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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Breath of Life, by John Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Breath of Life
+
+Author: John Burroughs
+
+Release Date: May 7, 2006 [EBook #18335]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BREATH OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Jamie Atiga, Leonard Johnson and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+BREATH OF LIFE
+
+
+BY
+
+JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+[Illustration]
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+_Published May 1915_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+As life nears its end with me, I find myself meditating more and more
+upon the mystery of its nature and origin, yet without the least hope
+that I can find out the ways of the Eternal in this or in any other
+world. In these studies I fancy I am about as far from mastering the
+mystery as the ant which I saw this morning industriously exploring a
+small section of the garden walk is from getting a clear idea of the
+geography of the North American Continent. But the ant was occupied and
+was apparently happy, and she must have learned something about a small
+fraction of that part of the earth's surface.
+
+I have passed many pleasant summer days in my hay-barn study, or under
+the apple trees, exploring these questions, and though I have not solved
+them, I am satisfied with the clearer view I have given myself of the
+mystery that envelops them. I have set down in these pages all the
+thoughts that have come to me on this subject. I have not aimed so much
+at consistency as at clearness and definiteness of statement, letting my
+mind drift as upon a shoreless sea. Indeed, what are such questions, and
+all other ultimate questions, but shoreless seas whereon the chief
+reward of the navigator is the joy of the adventure?
+
+Sir Thomas Browne said, over two hundred years ago, that in philosophy
+truth seemed double-faced, by which I fancy he meant that there was
+always more than one point of view of all great problems, often
+contradictory points of view, from which truth is revealed. In the
+following pages I am aware that two ideas, or principles, struggle in my
+mind for mastery. One is the idea of the super-mechanical and the
+super-chemical character of living things; the other is the idea of the
+supremacy and universality of what we call natural law. The first
+probably springs from my inborn idealism and literary habit of mind; the
+second from my love of nature and my scientific bent. It is hard for me
+to reduce the life impulse to a level with common material forces that
+shape and control the world of inert matter, and it is equally hard for
+me to reconcile my reason to the introduction of a new principle, or to
+see anything in natural processes that savors of the _ab-extra_. It is
+the working of these two different ideas in my mind that seems to give
+rise to the obvious contradictions that crop out here and there
+throughout this volume. An explanation of life phenomena that savors of
+the laboratory and chemism repels me, and an explanation that savors of
+the theological point of view is equally distasteful to me. I crave and
+seek a natural explanation of all phenomena upon this earth, but the
+word "natural" to me implies more than mere chemistry and physics. The
+birth of a baby, and the blooming of a flower, are natural events, but
+the laboratory methods forever fail to give us the key to the secret of
+either.
+
+I am forced to conclude that my passion for nature and for all open-air
+life, though tinged and stimulated by science, is not a passion for pure
+science, but for literature and philosophy. My imagination and ingrained
+humanism are appealed to by the facts and methods of natural history. I
+find something akin to poetry and religion (using the latter word in its
+non-mythological sense, as indicating the sum of mystery and reverence
+we feel in the presence of the great facts of life and death) in the
+shows of day and night, and in my excursions to fields and woods. The
+love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the
+two may go together. The Wordsworthian sense in nature, of "something
+far more deeply interfused" than the principles of exact science, is
+probably the source of nearly if not quite all that this volume holds.
+To the rigid man of science this is frank mysticism; but without a sense
+of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat and barren. Without the
+emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art,
+no religion, no literature. How to get from the clod underfoot to the
+brain and consciousness of man without invoking something outside of,
+and superior to, natural laws, is the question. For my own part I
+content myself with the thought of some unknown and doubtless unknowable
+tendency or power in the elements themselves--a kind of universal mind
+pervading living matter and the reason of its living, through which the
+whole drama of evolution is brought about.
+
+This is getting very near to the old teleological conception, as it is
+also near to that of Henri Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge. Our minds
+easily slide into the groove of supernaturalism and spiritualism because
+they have long moved therein. We have the words and they mould our
+thoughts. But science is fast teaching us that the universe is complete
+in itself; that whatever takes place in matter is by virtue of the force
+of matter; that it does not defer to or borrow from some other universe;
+that there is deep beneath deep in it; that gross matter has its
+interior in the molecule, and the molecule has its interior in the atom,
+and the atom has its interior in the electron, and that the electron is
+matter in its fourth or non-material state--the point where it touches
+the super-material. The transformation of physical energy into vital,
+and of vital into mental, doubtless takes place in this invisible inner
+world of atoms and electrons. The electric constitution of matter is a
+deduction of physics. It seems in some degree to bridge over the chasm
+between what we call the material and the spiritual. If we are not
+within hailing distance of life and mind, we seem assuredly on the road
+thither. The mystery of the transformation of the ethereal, imponderable
+forces into the vital and the mental seems quite beyond the power of the
+mind to solve. The explanation of it in the bald terms of chemistry and
+physics can never satisfy a mind with a trace of idealism in it.
+
+The greater number of the chapters of this volume are variations upon a
+single theme,--what Tyndall called "the mystery and the miracle of
+vitality,"--and I can only hope that the variations are of sufficient
+interest to justify the inevitable repetitions which occur. I am no more
+inclined than Tyndall was to believe in miracles unless we name
+everything a miracle, while at the same time I am deeply impressed with
+the inadequacy of all known material forces to account for the phenomena
+of living things.
+
+That word of evil repute, materialism, is no longer the black sheep in
+the flock that it was before the advent of modern transcendental
+physics. The spiritualized materialism of men like Huxley and Tyndall
+need not trouble us. It springs from the new conception of matter. It
+stands on the threshold of idealism or mysticism with the door ajar.
+After Tyndall had cast out the term "vital force," and reduced all
+visible phenomena of life to mechanical attraction and repulsion, after
+he had exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty mystery
+still hovered beyond him. He recognized that he had made no step toward
+its solution, and was forced to confess with the philosophers of all
+ages that
+
+                            "We are such stuff
+    As dreams are made on, and our little life
+    Is rounded with a sleep."
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I.    THE BREATH OF LIFE                   1
+
+II.   THE LIVING WAVE                     24
+
+III.  A WONDERFUL WORLD                   46
+
+IV.   THE BAFFLING PROBLEM                71
+
+V.    SCIENTIFIC VITALISM                104
+
+VI.   A BIRD OF PASSAGE                  115
+
+VII.  LIFE AND MIND                      131
+
+VIII. LIFE AND SCIENCE                   159
+
+IX.   THE JOURNEYING ATOMS               188
+
+X.    THE VITAL ORDER                    212
+
+XI.   THE ARRIVAL OF THE FIT             244
+
+XII.  THE NATURALIST'S VIEW OF LIFE      254
+
+      INDEX                              291
+
+The reproduction of the bust of Mr. Burroughs which appears as the
+frontispiece to this volume is used by courtesy of the sculptor, C. S.
+Pietro.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE BREATH OF LIFE
+
+
+I
+
+When for the third or fourth time during the spring or summer I take my
+hoe and go out and cut off the heads of the lusty burdocks that send out
+their broad leaves along the edge of my garden or lawn, I often ask
+myself, "What is this thing that is so hard to scotch here in the
+grass?" I decapitate it time after time and yet it forthwith gets itself
+another head. We call it burdock, but what is burdock, and why does it
+not change into yellow dock, or into a cabbage? What is it that is so
+constant and so irrepressible, and before the summer is ended will be
+lying in wait here with its ten thousand little hooks to attach itself
+to every skirt or bushy tail or furry or woolly coat that comes along,
+in order to get free transportation to other lawns and gardens, to green
+fields and pastures new?
+
+It is some living thing; but what is a living thing, and how does it
+differ from a mechanical and non-living thing? If I smash or overturn
+the sundial with my hoe, or break the hoe itself, these things stay
+smashed and broken, but the burdock mends itself, renews itself, and, if
+I am not on my guard, will surreptitiously mature some of the burs
+before the season is passed.
+
+Evidently a living thing is radically different from a mechanical thing;
+yet modern physical science tells me that the burdock is only another
+kind of machine, and manifests nothing but the activity of the
+mechanical and chemical principles that we see in operation all about us
+in dead matter; and that a little different mechanical arrangement of
+its ultimate atoms would turn it into a yellow dock or into a cabbage,
+into an oak or into a pine, into an ox or into a man.
+
+I see that it is a machine in this respect, that it is set going by a
+force exterior to itself--the warmth of the sun acting upon it, and upon
+the moisture in the soil; but it is unmechanical in that it repairs
+itself and grows and reproduces itself, and after it has ceased running
+can never be made to run again. After I have reduced all its activities
+to mechanical and chemical principles, my mind seems to see something
+that chemistry and mechanics do not explain--something that avails
+itself of these forces, but is not of them. This may be only my
+anthropomorphic way of looking at things, but are not all our ways of
+looking at things anthropomorphic? How can they be any other? They
+cannot be deific since we are not gods. They may be scientific. But what
+is science but a kind of anthropomorphism? Kant wisely said, "It sounds
+at first singular, but is none the less certain, that the understanding
+does not derive its laws from nature, but prescribes them to nature."
+This is the anthropomorphism of science.
+
+If I attribute the phenomenon of life to a vital force or principle, am
+I any more unscientific than I am when I give a local habitation and a
+name to any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, cohesion,
+osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These terms stand for certain
+special activities in nature and are as much the inventions of our own
+minds as are any of the rest of our ideas.
+
+We can help ourselves out, as Haeckel does, by calling the physical
+forces--such as the magnet that attracts the iron filings, the powder
+that explodes, the steam that drives the locomotive, and the
+like--"living inorganics," and looking upon them as acting by "living
+force as much as the sensitive mimosa does when it contracts its leaves
+at touch." But living force is what we are trying to differentiate from
+mechanical force, and what do we gain by confounding the two? We can
+only look upon a living body as a machine by forming new conceptions of
+a machine--a machine utterly unmechanical, which is a contradiction of
+terms.
+
+A man may expend the same kind of force in thinking that he expends in
+chopping his wood, but that fact does not put the two kinds of activity
+on the same level. There is no question but that the food consumed is
+the source of the energy in both cases, but in the one the energy is
+muscular, and in the other it is nervous. When we speak of mental or
+spiritual force, we have as distinct a conception as when we speak of
+physical force. It requires physical force to produce the effect that we
+call mental force, though how the one can result in the other is past
+understanding. The law of the correlation and conservation of energy
+requires that what goes into the body as physical force must come out in
+some form of physical force--heat, light, electricity, and so forth.
+
+Science cannot trace force into the mental realm and connect it with our
+states of consciousness. It loses track of it so completely that men
+like Tyndall and Huxley and Spencer pause before it as an inscrutable
+mystery, while John Fiske helps himself out with the conception of the
+soul as quite independent of the body, standing related to it as the
+musician is related to his instrument. This idea is the key to Fiske's
+proof of the immortality of the soul. Finding himself face to face with
+an insoluble mystery, he cuts the knot, or rather, clears the chasm, by
+this extra-scientific leap. Since the soul, as we know it, is
+inseparably bound up with physical conditions, it seems to me that a
+more rational explanation of the phenomenon of mentality is the
+conception that the physical force and substance that we use up in a
+mental effort or emotional experience gives rise, through some unknown
+kind of molecular activity, to something which is analogous to the
+electric current in a live wire, and which traverses the nerves and
+results in our changing states of consciousness. This is the mechanistic
+explanation of mind, consciousness, etc., but it is the only one, or
+kind of one, that lends itself to scientific interpretation. Life,
+spirit, consciousness, may be a mode of motion as distinct from all
+other modes of motion, such as heat, light, electricity, as these are
+distinct from each other.
+
+When we speak of force of mind, force of character, we of course speak
+in parables, since the force here alluded to is an experience of our own
+minds entirely and would not suffice to move the finest dust-particle in
+the air.
+
+There could be no vegetable or animal life without the sunbeam, yet when
+we have explained or accounted for the growth of a tree in terms of the
+chemistry and physics of the sunbeam, do we not have to figure to
+ourselves something in the tree that avails itself of this chemistry,
+that uses it and profits by it? After this mysterious something has
+ceased to operate, or play its part, the chemistry of the sunbeam is no
+longer effective, and the tree is dead.
+
+Without the vibrations that we call light, there would have been no eye.
+But, as Bergson happily says, it is not light passively received that
+makes the eye; it is light meeting an indwelling need in the organism,
+which amounts to an active creative principle, that begets the eye. With
+fish in underground waters this need does not arise; hence they have no
+sight. Fins and wings and legs are developed to meet some end of the
+organism, but if the organism were not charged with an expansive or
+developing force or impulse, would those needs arise?
+
+Why should the vertebrate series have risen through the fish, the
+reptile, the mammal, to man, unless the manward impulse was inherent in
+the first vertebrate; something that struggled, that pushed on and up
+from the more simple to the more complex forms? Why did not unicellular
+life always remain unicellular? Could not the environment have acted
+upon it endlessly without causing it to change toward higher and more
+complex forms, had there not been some indwelling aboriginal tendency
+toward these forms? How could natural selection, or any other process of
+selection, work upon species to modify them, if there were not something
+in species pushing out and on, seeking new ways, new forms, in fact some
+active principle that is modifiable?
+
+Life has risen by stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things. Why
+has it risen? Why did it not keep on the same level, and go through the
+cycle of change, as the inorganic does, without attaining to higher
+forms? Because, it may be replied, it was life, and not mere matter and
+motion--something that lifts matter and motion to a new plane.
