150 The Fundamentals to furnish such a definition only serve to exhibit the futility of the attempt. Herbert. Spencer, who has made the most ambitious attempt of modern times to explain the visible universe,- gives this as the result of his best efforts to define life: “Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.” This definition manifestly stands as much in need of ex planation as that which it purports to explain. But it will serve at least to remind us that the wisdom of men is foolish ness with God. Another eminent man of science defined life as “the twofold internal movement of composition and decomposition, at once general and continuous.” These modern definitions are scarcely an improvement upon that of Aristotle, who defined life as “the assemblage of the operations of nutrition, growth, and destruction.” What a marvellous thing is life, and how far it transcends the comprehension of man, since his best efforts to define it give results so ridiculously inadequate! - The ignorance of scientific men on this subject is frankly confessed by Alfred Russell Wallace, who in one of his latest books, “Man’s Place in the Universe,” says, “Most people give scientific men credit for much greater knowledge than they possess in these matters.” And again: “As to the deeper prob lems of life, and growth, and reproduction, though our physi ologists have learned an infinite amount of curious and in structive facts, they can give us no intelligible explanation of them.” But, if none of us can say what life is, we can all distin guish between that which is living (even in the ordinary sense of the word) and that which is not living; and our best idea of the meaning of life is obtained by comparing that which has life (whether animal or vegetable) with that which has not life, as minerals, or any non-living matter. We know that between
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