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It embraces neither the force of wit, nor the force of folly; but mechanical force and its equivalents. The force exercised by the human hand in lifting a weight either with or without rope and pulley is, in every definitional sense of the word, mechanical force.
Is our scientific technology so destitute of definitional accuracy that they cannot use half a dozen scientific terms without committing half that number of down-right scientific blunders? "New-born specks of living matter" is language that a vitalist might possibly use by sheer inadvertence; but no avowed materialist, like Professor Bastian, should trip in this definitional way.
In the multiplicity of new scientific terms constantly springing up for recognition in these days, there ought to be no difficulty in expressing the true categories, and assigning to them their proper definitional value.
This would be as luminous a definition as that which should make Theism the opposite of Anti-theism, or the Algebraic statement x-y the antithesis of x+y one of no definitional value so long as there is no known quantity expressed in the formula.
The earth should, therefore, fall under the category of "life," according to Herbert Spencer's definitional formula. And so should an automatic dancing-jack that is made to run by internal adjustments to external movements or manifestations.
Nor are these "bioplasts" mere structureless matter, however minute they may be as "little points." They differ only from "morphological cells," in the definitional language employed by different theorists, and lack the all-essential accuracy of distinction necessary to scientific classification.
Precisely what they mean by this undiscovered correlate, is what puzzles us quite as much to determine as it does the materialists to explain. Were they to define life as an "undiscovered force" simply, their definition would manifestly lack in brilliancy what it would conclusively make up in precision and accuracy of definitional statement.
This carefully-worded definition of life, or the origin of "living matter," presents a hypothetical mode of reasoning which is eminently characteristic of all materialists. In the stricter definitional sense of the word, there is no such thing as "living matter" or "dead matter," as we have before claimed.
In his vexation at not finding the value of x, he is driven from mathematical to mechanical biology, and gives us this new definitional value of life that singularly contumacious quantity which so persistently refuses to be eliminated in scientific equations: "Life is molecular machinery worked by molecular force."
It finds, of course, its meagre definitional place in the dictionaries, but the bulky and more exhaustive encyclopedias have no room for it, except as it may be defined, under some correlate of motion, as "the latent possibility of a nebula," or of "undifferentiated primeval mist," originally pervading the interplanetary spaces.
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