+
+Under the influence of the life impulse, the old routine of matter--from
+compound to compound, from solid to fluid, from fluid to gaseous, from
+rock to soil, the cycle always ending where it began--is broken into,
+and cycles of a new order are instituted. From the stable equilibrium
+which dead matter is always seeking, the same matter in the vital
+circuit is always seeking the state of unstable equilibrium, or rather
+is forever passing between the two, and evolving the myriad forms of
+life in the passage. It is hard to think of the process as the work of
+the physical and chemical forces of inorganic nature, without
+supplementing them with a new and different force.
+
+The forces of life are constructive forces, and they are operative in a
+world of destructive or disintegrating forces which oppose them and
+which they overcome. The physical and chemical forces of dead matter are
+at war with the forces of life, till life overcomes and uses them.
+
+The mechanical forces go on repeating or dividing through the same
+cycles forever and ever, seeking a stable condition, but the vital force
+is inventive and creative and constantly breaks the repose that organic
+nature seeks to impose upon it.
+
+External forces may modify a body, but they cannot develop it unless
+there is something in the body waiting to be developed, craving
+development, as it were. The warmth and moisture in the soil act alike
+upon the grains of sand and upon the seed-germs; the germ changes into
+something else, the sand does not. These agents liberate a force in the
+germ that is not in the grain of sand. The warmth of the brooding fowl
+does not spend itself upon mere passive, inert matter (unless there is a
+china egg in the nest), but upon matter straining upon its leash, and in
+a state of expectancy. We do not know how the activity of the molecules
+of the egg differs from the activity of the molecules of the pebble,
+under the influence of warmth, but we know there must be a difference
+between the interior movements of organized and unorganized matter.
+
+Life lifts inert matter up into a thousand varied and beautiful forms
+and holds it there for a season,--holds it against gravity and chemical
+affinity, though you may say, if you please, not without their aid,--and
+then in due course lets go of it, or abandons it, and lets it fall back
+into the great sea of the inorganic. Its constant tendency is to fall
+back; indeed, in animal life it does fall back every moment; it rises on
+the one hand, serves its purpose of life, and falls back on the other.
+In going through the cycle of life the mineral elements experience some
+change that chemical analysis does not disclose--they are the more
+readily absorbed again by life. It is as if the elements had profited
+in some way under the tutelage of life. Their experience has been a
+unique and exceptional one. Only a small fraction of the sum total of
+the inert matter of the globe can have this experience. It must first go
+through the vegetable cycle before it can be taken up by the animal. The
+only things we can take directly from the inorganic world are water and
+air; and the function of water is largely a mechanical one, and the
+function of air a chemical one.
+
+I think of the vital as flowing out of the physical, just as the
+psychical flows out of the vital, and just as the higher forms of animal
+life flow out of the lower. It is a far cry from man to the dumb brutes,
+and from the brutes to the vegetable world, and from the vegetable to
+inert matter; but the germ and start of each is in the series below it.
+The living came out of the not-living. If life is of physico-chemical
+origin, it is so by transformations and translations that physics cannot
+explain. The butterfly comes out of the grub, man came out of the brute,
+but, as Darwin says, "not by his own efforts," any more than the child
+becomes the man by its own efforts.
+
+The push of life, of the evolutionary process, is back of all and in
+all. We can account for it all by saying the Creative Energy is immanent
+in matter, and this gives the mind something to take hold of.
+
+
+II
+
+According to the latest scientific views held on the question by such
+men as Professor Loeb, the appearance of life on the globe was a purely
+accidental circumstance. The proper elements just happened to come
+together at the right time in the right proportions and under the right
+conditions, and life was the result. It was an accident in the thermal
+history of the globe. Professor Loeb has lately published a volume of
+essays and addresses called "The Mechanistic Conception of Life,"
+enforcing and illustrating this view. He makes war on what he terms the
+metaphysical conception of a "life-principle" as the key to the problem,
+and urges the scientific conception of the adequacy of
+mechanico-chemical forces. In his view, we are only chemical mechanisms;
+and all our activities, mental and physical alike, are only automatic
+responses to the play of the blind, material forces of external nature.
+All forms of life, with all their wonderful adaptations, are only the
+chance happenings of the blind gropings and clashings of dead matter:
+"We eat, drink, and reproduce [and, of course, think and speculate and
+write books on the problems of life], not because mankind has reached an
+agreement that this is desirable, but because, machine-like, we are
+compelled to do so!"
+
+He reaches the conclusion that all our inner subjective life is
+amenable to physico-chemical analysis, because many cases of simple
+animal instinct and will can be explained on this basis--the basis of
+animal tropism. Certain animals creep or fly to the light, others to the
+dark, because they cannot help it. This is tropism. He believes that the
+origin of life can be traced to the same physico-chemical activities,
+because, in his laboratory experiments, he has been able to dispense
+with the male principle, and to fertilize the eggs of certain low forms
+of marine life by chemical compounds alone. "The problem of the
+beginning and end of individual life is physico-chemically clear"--much
+clearer than the first beginnings of life. All individual life begins
+with the egg, but where did we get the egg? When chemical synthesis will
+give us this, the problem is solved. We can analyze the material
+elements of an organism, but we cannot synthesize them and produce the
+least spark of living matter. That all forms of life have a mechanical
+and chemical basis is beyond question, but when we apply our analysis to
+them, life evaporates, vanishes, the vital processes cease. But apply
+the same analysis to inert matter, and only the form is changed.
+
+Professor Loeb's artificially fathered embryo and starfish and
+sea-urchins soon die. If his chemism could only give him the
+mother-principle also! But it will not. The mother-principle is at the
+very foundations of the organic world, and defies all attempts of
+chemical synthesis to reproduce it.
+
+It would be presumptive in the extreme for me to question Professor
+Loeb's scientific conclusions; he is one of the most eminent of living
+experimental biologists. I would only dissent from some of his
+philosophical conclusions. I dissent from his statement that only the
+mechanistic conception of life can throw light on the source of ethics.
+Is there any room for the moral law in a world of mechanical
+determinism? There is no ethics in the physical order, and if humanity
+is entirely in the grip of that order, where do moral obligations come
+in? A gun, a steam-engine, knows no ethics, and to the extent that we
+are compelled to do things, are we in the same category. Freedom of
+choice alone gives any validity to ethical consideration. I dissent from
+the idea to which he apparently holds, that biology is only applied
+physics and chemistry. Is not geology also applied physics and
+chemistry? Is it any more or any less? Yet what a world of difference
+between the two--between a rock and a tree, between a man and the soil
+he cultivates. Grant that the physical and the chemical forces are the
+same in both, yet they work to such different ends in each. In one case
+they are tending always to a deadlock, to the slumber of a static
+equilibrium; in the other they are ceaselessly striving to reach a state
+of dynamic activity--to build up a body that hangs forever between a
+state of integration and disintegration. What is it that determines this
+new mode and end of their activities?
+
+In all his biological experimentation, Professor Loeb starts with living
+matter and, finding its processes capable of physico-chemical analysis,
+he hastens to the conclusion that its genesis is to be accounted for by
+the action and interaction of these principles alone.
+
+In the inorganic world, everything is in its place through the operation
+of blind physical forces; because the place of a dead thing, its
+relation to the whole, is a matter of indifference. The rocks, the
+hills, the streams are in their place, but any other place would do as
+well. But in the organic world we strike another order--an order where
+the relation and subordination of parts is everything, and to speak of
+human existence as a "matter of chance" in the sense, let us say, that
+the forms and positions of inanimate bodies are matters of chance, is to
+confuse terms.
+
+Organic evolution upon the earth shows steady and regular progression;
+as much so as the growth and development of a tree. If the evolutionary
+impulse fails on one line, it picks itself up and tries on another, it
+experiments endlessly like an inventor, but always improves on its last
+attempts. Chance would have kept things at a standstill; the principle
+of chance, give it time enough, must end where it began. Chance is a
+man lost in the woods; he never arrives; he wanders aimlessly. If
+evolution pursued a course equally fortuitous, would it not still be
+wandering in the wilderness of the chaotic nebulae?
+
+
+III
+
+A vastly different and much more stimulating view of life is given by
+Henri Bergson in his "Creative Evolution." Though based upon biological
+science, it is a philosophical rather than a scientific view, and
+appeals to our intuitional and imaginative nature more than to our
+constructive reason. M. Bergson interprets the phenomena of life in
+terms of spirit, rather than in terms of matter as does Professor Loeb.
+The word "creative" is the key-word to his view. Life is a creative
+impulse or current which arose in matter at a certain time and place,
+and flows through it from form to form, from generation to generation,
+augmenting in force as it advances. It is one with spirit, and is
+incessant creation; the whole organic world is filled, from bottom to
+top, with one tremendous effort. It was long ago felicitously stated by
+Whitman in his "Leaves of Grass," "Urge and urge, always the procreant
+urge of the world."
+
+This conception of the nature and genesis of life is bound to be
+challenged by modern physical science, which, for the most part, sees in
+biology only a phase of physics; but the philosophic mind and the
+trained literary mind will find in "Creative Evolution" a treasure-house
+of inspiring ideas, and engaging forms of original artistic expression.
+As Mr. Balfour says, "M. Bergson's 'Evolution Creatrice' is not merely a
+philosophical treatise, it has all the charm and all the audacities of a
+work of art, and as such defies adequate reproduction."
+
+It delivers us from the hard mechanical conception of determinism, or of
+a closed universe which, like a huge manufacturing plant, grinds out
+vegetables and animals, minds and spirits, as it grinds out rocks and
+soils, gases and fluids, and the inorganic compounds.
+
+With M. Bergson, life is the flowing metamorphosis of the poets,--an
+unceasing becoming,--and evolution is a wave of creative energy
+overflowing through matter "upon which each visible organism rides
+during the short interval of time given it to live." In his view, matter
+is held in the iron grip of necessity, but life is freedom itself.
+"Before the evolution of life ... the portals of the future remain wide
+open. It is a creation that goes on forever in virtue of an initial
+movement. This movement constitutes the unity of the organized world--a
+prolific unity, of an infinite richness, superior to any that the
+intellect could dream of, for the intellect is only one of its aspects
+or products."
+
+What a contrast to Herbert Spencer's view of life and evolution!
+"Life," says Spencer, "consists of inner action so adjusted as to
+balance outer action." True enough, no doubt, but not interesting. If
+the philosopher could tell us what it is that brings about the
+adjustment, and that profits by it, we should at once prick up our ears.
+Of course, it is life. But what is life? It is inner action so adjusted
+as to balance outer action!
+
+A recent contemptuous critic of M. Bergson's book, Hugh S. R. Elliot,
+points out, as if he were triumphantly vindicating the physico-chemical
+theory of the nature and origin of life, what a complete machine a
+cabbage is for converting solar energy into chemical and vital
+energy--how it takes up the raw material from the soil by a chemical and
+mechanical process, how these are brought into contact with the light
+and air through the leaves, and thus the cabbage is built up. In like
+manner, a man is a machine for converting chemical energy derived from
+the food he eats into motion, and the like. As if M. Bergson, or any one
+else, would dispute these things! In the same way, a steam-engine is a
+machine for converting the energy latent in coal into motion and power;
+but what force lies back of the engine, and was active in the
+construction?
+
+The final question of the cabbage and the man still remains--Where did
+you get them?
+
+You assume vitality to start with--how did you get it? Did it arise
+spontaneously out of dead matter? Mechanical and chemical forces do all
+the work of the living body, but who or what controls and directs them,
+so that one compounding of the elements begets a cabbage, and another
+compounding of the same elements begets an oak--one mixture of them and
+we have a frog, another and we have a man? Is there not room here for
+something besides blind, indifferent forces? If we make the molecules
+themselves creative, then we are begging the question. The creative
+energy by any other name remains the same.
+
+
+IV
+
+If life itself is not a force or a form of energy, yet behold what
+energy it is capable of exerting! It seems to me that Sir Oliver Lodge
+is a little confusing when he says in a recent essay that "life does not
+exert force--not even the most microscopical force--and certainly does
+not supply energy." Sir Oliver is thinking of life as a distinct
+entity--something apart from the matter which it animates. But even in
+this case can we not say that the mainspring of the energy of living
+bodies is the life that is in them?
+
+Apart from the force exerted by living animal bodies, see the force
+exerted by living plant bodies. I thought of the remark of Sir Oliver
+one day not long after reading it, while I was walking in a beech wood
+and noted how the sprouting beechnuts had sent their pale radicles down
+through the dry leaves upon which they were lying, often piercing two
+or three of them, and forcing their way down into the mingled soil and
+leaf-mould a couple of inches. Force was certainly expended in doing
+this, and if the life in the sprouting nut did not exert it or expend
+it, what did?
+
+When I drive a peg into the ground with my axe or mallet, is the life in
+my arm any more strictly the source (the secondary source) of the energy
+expended than is the nut in this case? Of course, the sun is the primal
+source of the energy in both cases, and in all cases, but does not life
+exert the force, use it, bring it to bear, which it receives from the
+universal fount of energy?
+
+Life cannot supply energy _de novo_, cannot create it out of nothing,
+but it can and must draw upon the store of energy in which the earth
+floats as in a sea. When this energy or force is manifest through a
+living body, we call it vital force; when it is manifest through a
+mechanical contrivance, we call it mechanical force; when it is
+developed by the action and reaction of chemical compounds, we call it
+chemical force; the same force in each case, but behaving so differently
+in the one case from what it does in the other that we come to think of
+it as a new and distinct entity. Now if Sir Oliver or any one else could
+tell us what force is, this difference between the vitalists and the
+mechanists might be reconciled.
