Not reacting, but able to react, molecules (for instance those of oxyhydrogen, H2 and O2) are protected by the potential wall of activation energy [A certain amount of energy must be supplied in order to ignite the reaction. As long as this activation energy is not supplied the molecules are protected in the sense that they do not react with one another]. This potential wall, or better : the molecular internal conditions not allowing the given chemical system to directly choose for a next more favorable state, is the guarantee for [meta]stability. How things are with the transition living ==> non-living? [thermodynamically, the non-living state is the more favorable, because then the system is in thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e. it is within the energetic protection wall and thus in a state of lowest potential energy, and, consequently, stable. The living organism, on the other hand, actively holds itself far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and thus maintaining its very structure. It does this by importing energy and exporting entropy.]
The "fluctuating" vital phase boundary all by itself hasn't any organ-like wall function at all. One must ascribe to the vital structure a sufficiently strong directional effect originating from some internal "tension", a directional effect which is able to directly transform the very similar to it [i.e. similar to the vital structure], namely [to transform] the denaturation zone [to transform it into living substance], when the crystalloid side (boundary) of it recedes toward the inorganic external phase [I presume that Müller here means that the living substance is, as it were, pressing toward the outside]. However, this direct-action zone is, qua extension, very thin. When it is [in maintaning the living state] about larger regions in the organism, then vitalization, whose chief function is maintenance, not inducing, is completed with the help of the nucleotidic matrices [DNA] in the sense of exchange-creation or orientation-catalized "transformation".