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purely mechanical theory, the physical scientist will be the first to acknowledge it.
 
As a matter of fact, it is one of the profoundest achievements of nineteenth-century science that it has gradually passed beyond the merely mechanical theory which had such vogue after the great discoveries of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Popular thinking has scarcely risen as yet to the modern biological point of view. We are still inclined to think and speak of matter as "inert" or "dead." Science shows us that it is nowhere inert, not even in the great rock foundations of our earth. Physical death is only a state of transition to another form of life. It is life that is fundamental, not what is popularly called a "thing," or "substance." The word ''substance" is ordinarily applied as if each table, house, rock, were a thing by itself, a permanent entity, or unitary mass. But science points out that there are everywhere mutations of life, even in the apparently most solid body. The term "matter" is simply a general expression for relatively mobile forms of life in various grades from the seemingly lifeless granite through less compact forms, solids, liquids, gases, and the attenuated nerve tissues which approach the nature of mind. Furthermore, a single substance--for instance, water--passes successively through three states, as a solid, as liquid, and as vapour, the integration