+
+Darwin measured the force of the downward growth of the radicle, such as
+I have alluded to, as one quarter of a pound, and its lateral pressure
+as much greater. We know that the roots of trees insert themselves into
+seams in the rocks, and force the parts asunder. This force is
+measurable and is often very great. Its seat seems to be in the soft,
+milky substance called the cambium layer under the bark. These minute
+cells when their force is combined may become regular rock-splitters.
+
+One of the most remarkable exhibitions of plant force I ever saw was in
+a Western city where I observed a species of wild sunflower forcing its
+way up through the asphalt pavement; the folded and compressed leaves of
+the plant, like a man's fist, had pushed against the hard but flexible
+concrete till it had bulged up and then split, and let the irrepressible
+plant through. The force exerted must have been many pounds. I think it
+doubtful if the strongest man could have pushed his fist through such a
+resisting medium. If it was not life which exerted this force, what was
+it? Life activities are a kind of explosion, and the slow continued
+explosions of this growing plant rent the pavement as surely as powder
+would have done. It is doubtful if any cultivated plant could have
+overcome such odds. It required the force of the untamed hairy plant of
+the plains to accomplish this feat.
+
+That life does not supply energy, that is, is not an independent source
+of energy, seems to me obvious enough, but that it does not manifest
+energy, use energy, or "exert force," is far from obvious. If a growing
+plant or tree does not exert force by reason of its growing, or by
+virtue of a specific kind of activity among its particles, which we name
+life, and which does not take place in a stone or in a bar of iron or in
+dead timber, then how can we say that any mechanical device or explosive
+compound exerts force? The steam-engine does not create force, neither
+does the exploding dynamite, but these things exert force. We have to
+think of the sum total of the force of the universe, as of matter
+itself, as a constant factor, that can neither be increased nor
+diminished. All activity, organic and inorganic, draws upon this force:
+the plant and tree, as well as the engine and the explosive--the winds,
+the tides, the animal, the vegetable alike. I can think of but one
+force, but of any number of manifestations of force, and of two distinct
+kinds of manifestations, the organic and the inorganic, or the vital and
+the physical,--the latter divisible into the chemical and the
+mechanical, the former made up of these two working in infinite
+complexity because drawn into new relations, and lifted to higher ends
+by this something we call life.
+
+We think of something in the organic that lifts and moves and
+redistributes dead matter, and builds it up into the ten thousand new
+forms which it would never assume without this something; it lifts lime
+and iron and silica and potash and carbon, against gravity, up into
+trees and animal forms, not by a new force, but by an old force in the
+hands of a new agent.
+
+The cattle move about the field, the drift boulders slowly creep down
+the slopes; there is no doubt that the final source of the force is in
+both cases the same; what we call gravity, a name for a mystery, is the
+form it takes in the case of the rocks, and what we call vitality,
+another name for a mystery, is the form it takes in the case of the
+cattle; without the solar and stellar energy, could there be any motion
+of either rock or beast?
+
+Force is universal, it pervades all nature, one manifestation of it we
+call heat, another light, another electricity, another cohesion,
+chemical affinity, and so on. May not another manifestation of it be
+called life, differing from all the rest more radically than they differ
+from one another; bound up with all the rest and inseparable from them
+and identical with them only in its ultimate source in the Creative
+Energy that is immanent in the universe? I have to think of the Creative
+Energy as immanent in all matter, and the final source of all the
+transformations and transmutations we see in the organic and the
+inorganic worlds. The very nature of our minds compels us to postulate
+some power, or some principle, not as lying back of, but as active in,
+all the changing forms of life and nature, and their final source and
+cause.
+
+The mind is satisfied when it finds a word that gives it a hold of a
+thing or a process, or when it can picture to itself just how the thing
+occurs. Thus, for instance, to account for the power generated by the
+rushing together of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water, we have to
+conceive of space between the atoms of these elements, and that the
+force generated comes from the immense velocity with which the
+infinitesimal atoms rush together across this infinitesimal space. It is
+quite possible that this is not the true explanation at all, but it
+satisfies the mind because it is an explanation in terms of mechanical
+forces that we know.
+
+The solar energy goes into the atoms or corpuscles one thing, and it
+comes out another; it goes in as inorganic force, and it comes out as
+organic and psychic. The change or transformation takes place in those
+invisible laboratories of the infinitesimal atoms. It helps my mental
+processes to give that change a name--vitality--and to recognize it as a
+supra-mechanical force. Pasteur wanted a name for it and called it
+"dissymmetric force."
+
+We are all made of one stuff undoubtedly, vegetable and animal, man and
+woman, dog and donkey, and the secret of the difference between us, and
+of the passing along of the difference from generation to generation
+with but slight variations, may be, so to speak, in the way the
+molecules and atoms of our bodies take hold of hands and perform their
+mystic dances in the inner temple of life. But one would like to know
+who or what pipes the tune and directs the figures of the dance.
+
+In the case of the beechnuts, what is it that lies dormant in the
+substance of the nuts and becomes alive, under the influence of the
+warmth and moisture of spring, and puts out a radicle that pierces the
+dry leaves like an awl? The pebbles, though they contain the same
+chemical elements, do not become active and put out a radicle.
+
+The chemico-physical explanation of the universe goes but a little way.
+These are the tools of the creative process, but they are not that
+process, nor its prime cause. Start the flame of life going, and the
+rest may be explained in terms of chemistry; start the human body
+developing, and physiological processes explain its growth; but why it
+becomes a man and not a monkey--what explains that?
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE LIVING WAVE
+
+
+I
+
+If one attempts to reach any rational conclusion on the question of the
+nature and origin of life on this planet, he soon finds himself in close
+quarters with two difficulties. He must either admit of a break in the
+course of nature and the introduction of a new principle, the vital
+principle, which, if he is a man of science, he finds it hard to do; or
+he must accept the theory of the physico-chemical origin of life, which,
+as a being with a soul, he finds it equally hard to do. In other words,
+he must either draw an arbitrary line between the inorganic and the
+organic when he knows that drawing arbitrary lines in nature, and
+fencing off one part from another, is an unscientific procedure, and one
+that often leads to bewildering contradictions; or he must look upon
+himself with all his high thoughts and aspirations, and upon all other
+manifestations of life, as merely a chance product of the blind
+mechanical and chemical action and interaction of the inorganic forces.
+
+Either conclusion is distasteful. One does not like to think of himself
+as a chance hit of the irrational physical elements; neither does he
+feel at ease with the thought that he is the result of any break or
+discontinuity in natural law. He likes to see himself as vitally and
+inevitably related to the physical order as is the fruit to the tree
+that bore it, or the child to the mother that carried it in her womb,
+and yet, if only mechanical and chemical forces entered into his
+genesis, he does not feel himself well fathered and mothered.
+
+One may evade the difficulty, as Helmholtz did, by regarding life as
+eternal--that it had no beginning in time; or, as some other German
+biologists have done, that the entire cosmos is alive and the earth a
+living organism.
+
+If biogenesis is true, and always has been true,--no life without
+antecedent life,--then the question of a beginning is unthinkable. It is
+just as easy to think of a stick with only one end.
+
+Such stanch materialists and mechanists as Haeckel and Verworn seem to
+have felt compelled, as a last resort, to postulate a psychic principle
+in nature, though of a low order. Haeckel says that most chemists and
+physicists will not hear a word about a "soul" in the atom. "In my
+opinion, however," he says, "in order to explain the simplest physical
+and chemical processes, we must necessarily assume a low order of
+psychical activity among the homogeneous particles of plasm, rising a
+very little above that of the crystal." In crystallization he sees a
+low degree of sensation and a little higher degree in the plasm.
+
+Have we not in this rudimentary psychic principle which Haeckel ascribes
+to the atom a germ to start with that will ultimately give us the mind
+of man? With this spark, it seems to me, we can kindle a flame that will
+consume Haeckel's whole mechanical theory of creation. Physical science
+is clear that the non-living or inorganic world was before the living or
+organic world, but that the latter in some mysterious way lay folded in
+the former. Science has for many years been making desperate efforts to
+awaken this slumbering life in its laboratories, but has not yet
+succeeded, and probably never will succeed. Life without antecedent life
+seems a biological impossibility. The theory of spontaneous generation
+is rejected by the philosophical mind, because our experience tells us
+that everything has its antecedent, and that there is and can be no end
+to the causal sequences.
+
+Spencer believes that the organic and inorganic fade into each other by
+insensible gradations--that no line can be drawn between them so that
+one can say, on this side is the organic, on that the inorganic. In
+other words, he says it is not necessary for us to think of an absolute
+commencement of organic life, or of a first organism--organic matter was
+not produced all at once, but was reached through steps or gradations.
+Yet it puzzles one to see how there can be any gradations or degrees
+between being and not being. Can there be any halfway house between
+something and nothing?
+
+
+II
+
+There is another way out of the difficulty that besets our rational
+faculties in their efforts to solve this question, and that is the
+audacious way of Henri Bergson in his "Creative Evolution." It is to
+deny any validity to the conclusion of our logical faculties upon this
+subject. Our intellect, Bergson says, cannot grasp the true nature of
+life, nor the meaning of the evolutionary movement. With the emphasis of
+italics he repeats that "_the intellect is characterized by a natural
+inability to comprehend life_." He says this in a good many pages and in
+a good many different ways; the idea is one of the main conclusions of
+his book. Our intuitions, our spiritual nature, according to this
+philosopher, are more _en rapport_ with the secrets of the creative
+energy than are our intellectual faculties; the key to the problem is to
+be found here, rather than in the mechanics and chemistry of the latter.
+Our intellectual faculties can grasp the physical order because they are
+formed by a world of solids and fluids and give us the power to deal
+with them and act upon them. But they cannot grasp the nature and the
+meaning of the vital order.
+
+"We treat the living like the lifeless, and think all reality, however
+fluid, under the form of the sharply defined solid. We are at ease only
+in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. Perceiving in an
+organism only parts external to parts, the understanding has the choice
+between two systems of explanation only: either to regard the infinitely
+complex (and thereby infinitely well contrived) organization as a
+fortuitous concatenation of atoms, or to relate it to the
+incomprehensible influence of an external force that has grouped its
+elements together."
+
+"Everything is obscure in the idea of creation, if we think of things
+which are created and a thing which creates." If we follow the lead of
+our logical, scientific faculties, then, we shall all be mechanists and
+materialists. Science can make no other solution of the problem because
+it sees from the outside. But if we look from the inside, with the
+spirit or "with that faculty of seeing which is immanent in the faculty
+of acting," we shall escape from the bondage of the mechanistic view
+into the freedom of the larger truth of the ceaseless creative view; we
+shall see the unity of the creative impulse which is immanent in life
+and which, "passing through generations, links individuals with
+individuals, species with species, and makes of the whole series of the
+living one single immense wave flowing over matter."
+
+I recall that Tyndall, who was as much poet as scientist, speaks of
+life as a wave "which at no two consecutive moments of its existence is
+composed of the same particles." In his more sober scientific mood
+Tyndall would doubtless have rejected M. Bergson's view of life, yet his
+image of the wave is very Bergsonian. But what different meanings the
+two writers aim to convey: Tyndall is thinking of the fact that a living
+body is constantly taking up new material on the one side and dropping
+dead or outworn material on the other. M. Bergson's mind is occupied
+with the thought of the primal push or impulsion of matter which travels
+through it as the force in the wave traverses the water. The wave
+embodies a force which lifts the water up in opposition to its tendency
+to seek and keep a level, and travels on, leaving the water behind. So
+does this something we call life break the deadlock of inert matter and
+lift it into a thousand curious and beautiful forms, and then, passing
+on, lets it fall back again into a state of dead equilibrium.
+
+Tyndall was one of the most eloquent exponents of the materialistic
+theory of the origin of life, and were he living now would probably feel
+little or no sympathy with the Bergsonian view of a primordial life
+impulse. He found the key to all life phenomena in the hidden world of
+molecular attraction and repulsion. He says: "Molecular forces determine
+the form which the solar energy will assume. [What a world of mystery
+lies in that determinism of the hidden molecular forces!] In the
+separation of the carbon and oxygen this energy may be so conditioned as
+to result in one case in the formation of a cabbage and in another case
+in the formation of an oak. So also as regards the reunion of the carbon
+and the oxygen [in the animal organism] the molecular machinery through
+which the combining energy acts may in one case weave the texture of a
+frog, while in another it may weave the texture of a man."
+
+But is not this molecular force itself a form of solar energy, and can
+it differ in kind from any other form of physical force? If molecular
+forces determine whether the solar energy shall weave a head of a
+cabbage or a head of a Plato or a Shakespeare, does it not meet all the
+requirements of our conception of creative will?
+
+Tyndall thinks that a living man--Socrates, Aristotle, Goethe, Darwin, I
+suppose--could be produced directly from inorganic nature in the
+laboratory if (and note what a momentous "if" this is) we could put
+together the elements of such a man in the same relative positions as
+those which they occupy in his body, "with the selfsame forces and
+distribution of forces, the selfsame motions and distribution of
+motions." Do this and you have a St. Paul or a Luther or a Lincoln. Dr.
