ABSTRACT
HOW very little do any of us know about ourselves after a century of intensive study and research in biology and other branches of science? We do not even know the nature of life. We see life arriving, we know not whence; and soon departing, we know not whither. Life may be a real and basal form of existence, not being created de novo but being called out, as it were, from an inexhaustible reservoir, and animating matter for a time and then leaving it, returning whence it came. There is much speculation as to how life is associated with matter; it may be indirect, with the cohesive force of the ether as the link that binds them in one seeming whole. Life appears (to us) to need a material vehicle in and through which to express itself, and to display its activities. This material vehicle, the intricate, presumably chemical substance called protoplasm, is in a state of continual flux, a stream of “becoming” rather than something that is.
