more and more evident that vital processes, even of the simplest kind, are not of the mechanical order. But, if not through mechanical agency, through atomic push and counterpush, how then are the activities, the purposive movements of life effected?

The scientific spirit revolts against the facile subterfuge of attributing the occurrence of any obscure event in nature to the miraculous intervention of any kind of extraneous power. It can find restful satisfaction in no sort of conflict between incommensurable agencies. It irresistibly urges towards unification, towards a monistic interpretation. The ever-present intuition, guiding and inspiring scientific investigation, is the firm belief that nature is all-embracing,

that all her phenomena without exception are interdependently connected, are forming part of one all-comprising cosmos.

This steadfastly in mind, the attempt shall here be made, first to gain a scientifically justified and logically consistent physical basis, upon which a naturalistic conception of vitality can be reared; and, then, to show to what special physical conditions vital activities and vital organisation owe their existence.

THE PHYSICAL BASIS.

However inscrutable the vivification of lifeless stuff may appear, the rest of nature, things inanimate, have in a manner become intelligible to us. Thunder and lightning, earthquakes and plagues, are no longer regarded as wilful visitations of living Gods; of Indra or Jahve, of Zeus or Thor, of Ahriman or Jove. We view them as necessary outcomes of the present order of nature. And, therewith, they have lost most of their terrorising influence over us. We can tell whence the wind cometh and whither it goeth; and do not stand confounded before the birth of the storm-laden clouds. We know what shakes the old beldame earth, and topples steeples and mossgrown towers." And we do not shrink from waging war against all manner of pestiferous scourges. No such portentous heart-beats, as beset the medieval conscience of Petrarch, oppress us when we ascend heaven-scaling Alps, and behold at our feet the glory of the far-stretching, sunlit landscape. To us the woods bear a familiar aspect. No satyrs or fauns, no mischievous elfs or gnomes haunt their grateful shades. Overhead the sun sheds his majestic light more reliably by far than when all-seeing Helios drove him along. And universal gravitation holds the starry host more trustfully within ordered cycles than could any divine volition of their own.

Our dread of outside nature seems to diminish in measure as we become convinced that nothing vivifies it from within; that its divers constituents, its heaven and earth, its winds and waters, its. stocks and stones, are in no way volitionally actuated. The senseapparent properties of things once probed, we fear not that they will turn upon us with untoward powers. Instead of cringing be

fore their hidden terrors, we proudly move among them as masters, controlling and utilising their sundry efficiencies. Unlike our savage ancestors, whose religion consisted chiefly in attempts at propitiating malignant influences abroad, we snugly-settled optimists have almost come to believe with Candide that this is indeed the best and most benignant of worlds.

Yet such seemingly close familiarity with the outside universe, and the apparent recognition of its nature, is after all but a fond illusion. All things have in truth become far more enigmatical, far more foreign to our understanding, since we fail to discover any analogy between inanimate activities and our own volitional performances. The saying of Socrates, that physical nature must ever remain incomprehensible to us, while we are competent to recognise our own mental and moral being, while as he expressed it—the command of the Delphian god, "Know thyself," could and should be obeyed; this agnostic declaration on the part of the wisest of ancients regarding the physical side of nature, may after all not be so completely off the mark as most scientists of the present day would be inclined to acknowledge.

Gravitation, though its mode of occurrence is mathematically precise, acts really by force of something not remotely so well known to us as our own volition. The evolutional drift of the endless preparatory stages of elaboration through which the original stuff of our planet has passed before it became fit to serve as a habitation for living beings; this physical becoming is infinitely less intelligible than the process by which we ourselves make things subserve remote ends. The forces that actuate and shape material things from within are indeed incommensurable with the activity by which we seize upon them from without, to put their given efficiencies to intelligent uses.

Our comprehension of matter and its forces, vicarious or symbolical as it necessarily is, is moreover limited by the scope of our sense-informed imagination. The astoundingly sensitive response of a lifeless wire to the lightning speed of the electrical influx, and to its slightest minutiæ, is incomparably more perplexing to our conception, than, for instance, the rate of the propagation of

the immensely more sluggish current of activity along our living

nerves.

Furthermore, it is obviously only by dint of co-natural congruency and sympathy that we come to understand the inwardness of any thing or event whatever. We are well enough aware what it inwardly means when some other living being is seen to be in an angry or in a pleased mood, to be laughing or weeping. But who can grasp with co-natural sympathy the inward meaning, the motive intention of a cyclone or an earthquake, of shining light or falling snow, of physical or chemical activity? We generally rest satisfied when we have ascertained that it all occurs in accordance with definite "laws"; that it all forms part of the "mechanism of nature," of a rigorous concatenation of "causes and effects."

But what scientist has the slightest inkling of that which really constitutes inanimate or physical activity? He calls it force, and believes it is something that can move or energise matter. He calls it energy, and imagines that this immaterial essence of activity-in truth a mere mental abstraction-can slide from one material compound into another, assuming protean modes of appearance. At times he calls it motion, without realising that "motion" is only a perceptual sign of ours for all manner of activities we have no power of intellectually assimilating.

In this helpless predicament some are bold enough to cut the knot by asserting that it is volition which here also is imparting motion to lifeless matter; moving it—as some maintain-from within as will of its own; or as others will have it—from without by force of the will of some deus ex machina. But what legitimate analogy can be found between the conscious, aimfully directed movements of our appropriately organised living body, and the evidently unconscious, purposeless motions of things in which no perceptible sign. of animation or volitional direction can be detected?

And if our intellect is powerless to assimilate inanimate or physical activity with what it is cognisant of as animated or volitional activity, our senses fail to yield us adequate information regarding even the effects of such physical activity. We offer our sundry sensibilities as delicately graded reagents to the sense-affecting agents

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