+Verworn said essentially the same thing in a lecture before one of our
+colleges while in this country a few years ago--easy enough to
+manufacture a living being of any order of intellect if you can
+reproduce in the laboratory his "internal and external _vital
+conditions_." (The italics are mine.) To produce those vital conditions
+is where the rub comes. Those vital conditions, as regards the minutest
+bit of protoplasm, science, with all her tremendous resources, has not
+yet been able to produce. The raising of Lazarus from the dead seems no
+more a miracle than evoking vital conditions in dead matter. External
+and internal vital conditions are no doubt inseparably correlated, and
+when we can produce them we shall have life. Life, says Verworn, is like
+fire, and "is a phenomenon of nature which appears as soon as the
+complex of its conditions is fulfilled." We can easily produce fire by
+mechanical and chemical means, but not life. Fire is a chemical process,
+it is rapid oxidation, and oxidation is a disintegrating process, while
+life is an integrating process, or a balance maintained between the two
+by what we call the vital force. Life is evidently a much higher form of
+molecular activity than combustion. The old Greek Heraclitus saw, and
+the modern scientist sees, very superficially in comparing the two.
+
+I have no doubt that Huxley was right in his inference "that if the
+properties of matter result from the nature and disposition of its
+component molecules, then there is no intelligible ground for refusing
+to say that the properties of protoplasm result from the nature and
+disposition of its molecules." It is undoubtedly in that nature and
+disposition of the biological molecules that Tyndall's whole "mystery
+and miracle of vitality" is wrapped up. If we could only grasp what it
+is that transforms the molecule of dead matter into the living molecule!
+Pasteur called it "dissymmetric force," which is only a new name for the
+mystery. He believed there was an "irrefragable physical barrier between
+organic and inorganic nature"--that the molecules of an organism
+differed from those of a mineral, and for this difference he found a
+name.
+
+
+III
+
+There seems to have been of late years a marked reaction, even among men
+of science, from the mechanistic conception of life as held by the band
+of scientists to which I have referred. Something like a new vitalism is
+making headway both on the Continent and in Great Britain. Its exponents
+urge that biological problems "defy any attempt at a mechanical
+explanation." These men stand for the idea "of the creative
+individuality of organisms" and that the main factors in organic
+evolution cannot be accounted for by the forces already operative in the
+inorganic world.
+
+There is, of course, a mathematical chance that in the endless changes
+and permutations of inert matter the four principal elements that make
+up a living body may fall or run together in just that order and number
+that the kindling of the flame of life requires, but it is a disquieting
+proposition. One atom too much or too little of any of them,--three of
+oxygen where two were required, or two of nitrogen where only one was
+wanted,--and the face of the world might have been vastly different. Not
+only did much depend on their coming together, but upon the order of
+their coming; they must unite in just such an order. Insinuate an atom
+or corpuscle of hydrogen or carbon at the wrong point in the ranks, and
+the trick is a failure. Is there any chance that they will hit upon a
+combination of things and forces that will make a machine--a watch, a
+gun, or even a row of pins?
+
+When we regard all the phenomena of life and the spell it seems to put
+upon inert matter, so that it behaves so differently from the same
+matter before it is drawn into the life circuit, when we see how it
+lifts up a world of dead particles out of the soil against gravity into
+trees and animals; how it changes the face of the earth; how it comes
+and goes while matter stays; how it defies chemistry and physics to
+evoke it from the non-living; how its departure, or cessation, lets the
+matter fall back to the inorganic--when we consider these and others
+like them, we seem compelled to think of life as something, some force
+or principle in itself, as M. Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge do, existing
+apart from the matter it animates.
+
+Sir Oliver Lodge, famous physicist that he is, yet has a vein of
+mysticism and idealism in him which sometimes makes him recoil from the
+hard-and-fast interpretations of natural phenomena by physical science.
+Like M. Bergson, he sees in life some tendency or impetus which arose in
+matter at a definite time and place, "and which has continued to
+interact with and incarnate itself in matter ever since."
+
+If a living body is a machine, then we behold a new kind of machine with
+new kinds of mechanical principles--a machine that repairs itself, that
+reproduces itself, a clock that winds itself up, an engine that stokes
+itself, a gun that aims itself, a machine that divides and makes two,
+two unite and make four, a million or more unite and make a man or a
+tree--a machine that is nine tenths water, a machine that feeds on other
+machines, a machine that grows stronger with use; in fact, a machine
+that does all sorts of unmechanical things and that no known combination
+of mechanical and chemical principles can reproduce--a vital machine.
+The idea of the vital as something different from and opposed to the
+mechanical must come in. Something had to be added to the mechanical and
+chemical to make the vital.
+
+Spencer explains in terms of physics why an ox is larger than the sheep,
+but he throws no light upon the subject of the individuality of these
+animals--what it is that makes an ox an ox or a sheep a sheep. These
+animals are built up out of the same elements by the same processes, and
+they may both have had the same stem form in remote biologic time. If
+so, what made them diverge and develop into such totally different
+forms? After the living body is once launched many, if not all, of its
+operations and economies can be explained on principles of mechanics and
+chemistry, but the something that avails itself of these principles and
+develops an ox in the one case and a sheep in the other--what of that?
+
+Spencer is forced into using the terms "amount of vital capital." How
+much more of it some men, some animals, some plants have than others!
+What is it? What did Spencer mean by it? This capital augments from
+youth to manhood, and then after a short or long state of equilibrium
+slowly declines to the vanishing-point.
+
+Again, what a man does depends upon what he is, and what he is depends
+upon what he does. Structure determines function, and function reacts
+upon structure. This interaction goes on throughout life; cause and
+effect interchange or play into each other's hands. The more power we
+spend within limits the more power we have. This is another respect in
+which life is utterly unmechanical. A machine does not grow stronger by
+use as our muscles do; it does not store up or conserve the energy it
+expends. The gun is weaker by every ball it hurls; not so the baseball
+pitcher; he is made stronger up to the limit of his capacity for
+strength.
+
+It is plain enough that all living beings are machines in this
+respect--they are kept going by the reactions between their interior and
+their exterior; these reactions are either mechanical, as in flying,
+swimming, walking, and involve gravitation, or they are chemical and
+assimilative, as in breathing and eating. To that extent all living
+things are machines--some force exterior to themselves must aid in
+keeping them going; there is no spontaneous or uncaused movement in
+them; and yet what a difference between a machine and a living thing!
+
+True it is that a man cannot live and function without heat and oxygen,
+nor long without food, and yet his relation to his medium and
+environment is as radically different from that of the steam-engine as
+it is possible to express. His driving-wheel, the heart, acts in
+response to some stimulus as truly as does the piston of the engine, and
+the principles involved in circulation are all mechanical; and yet the
+main thing is not mechanical, but vital. Analyze the vital activities
+into principles of mechanics and of chemistry, if you will, yet there is
+something involved that is neither mechanical nor chemical, though it
+may be that only the imagination can grasp it.
+
+The type that prints the book is set up and again distributed by a
+purely mechanical process, but that which the printed page signifies
+involves something not mechanical. The mechanical and chemical
+principles operative in men's bodies are all the same; the cell
+structure is the same, and yet behold the difference between men in
+size, in strength, in appearance, in temperament, in disposition, in
+capacities! All the processes of respiration, circulation, and nutrition
+in our bodies involve well-known mechanical principles, and the body is
+accurately described as a machine; and yet if there were not something
+in it that transcends mechanics and chemistry would you and I be here? A
+machine is the same whether it is in action or repose, but when a body
+ceases to function, it is not the same. It cannot be set going like a
+machine; the motor power has ceased to be. But if the life of the body
+were no more than the sum of the reactions existing between the body and
+the medium in which it lives, this were not so. A body lives as long as
+there is a proper renewal of the interior medium through exchanges with
+its environment.
+
+Mechanical principles are operative in every part of the body--in the
+heart, in the arteries, in the limbs, in the joints, in the bowels, in
+the muscles; and chemical principles are operative in the lungs, in the
+stomach, in the liver, in the kidneys; but to all these things do we not
+have to add something that is not mechanical or chemical to make the
+man, to make the plant? A higher mechanics, a higher chemistry, if you
+prefer, a force, but a force differing in kind from the physical forces.
+
+The forces of life are constructive forces, and work in a world of
+disintegrating or destructive forces which oppose them and which they
+overcome. The mechanical and the chemical forces of dead matter are the
+enemies of the forces of life till life overcomes and uses them; as much
+so as gravity, fire, frost, water are man's enemies till he has learned
+how to subdue and use them.
+
+
+IV
+
+It is a significant fact that the four chief elements which in various
+combinations make up living bodies are by their extreme mobility well
+suited to their purpose. Three of these are gaseous; only the carbon is
+a solid. This renders them facile and adaptive in the ever-changing
+conditions of organic evolution. The solid carbon forms the vessel in
+which the precious essence of life is carried. Without carbon we should
+evaporate or flow away and escape. Much of the oxygen and hydrogen
+enters into living bodies as water; nine tenths of the human body is
+water; a little nitrogen and a few mineral salts make up the rest. So
+that our life in its final elements is little more than a stream of
+water holding in solution carbonaceous and other matter and flowing,
+forever flowing, a stream of fluid and solid matter plus something else
+that scientific analysis cannot reach--some force or principle that
+combines and organizes these elements into the living body.
+
+If a man could be reduced instantly into his constituent elements we
+should see a pail or two of turbid fluid that would flow down the bank
+and soon be lost in the soil. That which gives us our form and stability
+and prevents us from slowly spilling down the slope at all times is the
+mysterious vital principle or force which knits and marries these
+unstable elements together and raises up a mobile but more or less
+stable form out of the world of fluids. Venus rising from the sea is a
+symbol of the genesis of every living thing.
+
+Inorganic matter seeks only rest. "Let me alone," it says; "do not break
+my slumbers." But as soon as life awakens in it, it says: "Give me room,
+get out of my way. Ceaseless activity, ceaseless change, a thousand new
+forms are what I crave." As soon as life enters matter, matter meets
+with a change of heart. It is lifted to another plane, the
+supermechanical plane; it behaves in a new way; its movements from being
+calculable become incalculable. A straight line has direction, that is
+mechanics; what direction has the circle? That is life, a change of
+direction every instant. An aeroplane is built entirely on mechanical
+principles, but something not so built has to sit in it and guide it; in
+fact, had to build it and adjust it to its end.
+
+Mechanical forces seek an equilibrium or a state of rest. The whole
+inorganic world under the influence of gravity would flow as water
+flows, if it could, till it reached a state of absolute repose. But
+vital forces struggle against a state of repose, which to them means
+death. They are vital by virtue of their tendency to resist the repose
+of inert matter; chemical activity disintegrates a stone or other metal,
+but the decay of organized matter is different in kind; living organisms
+decompose it and resolve it into its original compounds.
+
+Vital connections and mechanical connections differ in kind. You can
+treat mechanical principles mathematically, but can you treat life
+mathematically? Will your formulas and equations apply here? You can
+figure out the eclipses of the sun and moon for centuries to come, but
+who can figure out the eclipses of nations or the overthrow of parties
+or the failures of great men? And it is not simply because the problem
+is so vastly more complex; it is because you are in a world where
+mathematical principles do not apply. Mechanical forces will determine
+the place and shape of every particle of inert matter any number of
+years or centuries hence, but they will not determine the place and
+condition of matter imbued with the principle of life.
+
+We can graft living matter, we can even graft a part of one animal's
+body into another animal's body, but the mechanical union which we
+bring about must be changed into vital union to be a success, the
+spirit of the body has to second our efforts. The same in grafting a
+tree or anything else: the mechanical union which we effect must become
+a vital union; and this will not take place without some degree of
+consanguinity, the live scion must be recognized and adapted by the
+stock in which we introduce it.
+
+Living matter may be symbolized by a stream; it is ever and never the
+same; life is a constant becoming; our minds and our bodies are never
+the same at any two moments of time; life is ceaseless change.
+
+No doubt it is between the stable and the unstable condition of the
+molecules of matter that life is born. The static condition to which all
+things tend is death. Matter in an unstable condition tends either to
+explode or to grow or to disintegrate. So that an explosion bears some
+analogy to life, only it is quickly over and the static state of the
+elements is restored. Life is an infinitely slower explosion, or a
+prolonged explosion, during which some matter of the organism is being
+constantly burned up, and thus returned to a state of inorganic repose,
+while new matter is taken in and kindled and consumed by the fires of
+life. One can visualize all this and make it tangible to the intellect.
+Get your fire of life started and all is easy, but how to start it is
+the rub. Get your explosive compound, and something must break the
+deadlock of the elements before it will explode. So in life, what is it
+that sets up this slow gentle explosion that makes the machinery of our
+vital economies go--that draws new matter into the vortex and casts the
+used-up material out--in short, that creates and keeps up the unstable
+condition, the seesaw upon which life depends? To enable the mind to
+grasp it we have to invent or posit some principle, call it the vital
+force, as so many have done and still do, or call it molecular force, as
+Tyndall does, or the power of God, as our orthodox brethren do, it
+matters not. We are on the border-land between the knowable and the
+unknowable, where the mind can take no further step. There is no life
+without carbon and oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, but there is a world
+of these elements without life. What must be added to them to set up the
+reaction we call life? Nothing that chemistry can disclose.
+
+New tendencies and activities are set up among these elements, but the
+elements themselves are not changed; oxygen is still oxygen and carbon
+still carbon, yet behold the wonder of their new workmanship under the
+tutelage of life!
+
+Life only appears when the stable passes into the unstable, yet this
+change takes place all about us in our laboratories, and no life
+appears. We can send an electric spark through a room full of oxygen and
+hydrogen gas, and with a tremendous explosion we have water--an element
+of life, but not life.
