The Breath of Life

o difficulties. He must either admit of a break in the course of nature and the introduction of a new principle, the vital principle, which, if he is a man of sc

part from another, is an unscientific procedure, and one that often leads to bewildering contradictions; or he must look upon himself with all his high thoughts and a

the result of any break or discontinuity in natural law. He likes to see himself as vitally and inevitably related to the physical order as is the fruit to the tree that bore it, o

al-that it had no beginning in time; or, as some other German biologists h

ut antecedent life,-then the question of a beginning is unthin

ts and physicists will not hear a word about a "soul" in the atom. "In my opinion, however," he says, "in order to explain the simplest physical and chemical processes, we must necessarily assume a low orde

ear that the non-living or inorganic world was before the living or organic world, but that the latter in some mysterious way lay folded in the former. Science has for many years been making desperate efforts to awaken this slumbering life in its laboratories, but has not yet succeeded, and pr

inorganic. In other words, he says it is not necessary for us to think of an absolute commencement of organic life, or of a first organism-organic matter was not produced all at once, but was r