striking, walking, running—­are mechanical, but seeing, hearing, and tasting, are of another order.  And that which controls, directs, cooerdinates, and inhibits our activities belongs to a still higher order, the psychic.  The world of thoughts and emotions within us, while dependent upon and interacting with the physical world without us, cannot be accounted for in terms of the physical world.  A living thing is more than a machine, more than a chemical laboratory.

We can analyze the processes of a tree into their mechanical and chemical elements, but there is besides a kind of force there which we must call vital.  The whole growth and development of the tree, its manner of branching and gripping the soil, its fixity of species, its individuality—­all imply something that does not belong to the order of the inorganic, automatic forces.  In the living animal how the psychic stands related to the physical or physiological and arises out of it, science cannot tell us, but the relation must be real; only philosophy can grapple with that question.  To resolve the psychic and the vital into the mechanical and chemical and refuse to see any other factors at work is the essence of materialism.

II

Any contrivance which shows an interdependence of parts, that results in unity of action, is super-mechanical.  The solar system may be regarded as a unit, but it has not the purposive unity of a living body.  It is one only in the sense that its separate bodies are all made of one stuff, and obey the same laws and move together in the same direction, but a living body is a unit because all its parts are in the service of one purposive end.  An army is a unit, a flock of gregarious birds, a colony of ants or bees, is a unit because the spirit and purpose of one is the spirit and purpose of all; the unity is psychological.

Only living bodies are adaptive.  Adaptation, of course, has its physics or its chemistry, because it is a physical phenomenon; but there is no adaptation of a rock or a clay-bank to its environment; there is only mechanical and chemical adjustment.  The influence of the environment may bring about chemical and physical changes in a non-living body, but they are not purposive as in a living body.  The fat in the seeds of plants in northern countries is liquid and solid at a lower temperature than in tropical climates.  Living organisms alone react in a formative or deformative way to external stimuli.  In warm climates the fur of animals and the wool of sheep become thin and light.  The colder the climate, the thicker these coverings.  Such facts only show that in the matter of adaptation among living organisms, there is a factor at work other than chemistry and physics—­not independent of them, but making a purposive use of them.  Cut off the central shoot that leads the young spruce tree upwards, and one of the shoots from the whirl of lateral branches