+
+Some of the elements seem nearer life than others. Water is near life;
+heat, light, the colloid state are near life; osmosis, oxidation,
+chemical reactions are near life; the ashes of inorganic bodies are
+nearer life than the same minerals in the rocks and soil; but none of
+these things is life.
+
+The chemical mixture of some of the elements gives us our high
+explosives--gunpowder, guncotton, and the like; their organic mixture
+gives a slower kind of explosive--bread, meat, milk, fruit, which, when
+acted upon by the vital forces of the body, yield the force that is the
+equivalent of the work the body does. But to combine them in the
+laboratory so as to produce the compounds out of which the body can
+extract force is impossible. We can make an unstable compound that will
+hurl a ton of iron ten miles, but not one that when exploded in the
+digestive tract of the human body will lift a hair.
+
+We may follow life down to the ground, yes, under the ground, into the
+very roots of matter and motion, yea, beyond the roots, into the
+imaginary world of molecules and atoms, and their attractions and
+repulsions and not find its secret. Indeed, science--the new
+science--pursues matter to the vanishing-point, where it ceases to
+become matter and becomes pure force or spirit. What takes place in that
+imaginary world where ponderable matter ends and becomes disembodied
+force, and where the hypothetical atoms are no longer divisible, we may
+conjecture but may never know. We may fancy the infinitely little going
+through a cycle of evolution like that of the infinitely great, and
+solar systems developing and revolving inside of the ultimate atoms, but
+the Copernicus or the Laplace of the atomic astronomy has not yet
+appeared. The atom itself is an invention of science. To get the mystery
+of vitality reduced to the atom is getting it in very close quarters,
+but it is a very big mystery still. Just how the dead becomes alive,
+even in the atom, is mystery enough to stagger any scientific mind. It
+is not the volume of the change; it is the quality or kind. Chemistry
+and mechanics we have always known, and they always remain chemistry and
+mechanics. They go into our laboratories and through our devices
+chemistry and mechanics, and they come out chemistry and mechanics. They
+will never come out life, conjure with them as we will, and we can get
+no other result. We cannot inaugurate the mystic dance among the atoms
+that will give us the least throb of life.
+
+The psychic arises out of the organic and the organic arises out of the
+inorganic, and the inorganic arises out of--what? The relation of each
+to the other is as intimate as that of the soul to the body; we cannot
+get between them even in thought, but the difference is one of kind and
+not of degree. The vital transcends the mechanical, and the psychic
+transcends the vital--is on another plane, and yet without the sun's
+energy there could be neither. Thus are things knit together; thus does
+one thing flow out of or bloom out of another. We date from the rocks,
+and the rocks date from the fiery nebulae, and the loom in which the
+texture of our lives was woven is the great loom of vital energy about
+us and in us; but what hand guided the shuttle and invented the
+pattern--who knows?
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+A WONDERFUL WORLD
+
+
+I
+
+Science recognizes a more fundamental world than that of matter. This is
+the electro-magnetic world which underlies the material world and which,
+as Professor Soddy says, probably completely embraces it, and has no
+mechanical analogy. To those accustomed only to the grosser ideas of
+matter and its motions, says the British scientist, this
+electro-magnetic world is as difficult to conceive of as it would be for
+us to walk upon air. Yet many times in our lives is this world in
+overwhelming evidence before us. During a thunderstorm we get an inkling
+of how fearfully and wonderfully the universe in which we live is made,
+and what energy and activity its apparent passivity and opacity mark. A
+flash of lightning out of a storm-cloud seems instantly to transform the
+whole passive universe into a terrible living power. This slow, opaque,
+indifferent matter about us and above us, going its silent or noisy
+round of mechanical and chemical change, ponderable, insensate,
+obstructive, slumbering in the rocks, quietly active in the soil, gently
+rustling in the trees, sweetly purling in the brooks, slowly, invisibly
+building and shaping our bodies--how could we ever dream that it held in
+leash such a terrible, ubiquitous, spectacular thing as this of the
+forked lightning? If we were to see and hear it for the first time,
+should we not think that the Judgment Day had really come? that the
+great seals of the Book of Fate were being broken?
+
+What an awakening it is! what a revelation! what a fearfully dramatic
+actor suddenly leaps upon the stage! Had we been permitted to look
+behind the scenes, we could not have found him; he was not there, except
+potentially; he was born and equipped in a twinkling. One stride, and
+one word which shakes the house, and he is gone; gone as quickly as he
+came. Look behind the curtain and he is not there. He has vanished more
+completely than any stage ghost ever vanished--he has withdrawn into the
+innermost recesses of the atomic structure of matter, and is diffused
+through the clouds, to be called back again, as the elemental drama
+proceeds, as suddenly as before.
+
+All matter is charged with electricity, either actual or potential; the
+sun is hot with it, and doubtless our own heart-beats, our own thinking
+brains, are intimately related to it; yet it is palpable and visible
+only in this sudden and extraordinary way. It defies our analysis, it
+defies our definitions; it is inscrutable and incomprehensible, yet it
+will do our errands, light our houses, cook our dinners, and pull our
+loads.
+
+How humdrum and constant and prosaic the other forces--gravity,
+cohesion, chemical affinity, and capillary attraction--seem when
+compared with this force of forces, electricity! How deep and prolonged
+it slumbers at one time, how terribly active and threatening at another,
+bellowing through the heavens like an infuriated god seeking whom he may
+destroy!
+
+The warring of the elements at such times is no figure of speech. What
+has so disturbed the peace in the electric equilibrium, as to make
+possible this sudden outburst, this steep incline in the stream of
+energy, this ethereal Niagara pouring from heaven to earth? Is a
+thunderstorm a display of the atomic energy of which the physicists
+speak, and which, were it available for our use, would do all the work
+of the world many times over?
+
+How marvelous that the softest summer breeze, or the impalpable currents
+of the calmest day, can be torn asunder with such suddenness and
+violence, by the accumulated energy that slumbers in the imaginary
+atoms, as to give forth a sound like the rending of mountains or the
+detonations of earthquakes!
+
+Electricity is the soul of matter. If Whitman's paradox is true, that
+the soul and body are one, in the same sense the scientific paradox is
+true: that matter and electricity are one, and both are doubtless a
+phase of the universal ether--a reality which can be described only in
+terms of the negation of matter. In a flash of lightning we see pure
+disembodied energy--probably that which is the main-spring of the
+universe. Modern science is more and more inclined to find the
+explanation of all vital phenomena in electrical stress and change. We
+know that an electric current will bring about chemical changes
+otherwise impracticable. Nerve force, if not a form of electricity, is
+probably inseparable from it. Chemical changes equivalent to the
+combustion of fuel and the corresponding amount of available energy
+released have not yet been achieved outside of the living body without
+great loss. The living body makes a short cut from fuel to energy, and
+this avoids the wasteful process of the engine. What part electricity
+plays in this process is, of course, only conjectural.
+
+
+II
+
+Our daily lives go on for the most part in two worlds, the world of
+mechanical transposition and the world of chemical transformations, but
+we are usually conscious only of the former. This is the visible,
+palpable world of motion and change that rushes and roars around us in
+the winds, the storms, the floods, the moving and falling bodies, and
+the whole panorama of our material civilization; the latter is the
+world of silent, invisible, unsleeping, and all-potent chemical
+reactions that take place all about us and is confined to the atoms and
+molecules of matter, as the former is confined to its visible
+aggregates.
+
+Mechanical forces and chemical affinities rule our physical lives, and
+indirectly our psychic lives as well. When we come into the world and
+draw our first breath, mechanics and chemistry start us on our career.
+Breathing is a mechanical, or a mechanico-vital, act; the mechanical
+principle involved is the same as that involved in the working of a
+bellows, but the oxidation of the blood when the air enters the lungs is
+a chemical act, or a chemico-vital act. The air gives up a part of its
+oxygen, which goes into the arterial circulation, and its place is taken
+by carbonic-acid gas and watery vapor. The oxygen feeds and keeps going
+the flame of life, as literally as it feeds and keeps going the fires in
+our stoves and furnaces.
+
+Hence our most constant and vital relation to the world without is a
+chemical one. We can go without food for some days, but we can exist
+without breathing only a few moments. Through these spongy lungs of ours
+we lay hold upon the outward world in the most intimate and constant
+way. Through them we are rooted to the air. The air is a mechanical
+mixture of two very unlike gases--nitrogen and oxygen; one very inert,
+the other very active. Nitrogen is like a cold-blooded, lethargic
+person--it combines with other substances very reluctantly and with but
+little energy. Oxygen is just its opposite in this respect: it gives
+itself freely; it is "Hail, fellow; well met!" with most substances, and
+it enters into co-partnership with them on such a large scale that it
+forms nearly one half of the material of the earth's crust. This
+invisible gas, this breath of air, through the magic of chemical
+combination, forms nearly half the substance of the solid rocks. Deprive
+it of its affinity for carbon, or substitute nitrogen or hydrogen in its
+place, and the air would quickly suffocate us. That changing of the dark
+venous blood in our lungs into the bright, red, arterial blood would
+instantly cease. Fancy the sensation of inhaling an odorless,
+non-poisonous atmosphere that would make one gasp for breath! We should
+be quickly poisoned by the waste of our own bodies. All things that live
+must have oxygen, and all things that burn must have oxygen. Oxygen does
+not burn, but it supports combustion.
+
+And herein is one of the mysteries of chemistry again. This support
+which the oxygen gives is utterly unlike any support we are acquainted
+with in the world of mechanical forces. Oxygen supports combustion by
+combining chemically with carbon, and the evolution of heat and light is
+the result. And this is another mystery--this chemical union which takes
+place in the ultimate particles of matter and which is so radically
+different from a mechanical mixture. In a chemical union the atoms are
+not simply in juxtaposition; they are, so to speak, inside of one
+another--each has swallowed another and lost its identity, an impossible
+feat, surely, viewed in the light of our experiences with tangible
+bodies. In the visible, mechanical world no two bodies can occupy the
+same place at the same time, but apparently in chemistry they can and
+do. An atom of oxygen and one of carbon, or of hydrogen, unite and are
+lost in each other; it is a marriage wherein the two or three become
+one. In dealing with the molecules and atoms of matter we are in a world
+wherein the laws of solid bodies do not apply; friction is abolished,
+elasticity is perfect, and place and form play no part. We have escaped
+from matter as we know it, the solid, fluid, or gaseous forms, and are
+dealing with it in its fourth or ethereal estate. In breathing, the
+oxygen goes into the blood, not to stay there, but to unite with and
+bring away the waste of the system in the shape of carbon, and re-enter
+the air again as one of the elements of carbonic-acid gas, CO_{2}. Then
+the reverse process takes place in the vegetable world, the leaves
+breathe this poisonous gas, release the oxygen under the chemistry of
+the sun's rays, and appropriate and store up the carbon. Thus do the
+animal and vegetable worlds play into each other's hands. The animal is
+dependent upon the vegetable for its carbon, which it releases again,
+through the life processes, as carbonic-acid gas, to be again drawn into
+the cycle of vegetable life.
+
+The act of breathing well illustrates our mysterious relations to
+Nature--the cunning way in which she plays the principal part in our
+lives without our knowledge. How certain we are that we draw the air
+into our lungs--that we seize hold of it in some way as if it were a
+continuous substance, and pull it into our bodies! Are we not also
+certain that the pump sucks the water up through the pipe, and that we
+suck our iced drinks through a straw? We are quite unconscious of the
+fact that the weight of the superincumbent air does it all, that
+breathing is only to a very limited extent a voluntary act. It is
+controlled by muscular machinery, but that machinery would not act in a
+vacuum. We contract the diaphragm, or the diaphragm contracts under
+stimuli received through the medulla oblongata from those parts of the
+body which constantly demand oxygen, and a vacuum tends to form in the
+chest, which is constantly prevented by the air rushing in to fill it.
+The expansive force of the air under its own weight causes the lungs to
+fill, just as it causes the bellows of the blacksmith to fill when he
+works the lever, and the water to rise in the pump when we force out the
+air by working the handle. Another unconscious muscular effort under the
+influence of nerve stimulus, and the air is forced out of the lungs,
+charged with the bodily waste which it is the function to relieve. But
+the wonder of it all is how slight a part our wills play in the process,
+and how our lives are kept going by a mechanical force from without,
+seconded or supplemented by chemical and vital forces from within.
+
+The one chemical process with which we are familiar all our lives, but
+which we never think of as such, is fire. Here on our own hearthstones
+goes on this wonderful spectacular and beneficent transformation of
+matter and energy, and yet we are grown so familiar with it that it
+moves us not. We can describe combustion in terms of chemistry, just as
+we can describe the life-processes in similar terms, yet the mystery is
+no more cleared up in the one case than in the other. Indeed, it seems
+to me that next to the mystery of life is the mystery of fire. The
+oxidizing processes are identical, only one is a building up or
+integrating process, and the other is a pulling down or disintegrating
+process. More than that, we can evoke fire any time, by both mechanical
+and chemical means, from the combustible matter about us; but we cannot
+evoke life. The equivalents of life do not slumber in our tools as do
+the equivalents of fire. Hence life is the deeper mystery. The ancients
+thought of a spirit of fire as they did of a spirit of health and of
+disease, and of good and bad spirits all about them, and as we think of
+a spirit of life, or of a creative life principle. Are we as wide of
+the mark as they were? So think many earnest students of living things.
+When we do not have to pass the torch of life along, but can kindle it
+in our laboratories, then this charge will assume a different aspect.
