not help his argument.  “Protoplasm,” he says, “is the clay of the potter; which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod.”  Clay is certainly the physical basis of the potter’s art, but would there be any pottery in the world if it contained only clay?  Do we not have to think of the potter?  In the same way, do we not have to think of something that fashions these myriad forms of life out of protoplasm?—­and back of that, of something that begat protoplasm out of non-protoplasmic matter, and started the flame of life going?  Life accounts for protoplasm, but what accounts for life?  We have to think of the living clay as separated by Nature from the inert “sun-dried clod.”  There is something in the one that is not in the other.  There is really no authentic analogy between the potter’s art and Nature’s art of life.

The force of the analogy, if it has any, drives us to the conclusion that life is an entity, or an agent, working upon matter and independent of it.

There is more wit than science in Huxley’s question, “What better philosophical status has vitality than aquosity?” There is at least this difference:  When vitality is gone, you cannot recall it, or reproduce it by your chemistry; but you can recombine the two gases in which you have decomposed water, any number of times, and get your aquosity back again; it never fails; it is a power of chemistry.  But vitality will not come at your beck; it is not a chemical product, at least in the same sense that water is; it is not in the same category as the wetness or liquidity of water.  It is a name for a phenomenon—­the most remarkable phenomenon in nature.  It is one that the art of man is powerless to reproduce, while water may be made to go through its cycle of change—­solid, fluid, vapor, gas—­and always come back to water.  Well does the late Professor Brooks, of Johns Hopkins, say that “living things do, in some way and in some degree, control or condition inorganic nature; that they hold their own by setting the mechanical properties of matter in opposition to each other, and that this is their most notable and distinctive characteristic.”  Does not Ray Lankester, the irate champion of the mechanistic view of life, say essentially the same thing when he calls man the great Insurgent in Nature’s camp—­“crossing her courses, reversing her processes, and defeating her ends?”

Life appears like the introduction of a new element or force or tendency into the cosmos.  Henceforth the elements go new ways, form new compounds, build up new forms, and change the face of nature.  Rivers flow where they never would have flowed without it, mountains fall in a space of time during which they never would have fallen; barriers arise, rough ways are made smooth, a new world appears—­the world of man’s physical and mental activities.