+
+
+III
+
+Nature works with such simple means! A little more or a little less of
+this or that, and behold the difference! A little more or a little less
+heat, and the face of the world is changed.
+
+    "And the little more, and how much it is,
+    And the little less, and what worlds away!"
+
+At one temperature water is solid, at another it is fluid, at another it
+is a visible vapor, at a still higher it is an invisible vapor that
+burns like a flame. All possible shades of color lurk in a colorless ray
+of light. A little more or a little less heat makes all the difference
+between a nebula and a sun, and between a sun and a planet. At one
+degree of heat the elements are dissociated; at a lower degree they are
+united. At one point in the scale of temperatures life appears; at
+another it disappears. With heat enough the earth would melt like a
+snowball in a furnace, with still more it would become a vapor and float
+away like a cloud. More or less heat only makes the difference between
+the fluidity of water and the solidity of the rocks that it beats
+against, or of the banks that hold it.
+
+The physical history of the universe is written in terms of heat and
+motion. Astronomy is the story of cooling suns and worlds. At a low
+enough temperature all chemical activity ceases. In our own experience
+we find that frost will blister like flame. In the one case heat passes
+into the tissues so quickly and in such quantity that a blister ensues;
+in the other, heat is abstracted so quickly and in such quantity that a
+like effect is produced. In one sense, life is a thermal phenomenon; so
+are all conditions of fluids and solids thermal phenomena.
+
+Great wonders Nature seems to achieve by varying the arrangement of the
+same particles. Arrange or unite the atoms of carbon in one way and you
+have charcoal; assemble the same atoms in another order, and you have
+the diamond. The difference between the pearl and the oyster-shell that
+holds it is one of structure or arrangement of the same particles of
+matter. Arrange the atoms of silica in one way and you have a quartz
+pebble, in another way and you have a precious stone. The chemical
+constituents of alcohol and ether are the same; the difference in their
+qualities and properties arises from the way the elements are
+compounded--the way they take hold of hands, so to speak, in that
+marriage ceremony which constitutes a chemical compound. Compounds
+identical in composition and in molecular formulae may yet differ widely
+in physical properties; the elements are probably grouped in different
+ways, the atoms of carbon or of hydrogen probably carry different
+amounts of potential energy, so that the order in which they stand
+related to one another accounts for the different properties of the same
+chemical compounds. Different groupings of the same atoms of any of the
+elements result in a like difference of physical properties.
+
+The physicists tell us that what we call the qualities of things, and
+their structure and composition, are but the expressions of internal
+atomic movements. A complex substance simply means a whirl, an intricate
+dance, of which chemical composition, histological structure, and gross
+configuration are the figures. How the atoms take hold of hands, as it
+were, the way they face, the poses they assume, the speed of their
+gyrations, the partners they exchange, determine the kinds of phenomena
+we are dealing with.
+
+There is a striking analogy between the letters of our alphabet and
+their relation to the language of the vast volume of printed books, and
+the eighty or more primary elements and their relation to the vast
+universe of material things. The analogy may not be in all respects a
+strictly true one, but it is an illuminating one. Our twenty-six letters
+combined and repeated in different orders give us the many thousand
+words our language possesses, and these words combined and repeated in
+different orders give us the vast body of printed books in our
+libraries. The ultimate parts--the atoms and molecules of all
+literature, so to speak--are the letters of the alphabet. How often by
+changing a letter in a word, by reversing their order, or by
+substituting one letter for another, we get a word of an entirely
+different meaning, as in umpire and empire, petrifaction and
+putrefaction, malt and salt, tool and fool. And by changing the order of
+the words in a sentence we express all the infinite variety of ideas and
+meanings that the books of the world hold.
+
+The eighty or more primordial elements are Nature's alphabet with which
+she writes her "infinite book of secrecy." Science shows pretty
+conclusively that the character of the different substances, their
+diverse qualities and properties, depend upon the order in which the
+atoms and molecules are combined. Change the order in which the
+molecules of the carbon and oxygen are combined in alcohol, and we get
+ether--the chemical formula remaining the same. Or take ordinary spirits
+of wine and add four more atoms of carbon to the carbon molecules, and
+we have the poison, carbolic acid. Pure alcohol is turned into a deadly
+poison by taking from it one atom of carbon and two of hydrogen. With
+the atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, by combining them in
+different proportions and in different orders, Nature produces such
+diverse bodies as acetic acid, alcohol, sugar, starch, animal fats,
+vegetable oils, glycerine, and the like. So with the long list of
+hydrocarbons--gaseous, liquid, and solid--called paraffins, that are
+obtained from petroleum and that are all composed of hydrogen and
+carbon, but with a different number of atoms of each, like a different
+number of a's or b's or c's in a word.
+
+What an enormous number of bodies Nature forms out of oxygen by uniting
+it chemically with other primary elements! Thus by uniting it with the
+element silica she forms half of the solid crust of the globe; by
+uniting it with hydrogen in the proportion of two to one she forms all
+the water of the globe. With one atom of nitrogen united chemically with
+three atoms of hydrogen she forms ammonia. With one atom of carbon
+united with four atoms of hydrogen she spells marsh gas; and so on.
+Carbon occurs in inorganic nature in two crystalline forms,--the diamond
+and black lead, or graphite,--their physical differences evidently being
+the result of their different molecular structure. Graphite is a good
+conductor of heat and electricity, and the diamond is not. Carbon in the
+organic world, where it plays such an important part, is
+non-crystalline. Under the influence of life its molecules are
+differently put together, as in sugar, starch, wood, charcoal, etc.
+There are also two forms of phosphorus, but not two kinds; the same
+atoms are probably united differently in each. The yellow waxy variety
+has such an affinity for oxygen that it will burn in water, and it is
+poisonous. Bring this variety to a high temperature away from the air,
+and its molecular structure seems to change, and we have the red
+variety, which is tasteless, odorless, and non-poisonous, and is not
+affected by contact with the air. Such is the mystery of chemical
+change.
+
+
+IV
+
+Science has developed methods and implements of incredible delicacy. Its
+"microbalance" can estimate "the difference of weight of the order of
+the millionth of a milligram." Light travels at the speed of 186,000
+miles a second, yet science can follow it with its methods, and finds
+that it travels faster with the current of running water than against
+it. Science has perfected a thermal instrument by which it can detect
+the heat of a lighted candle six miles away, and the warmth of the human
+face several miles distant. It has devised a method by which it can
+count the particles in the alpha rays of radium that move at a velocity
+of twenty thousand kilometers a second, and a method by which, through
+the use of a screen of zinc-sulphide, it can see the flashes produced by
+the alpha atoms when they strike this screen. It weighs and counts and
+calculates the motions of particles of matter so infinitely small that
+only the imagination can grasp them. Its theories require it to treat
+the ultimate particles into which it resolves matter, and which are so
+small that they are no longer divisible, as if they were solid bodies
+with weight and form, with centre and circumference, colliding with one
+another like billiard-balls, or like cosmic bodies in the depths of
+space, striking one another squarely, and, for aught I know, each going
+through another, or else grazing one another and glancing off. To
+particles of matter so small that they can no longer be divided or made
+smaller, the impossible feat of each going through the centre of
+another, or of each enveloping the other, might be affirmed of them
+without adding to their unthinkableness. The theory is that if we divide
+a molecule of water the parts are no longer water, but atoms of hydrogen
+and oxygen--real bodies with weight and form, and storehouses of energy,
+but no longer divisible.
+
+Indeed, the atomic theory of matter leads us into a non-material world,
+or a world the inverse of the solid, three-dimensioned world that our
+senses reveal to us, or to matter in a fourth estate. We know solids and
+fluids and gases; but emanations which are neither we know only as we
+know spirits and ghosts--by dreams or hearsay. Yet this fourth or
+ethereal estate of matter seems to be the final, real, and fundamental
+condition.
+
+How it differs from spirit is not easy to define. The beta ray of radium
+will penetrate solid iron a foot thick, a feat that would give a spirit
+pause. The ether of space, which science is coming more and more to look
+upon as the mother-stuff of all things, has many of the attributes of
+Deity. It is omnipresent and all-powerful. Neither time nor space has
+dominion over it. It is the one immutable and immeasurable thing in the
+universe. From it all things arise and to it they return. It is
+everywhere and nowhere. It has none of the finite properties of
+matter--neither parts, form, nor dimension; neither density nor tenuity;
+it cannot be compressed nor expanded nor moved; it has no inertia nor
+mass, and offers no resistance; it is subject to no mechanical laws, and
+no instrument or experiment that science has yet devised can detect its
+presence; it has neither centre nor circumference, neither extension nor
+boundary. And yet science is as convinced of its existence as of the
+solid ground beneath our feet. It is the one final reality in the
+universe, if we may not say that it is the universe. Tremors or
+vibrations in it reach the eye and make an impression that we call
+light; electrical oscillations in it are the source of other phenomena.
+It is the fountain-head of all potential energy. The ether is an
+invention of the scientific imagination. We had to have it to account
+for light, gravity, and the action of one body upon another at a
+distance, as well as to account for other phenomena. The ether is not a
+body, it is a medium. All bodies are in motion; matter moves; the ether
+is in a state of absolute rest. Says Sir Oliver Lodge, "The ether is
+strained, and has the property of exerting strain and recoil." An
+electron is like a knot in the ether. The ether is the fluid of fluids,
+yet its tension or strain is so great that it is immeasurably more dense
+than anything else--a phenomenon that may be paralleled by a jet of
+water at such speed that it cannot be cut with a sword or severed by a
+hammer. It is so subtle or imponderable that solid bodies are as vacuums
+to it, and so pervasive that all conceivable space is filled with it;
+"so full," says Clerk Maxwell, "that no human power can remove it from
+the smallest portion of space, or produce the slightest flaw in its
+infinite continuity."
+
+The scientific imagination, in its attempts to master the workings of
+the material universe, has thus given us a creation which in many of its
+attributes rivals Omnipotence. It is the sum of all contradictions, and
+the source of all reality. The gross matter which we see and feel is one
+state of it; electricity, which is without form and void, is another
+state of it; and our minds and souls, Sir Oliver Lodge intimates, may be
+still another state of it. But all these theories of physical science
+are justified by their fruits. The atomic theory of matter, and the
+kinetic theory of gases, are mathematically demonstrated. However unreal
+and fantastic they may appear to our practical faculties, conversant
+only with ponderable bodies, they bear the test of the most rigid and
+exact experimentation.
+
+
+V
+
+After we have marveled over all these hidden things, and been impressed
+by the world within world of the material universe, do we get any nearer
+to the mystery of life? Can we see where the tremendous change from the
+non-living to the living takes place? Can we evoke life from the
+omnipotent ether, or see it arise in the whirling stream of atoms and
+electrons? Molecular science opens up to us a world where the infinitely
+little matches the infinitely great, where matter is dematerialized and
+answers to many of the conceptions of spirit; but does it bring us any
+nearer the origin of life? Is radio-active matter any nearer living
+matter than is the clod under foot? Are the darting electrons any more
+vital than the shooting-stars? Can a flash of radium emanations on a
+zinc-sulphide plate kindle the precious spark? It is probably just as
+possible to evoke vitality out of the clash of billiard-balls as out of
+the clash of atoms and electrons. This allusion to billiard-balls
+recalls to my mind a striking passage from Tyndall's famous Belfast
+Address which he puts in the mouth of Bishop Butler in his imaginary
+argument with Lucretius, and which shows how thoroughly Tyndall
+appreciated the difficulties of his own position in advocating the
+theory of the physico-chemical origin of life.
+
+The atomic and electronic theory of matter admits one to a world that
+does indeed seem unreal and fantastic. "If my bark sinks," says the
+poet, "'t is to another sea." If the mind breaks through what we call
+gross matter, and explores its interior, it finds itself indeed in a
+vast under or hidden world--a world almost as much a creation of the
+imagination as that visited by Alice in Wonderland, except that the
+existence of this world is capable of demonstration. It is a world of
+the infinitely little which science interprets in terms of the
+infinitely large. Sir Oliver Lodge sees the molecular spaces that
+separate the particles of any material body relatively like the
+interstellar spaces that separate the heavenly bodies. Just as all the
+so-called solid matter revealed by our astronomy is almost infinitesimal
+compared with the space through which it is distributed, so the
+electrons which compose the matter with which we deal are comparable to
+the bodies of the solar system moving in vast spaces. It is indeed a
+fantastic world where science conceives of bodies a thousand times
+smaller than the hydrogen atom--the smallest body known to science;
+where it conceives of vibrations in the ether millions of millions times
+a second; where we are bombarded by a shower of corpuscles from a
+burning candle, or a gas-jet, or a red-hot iron surface, moving at the
+speed of one hundred thousand miles a second! But this almost omnipotent
+ether has, after all, some of the limitations of the finite. It takes
+time to transmit the waves of light from the sun and the stars. This
+measurable speed, says Sir Oliver Lodge, gives the ether away, and shows
+its finite character.
+
+It seems as if the theory of the ether must be true, because it fits in
+so well with the enigmatic, contradictory, incomprehensible character of
+the universe as revealed to our minds. We can affirm and deny almost
+anything of the ether--that it is immaterial, and yet the source of all
+material; that it is absolutely motionless, yet the cause of all motion;
+that it is the densest body in nature, and yet the most rarified; that
+it is everywhere, but defies detection; that it is as undiscoverable as
+the Infinite itself; that our physics cannot prove it, though they
+cannot get along without it. The ether inside a mass of iron or of lead
+is just as dense as the ether outside of it--which means that it is not
+dense at all, in our ordinary use of the term.
+
+
+VI
+
+There are physical changes in matter, there are chemical changes, and
+there is a third change, as unlike either of these as they are unlike
+each other. I refer to atomic change, as in radio-activity, which gives
+us lead from helium--a spontaneous change of the atoms. The energy that
+keeps the earth going, says Soddy, is to be sought for in the individual
+atoms; not in the great heaven-shaking voice of thunder, but in the
+still small voice of the atoms. Radio-activity is the mainspring of the
+universe. The only elements so far known that undergo spontaneous change
+are uranium and thorium. One pound of uranium contains and slowly gives
+out the same amount of energy that a hundred tons of coal evolves in its
+combustion, but only one ten-billionth part of this amount is given out
+every year.
+
+Man, of course, reaps where he has not sown. How could it be otherwise?
+It takes energy to sow or plant energy. We are exhausting the coal, the
+natural gas, the petroleum of the rocks, the fertility of the soil. But
+we cannot exhaust the energy of the winds or the tides, or of falling
+water, because this energy is ever renewed by gravity and the sun. There
+can be no exhaustion of our natural mechanical and chemical resources,
+as some seem to fear.
+
+I recently visited a noted waterfall in the South where electric power
+is being developed on a large scale. A great column of water makes a
+vertical fall of six hundred feet through a steel tube, and in the fall
+develops two hundred and fifty thousand horse-power. The water comes out
+of the tunnel at the bottom, precisely the same water that went in at
+the top; no change whatever has occurred in it, yet a vast amount of
+power has been taken out of it, or, rather, generated by its fall.
+Another drop of six hundred feet would develop as much more; in fact,
+the process may be repeated indefinitely, the same amount of power
+resulting each time, without effecting any change in the character of
+the water. The pull of gravity is the source of the power which is
+distributed hundreds of miles across the country as electricity. Two
+hundred and fifty thousand invisible, immaterial, noiseless horses are
+streaming along these wires with incredible speed to do the work of men
+and horses in widely separated parts of the country. A river of sand
+falling down those tubes, if its particles moved among themselves with
+the same freedom that those of the water do, would develop the same
+power. The attraction of gravitation is not supposed to be electricity,
+and yet here out of its pull upon the water comes this enormous voltage!
+The fact that such a mysterious and ubiquitous power as electricity can
+be developed from the action of matter without any alteration in its
+particles, suggests the question whether or not this something that we
+call life, or life-force, may not slumber in matter in the same way; but
+the secret of its development we have not yet learned, as we have that
+of electricity.
+
+Radio-activity is uninfluenced by external conditions; hence we are thus
+far unable to control it. Nothing that is known will effect the
+transmutation of one element into another. It is spontaneous and
+uncontrollable. May not life be spontaneous in the same sense?
+
+The release of the energy associated with the structure of the atoms is
+not available by any of our mechanical appliances. The process of
+radio-activity involves the expulsion of atoms of helium with a velocity
+three hundred times greater than that ever previously known for any
+material mass or particle, and this power we are incompetent to use. The
+atoms remain unchanged amid the heat and pressure of the laboratory of
+nature. Iron and oxygen and so forth remain the same in the sun as here
+on the earth.
+
+Science strips gross matter of its grossness. When it is done with it,
+it is no longer the obstructive something we know and handle; it is
+reduced to pure energy--the line between it and spirit does not exist.
+We have found that bodies are opaque only to certain rays; the X-ray
+sees through this too too solid flesh. Bodies are ponderable only to our
+dull senses; to a finer hand than this the door or the wall might offer
+no obstruction; a finer eye than this might see the emanations from the
+living body; a finer ear might hear the clash of electrons in the air.
+Who can doubt, in view of what we already know, that forces and
+influences from out the heavens above, and from the earth beneath, that
+are beyond our ken, play upon us constantly?
+
+The final mystery of life is no doubt involved in conditions and forces
+that are quite outside of or beyond our conscious life activities, in
+forces that play about us and upon and through us, that we know not of,
+because a knowledge of them is not necessary to our well-being. "Our
+eye takes in only an octave of the vibrations we call light," because no
+more is necessary for our action or our dealing with things. The
+invisible rays of the spectrum are potent, but they are beyond the ken
+of our senses. There are sounds or sound vibrations that we do not hear;
+our sense of touch cannot recognize a gossamer, or the gentler air
+movements.
+
+I began with the contemplation of the beauty and terror of the
+thunderbolt--"God's autograph," as one of our poets (Joel Benton) said,
+"written upon the sky." Let me end with an allusion to another aspect of
+the storm that has no terror in it--the bow in the clouds: a sudden
+apparition, a cosmic phenomenon no less wonderful and startling than the
+lightning's flash. The storm with terror and threatened destruction on
+one side of it, and peace and promise on the other! The bow appears like
+a miracle, but it is a commonplace of nature; unstable as life, and
+beautiful as youth. The raindrops are not changed, the light is not
+changed, the laws of the storms are not changed; and yet, behold this
+wonder!
+
+But all these strange and beautiful phenomena springing up in a world of
+inert matter are but faint symbols of the mystery and the miracle of the
+change of matter from the non-living to the living, from the elements in
+the clod to the same elements in the brain and heart of man.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE BAFFLING PROBLEM
+
+
+I
+
+Still the problem of living things haunts my mind and, let me warn my
+reader, will continue to haunt it throughout the greater part of this
+volume. The final truth about it refuses to be spoken. Every effort to
+do so but gives one new evidence of how insoluble the problem is.
+
+In this world of change is there any other change to be compared with
+that in matter, from the dead to the living?--a change so great that
+most minds feel compelled to go outside of matter and invoke some
+super-material force or agent to account for it. The least of living
+things is so wonderful, the phenomena it exhibits are so fundamentally
+unlike those of inert matter, that we invent a word for it, _vitality_;
+and having got the word, we conceive of a vital force or principle to
+explain vital phenomena. Hence vitalism--a philosophy of living things,
+more or less current in the world from Aristotle's time down to our own.
+It conceives of something in nature super-mechanical and super-chemical,
+though inseparably bound up with these things. There is no life without
+material and chemical forces, but material and chemical forces do not
+hold the secret of life. This is vitalism as opposed to mechanism, or
+scientific materialism, which is the doctrine of the all-sufficiency of
+the physical forces operating in the inorganic world to give rise to all
+the phenomena of the organic world--a doctrine coming more and more in
+vogue with the progress of physical science. Without holding to any
+belief in the supernatural or the teleological, and while adhering to
+the idea that there has been, and can be, no break in the causal
+sequence in this world, may one still hold to some form of vitalism, and
+see in life something more than applied physics and chemistry?
+
+Is biology to be interpreted in the same physical and chemical terms as
+geology? Are biophysics and geophysics one and the same? One may freely
+admit that there cannot be two kinds of physics, nor two kinds of
+chemistry--not one kind for a rock, and another kind for a tree, or a
+man. There are not two species of oxygen, nor two of carbon, nor two of
+hydrogen and nitrogen--one for living and one for dead matter. The water
+in the human body is precisely the same as the water that flows by in
+the creek or that comes down when it rains; and the sulphur and the lime
+and the iron and the phosphorus and the magnesium are identical, so far
+as chemical analysis can reveal, in the organic and the inorganic
+worlds. But are we not compelled to think of a kind of difference
+between a living and a non-living body that we cannot fit into any of
+the mechanical or chemical concepts that we apply to the latter?
+Professor Loeb, with his "Mechanistic Conception of Life"; Professor
+Henderson, of Harvard, with his "Fitness of the Environment"; Professor
+Le Dantec, of the Sorbonne in Paris, with his volume on "The Nature and
+Origin of Life," published a few years since; Professor Schaefer,
+President of the British Association, Professor Verworn of Bonn, and
+many others find in the laws and properties of matter itself a
+sufficient explanation of all the phenomena of life. They look upon the
+living body as only the sum of its physical and chemical activities;
+they do not seem to feel the need of accounting for life itself--for
+that something which confers vitality upon the heretofore non-vital
+elements. That there is new behavior, that there are new chemical
+compounds called organic,--tens of thousands of them not found in
+inorganic nature,--that there are new processes set up in aggregates of
+matter,--growth, assimilation, metabolism, reproduction, thought,
+emotion, science, civilization,--no one denies.
+
+How are we going to get these things out of the old physics and
+chemistry without some new factor or agent or force? To help ourselves
+out here with a "vital principle," or with spirit, or a creative
+impulse, as Bergson does, seems to be the only course open to certain
+types of mind. Positive science cannot follow us in this step, because
+science is limited to the verifiable. The stream of forces with which it
+deals is continuous; it must find the physical equivalents of all the
+forces that go into the body in the output of the body, and it cannot
+admit of a life force which it cannot trace to the physical forces.
+
+What has science done to clear up this mystery of vitality? Professor
+Loeb, our most eminent experimental biologist, has succeeded in
+fertilizing the eggs of some low forms of sea life by artificial means;
+and in one instance, at least, it is reported that the fatherless form
+grew to maturity. This is certainly an interesting fact, but takes us no
+nearer the solution of the mystery of vitality than the fact that
+certain chemical compounds may stimulate the organs of reproduction
+helps to clear up the mystery of generation; or the fact that certain
+other chemical compounds help the digestive and assimilative processes
+and further the metabolism of the body assists in clearing up the
+mystery that attaches to these things. In all such cases we have the
+living body to begin with. The egg of the sea-urchin and the egg of the
+jelly-fish are living beings that responded to certain chemical
+substances, so that a process is set going in their cell life that is
+equivalent to fertilization. It seems to me that the result of all
+Professor Loeb's valuable inquiries is only to give us a more intimate
+sense of how closely mechanical and chemical principles are associated
+and identified with all the phenomena of life and with all animal
+behavior. Given a living organism, mechanics and chemistry will then
+explain much of its behavior--practically all the behavior of the lower
+organisms, and much of that of the higher. Even when we reach man, our
+reactions to the environment and to circumstances play a great part in
+our lives; but dare we say that will, liberty of choice, ideation, do
+not play a part also? How much reality there is in the so-called animal
+will, is a problem; but that there is a foundation for our belief in the
+reality of the human will, I, for one, do not for a moment doubt. The
+discontinuity here is only apparent and not real. We meet with the same
+break when we try to get our mental states, our power of thought--a
+poem, a drama, a work of art, a great oration--out of the food we eat;
+but life does it, though our science is none the wiser for it. Our
+physical life forms a closed circle, science says, and what goes into
+our bodies as physical force, must come out in physical force, or as
+some of its equivalents. Well, one of the equivalents, transformed by
+some unknown chemism within us, is our psychic force, or states of
+consciousness. The two circles, the physical and the psychical, are not
+concentric, as Fiske fancied, but are linked in some mysterious way.
+
+Professor Loeb is a master critic of the life processes; he and his
+compeers analyze them as they have never been analyzed before; but the
+solution of the great problem of life that we are awaiting does not
+come. A critic may resolve all of Shakespeare's plays into their
+historic and other elements, but that will not account for Shakespeare.
+Nature's synthesis furnishes occasions for our analysis. Most assuredly
+all psychic phenomena have a physical basis; we know the soul only
+through the body; but that they are all of physico-chemical origin, is
+another matter.
+
+
+II
+
+Biological science has hunted the secret of vitality like a detective;
+and it has done some famous work; but it has not yet unraveled the
+mystery. It knows well the part played by carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen
+in organic chemistry, that without water and carbon dioxide there could
+be no life; it knows the part played by light, air, heat, gravity,
+osmosis, chemical affinity, and all the hundreds or thousands of organic
+compounds; it knows the part played by what are called the enzymes, or
+ferments, in all living bodies, but it does not know the secret of these
+ferments; it knows the part played by colloids, or jelly-like compounds,
+that there is no living body without colloids, though there are colloid
+bodies that are not living; it knows the part played by oxidation, that
+without it a living body ceases to function, though everywhere all about
+us is oxidation without life; it knows the part played by chlorophyll in
+the vegetable kingdom, and yet how chlorophyll works such magic upon the
+sun's rays, using the solar energy to fix the carbon of carbonic acid in
+the air, and thereby storing this energy as it is stored in wood and
+coal and in much of the food we consume, is a mystery. Chemistry cannot
+repeat the process in its laboratories. The fungi do not possess this
+wonderful chlorophyllian power, and hence cannot use the sunbeam to
+snatch their carbon from the air; they must get it from decomposed
+vegetable matter; they feed, as the animals do, upon elements that have
+gone through the cycle of vegetable life. The secret of vegetable life,
+then, is in the green substance of the leaf where science is powerless
+to unlock it. Conjure with the elements as it may, it cannot produce the
+least speck of living matter. It can by synthesis produce many of the
+organic compounds, but only from matter that has already been through
+the organic cycle. It has lately produced rubber, but from other
+products of vegetable life.
+
+As soon as the four principal elements, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and
+nitrogen, that make up the living body, have entered the world of living
+matter, their activities and possible combinations enormously increase;
+they enter into new relations with one another and form compounds of
+great variety and complexity, characterized by the instability which
+life requires. The organic compounds are vastly more sensitive to light
+and heat and air than are the same elements in the inorganic world. What
+has happened to them? Chemistry cannot tell us. Oxidation, which is only
+slow combustion, is the main source of energy in the body, as it is in
+the steam-engine. The storing of the solar energy, which occurs only in
+the vegetable, is by a process of reduction, that is, the separation of
+the carbon and oxygen in carbonic acid and water. The chemical reactions
+which liberate energy in the body are slow; in dead matter they are
+rapid and violent, or explosive and destructive. It is the chemistry in
+the leaf of the plant that diverts or draws the solar energy into the
+stream of life, and how it does it is a mystery.
+
+The scientific explanations of life phenomena are all after the fact;
+they do not account for the fact; they start with the ready-made
+organism and then reduce its activities and processes to their physical
+equivalents. Vitality is given, and then the vital processes are fitted
+into mechanical and chemical concepts, or into moulds derived from inert
+matter--not a difficult thing to do, but no more an explanation of the
+mystery of vitality than a painting or a marble bust of Tyndall would be
+an explanation of that great scientist.
+
+All Professor Loeb's experiments and criticisms throw light upon the
+life processes, or upon the factors that take part in them, but not upon
+the secret of the genesis of the processes themselves. Amid all the
+activities of his mechanical and chemical factors, there is ever present
+a factor which he ignores, which his analytical method cannot seize;
+namely, what Verworn calls "the specific energy of living substance."
+Without this, chemism and mechanism would work together to quite other
+ends. The water in the wave, and the laws that govern it, do not differ
+at all from the water and its laws that surround it; but unless one
+takes into account the force that makes the wave, an analysis of the
+phenomena will leave one where he began.
+
+Professor Le Dantec leaves the subject where he took it up, with the
+origin of life and the life processes unaccounted for. His work is a
+description, and not an explanation. All our ideas about vitality, or an
+unknown factor in the organic world, he calls "mystic" and unscientific.
+A sharp line of demarcation between living and non-living bodies is not
+permissible. This, he says, is the anthropomorphic error which puts some
+mysterious quality or force in all bodies considered to be living. To Le
+Dantec, the difference between the quick and the dead is of the same
+order as the difference which exists between two chemical compounds--for
+example, as that which exists between alcohol and an aldehyde, a liquid
+that has two less atoms of hydrogen in its composition. Modify your
+chemistry a little, add or subtract an atom or two, more or less, of
+this or that gas, and dead matter thrills into life, or living matter
+sinks to the inert. In other words, life is the gift of chemistry, its
+particular essence is of the chemical order--a bold inference from the
+fact that there is no life without chemical reactions, no life without
+oxidation. Yet chemical reactions in the laboratory cannot produce life.
+With Le Dantec, biology, like geology and astronomy, is only applied
+mechanics and chemistry.
+
+
+III
+
+Such is the result of the rigidly objective study of life--the only
+method analytical science can pursue. The conception of vitality as a
+factor in itself answers to nothing that the objective study of life can
+disclose; such a study reveals a closed circle of physical forces,
+chemical and mechanical, into which no immaterial force or principle can
+find entrance. "The fact of being conscious," Le Dantec says with
+emphasis, "does not intervene in the slightest degree in directing vital
+movements." But common sense and everyday observation tell us that
+states of consciousness do influence the bodily processes--influence the
+circulation, the digestion, the secretions, the respiration.
+
+An objective scientific study of a living body yields results not
+unlike those which we might get from an objective study of a book
+considered as something fabricated--its materials, its construction, its
+typography, its binding, the number of its chapters and pages, and so
+on--without giving any heed to the meaning of the book--its ideas, the
+human soul and personality that it embodies, the occasion that gave rise
+to it, indeed all its subjective and immaterial aspects. All these
+things, the whole significance of the volume, would elude scientific
+analysis. It would seem to be a manufactured article, representing only
+so much mechanics and chemistry. It is the same with the living body.
+Unless we permit ourselves to go behind the mere facts, the mere
+mechanics and chemistry of life phenomena, and interpret them in the
+light of immaterial principles, in short, unless we apply some sort of
+philosophy to them, the result of our analysis will be but dust in our
+eyes, and ashes in our mouths. Unless there is something like mind or
+intelligence pervading nature, some creative and transforming impulse
+that cannot be defined by our mechanical concepts, then, to me, the
+whole organic world is meaningless. If man is not more than an "accident
+in the history of the thermic evolution of the globe," or the result of
+the fortuitous juxtaposition and combination of carbonic acid gas and
+water and a few other elements, what shall we say? It is at least a
+bewildering proposition.
+
+Could one by analyzing a hive of bees find out the secret of its
+organization--its unity as an aggregate of living insects? Behold its
+wonderful economics, its division of labor, its complex social
+structure,--the queen, the workers, the drones,--thousands of bees
+without any head or code of laws or directing agent, all acting as one
+individual, all living and working for the common good. There is no
+confusion or cross-purpose in the hive. When the time of swarming comes,
+they are all of one mind and the swarm comes forth. Who or what decides
+who shall stay and who shall go? When the honey supply fails, or if it
+fail prematurely, on account of a drought, the swarming instinct is
+inhibited, and the unhatched queens are killed in their cells. Who or
+what issues the regicide order? We can do no better than to call it the
+Spirit of the Hive, as Maeterlinck has done. It is a community of mind.
+What one bee knows and feels, they all know and feel at the same
+instant. Something like that is true of a living body; the cells are
+like the bees: they work together, they build up the tissues and organs,
+some are for one thing and some for another, each community of cells
+plays its own part, and they all pull together for the good of the
+whole. We can introduce cells and even whole organs, for example a
+kidney from another living body, and all goes well; and yet we cannot
+find the seat of the organization. Can we do any better than to call it
+the Spirit of the Body?
+
+
+IV
+
+Our French biologist is of the opinion that the artificial production of
+that marvel of marvels, the living cell, will yet take place in the
+laboratory. But the enlightened mind, he says, does not need such proof
+to be convinced that there is no essential difference between living and
+non-living matter.
+
+Professor Henderson, though an expounder of the mechanistic theory of
+the origin of life, admits that he does not know of a biological chemist
+to whom the "mechanistic origin of a cell is scientifically imaginable."
+Like Professor Loeb, he starts with the vital; how he came by it we get
+no inkling; he confesses frankly that the biological chemist cannot even
+face the problem of the origin of life. He quotes with approval a remark
+of Liebig's, as reported by Lord Kelvin, that he (Liebig) could no more
+believe that a leaf or a flower could be formed or could grow by
+chemical forces "than a book on chemistry, or on botany, could grow out
+of dead matter." Is not this conceding to the vitalists all that they
+claim? The cell is the unit of life; all living bodies are but vast
+confraternities of cells, some billions or trillions of them in the
+human body; the cell builds up the tissues, the tissues build up the
+organs, the organs build up the body. Now if it is not thinkable that
+chemism could beget a cell, is it any more thinkable that it could build
+a living tissue, and then an organ, and then the body as a whole? If
+there is an inscrutable something at work at the start, which organizes
+that wonderful piece of vital mechanism, the cell, is it any the less
+operative ever after, in all life processes, in all living bodies and
+their functions,--the vital as distinguished from the mechanical and
+chemical? Given the cell, and you have only to multiply it, and organize
+these products into industrial communities, and direct them to specific
+ends,--certainly a task which we would not assign to chemistry or
+physics any more than we would assign to them the production of a work
+on chemistry or botany,--and you have all the myriad forms of
+terrestrial life.
+
+The cell is the parent of every living thing on the globe; and if it is
+unthinkable that the material and irrational forces of inert matter
+could produce it, then mechanics and chemistry must play second fiddle
+in all that whirl and dance of the atoms that make up life. And that is
+all the vitalists claim. The physico-chemical forces do play second
+fiddle; that inexplicable something that we call vitality dominates and
+leads them. True it is that a living organism yields to scientific
+analysis only mechanical and chemical forces--a fact which only limits
+the range of scientific analysis, and which by no means exhausts the
+possibilities of the living organism. The properties of matter and the
+laws of matter are intimately related to life, yea, are inseparable
+from it, but they are by no means the whole story. Professor Henderson
+repudiates the idea of any extra-physical influence as being involved in
+the processes of life, and yet concedes that the very foundation of all
+living matter, yea, the whole living universe in embryo--the cell--is
+beyond the possibilities of physics and chemistry alone. Mechanism and
+chemism are adequate to account for astronomy and geology, and
+therefore, he thinks, are sufficient to account for biology, without
+calling in the aid of any Bergsonian life impulse. Still these forces
+stand impotent before that microscopic world, the cell, the foundation
+of all life.
+
+Our professor makes the provisional statement, not in obedience to his
+science, but in obedience to his philosophy, that something more than
+mechanics and chemistry may have had a hand in shaping the universe,
+some primordial tendency impressed upon or working in matter "just
+before mechanism begins to act"--"a necessary and preestablished
+associate of mechanism." So that if we start with the universe, with
+life, and with this tendency, mechanism will do all the rest. But this
+is not science, of course, because it is not verifiable; it is
+practically the philosophy of Bergson.
+
+The cast-iron conclusions of physical science do pinch the Harvard
+professor a bit, and he pads them with a little of the Bergsonian
+philosophy. Bergson himself is not pinched at all by the conclusions of
+positive science. He sees that we, as human beings, cannot live in this
+universe without supplementing our science with some sort of philosophy
+that will help us to escape from the fatalism of matter and force into
+the freedom of the spiritual life. If we are merely mechanical and
+chemical accidents, all the glory of life, all the meaning of our moral
+and spiritual natures, go by the board.
+
+Professor Henderson shows us how well this planet, with its oceans and
+continents, and its mechanical and chemical forces and elements, is
+suited to sustain life, but he brings us no nearer the solution of the
+mystery than we were before. His title, to begin with, is rather
+bewildering. Has the "fitness of the environment" ever been questioned?
+The environment is fit, of course, else living bodies would not be here.
+We are used to taking hold of the other end of the problem. In living
+nature the foot is made to fit the shoe, and not the shoe the foot. The
+environment is the mould in which the living organism is cast. Hence, it
+seems to me, that seeking to prove the fitness of the environment is
+very much like seeking to prove the fitness of water for fish to swim
+in, or the fitness of the air for birds to fly in. The implication seems
+to be made that the environment anticipates the organism, or meets it
+half way. But the environment is rather uncompromising. Man alone
+modifies his environment by the weapon of science; but not radically; in
+the end he has to fit himself to it. Life has been able to adjust
+itself to the universal forces and so go along with them; otherwise we
+should not be here. We may say, humanly speaking, that the water is
+friendly to the swimmer, if he knows how to use it; if not, it is his
+deadly enemy. The same is true of all the elements and forces of nature.
+Whether they be for or against us, depends upon ourselves. The wind is
+never tempered to the shorn lamb, the shorn lamb must clothe itself
+against the wind. Life is adaptive, and this faculty of adaptation to
+the environment, of itself takes it out of the category of the
+physico-chemical. The rivers and seas favor navigation, if we have
+gumption enough to use and master their forces. The air is good to
+breathe, and food to eat, for those creatures that are adapted to them.
+Bergson thinks, not without reason, that life on other planets may be
+quite different from what it is on our own, owing to a difference in
+chemical and physical conditions. Change the chemical constituents of
+sea water, and you radically change the lower organisms. With an
+atmosphere entirely of oxygen, the processes of life would go on more
+rapidly and perhaps reach a higher form of development. Life on this
+planet is limited to a certain rather narrow range of temperature; the
+span may be the same in other worlds, but farther up or farther down the
+scale. Had the air been differently constituted, would not our lungs
+have been different? The lungs of the fish are in his gills: he has to
+filter his air from a much heavier medium. The nose of the pig is fitted
+for rooting; shall we say, then, that the soil was made friable that
+pigs might root in it? The webbed foot is fitted to the water; shall we
+say, then, that water is liquid in order that geese and ducks may swim
+in it? One more atom of oxygen united to the two atoms that go to make
+the molecule of air, and we should have had ozone instead of the air we
+now breathe. How unsuited this would have made the air for life as we
+know it! Oxidation would have consumed us rapidly. Life would have met
+this extra atom by some new device.
+
+One wishes Professor Henderson had told us more about how life fits
+itself to the environment--how matter, moved and moulded only by
+mechanical and chemical forces, yet has some power of choice that a
+machine does not have, and can and does select the environment best
+suited to its well-being. In fact, that it should have, or be capable
+of, any condition of well-being, if it is only a complex of physical and
+chemical forces, is a problem to wrestle with. The ground we walk on is
+such a complex, but only the living bodies it supports have conditions
+of well-being.
+
+Professor Henderson concedes very little to the vitalists or the
+teleologists. He is a thorough mechanist. "Matter and energy," he says,
+"have an original property, assuredly not by chance, which organizes
+the universe in space and time." Where or how matter got this organizing
+property, he offers no opinion. "Given the universe, life, and the
+tendency [the tendency to organize], mechanism is inductively proved
+sufficient to account for all phenomena." Biology, then, is only
+mechanics and chemistry engaged in a new role without any change of
+character; but what put them up to this new role? "The whole
+evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist
+may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric."
+
+
+V
+
+Another Harvard voice is less pronounced in favor of the mechanistic
+conception of life. Professor Rand thinks that in a mechanically
+determined universe, "our conscious life becomes a meaningless replica
+of an inexorable physical concatenation"--the soul the result of a
+fortuitous concourse of atoms. Hence all the science and art and
+literature and religion of the world are merely the result of a
+molecular accident.
+
+Dr. Rand himself, in wrestling with the problem of organization in a
+late number of "Science," seems to hesitate whether or not to regard man
+as a molecular accident, an appearance presented to us by the results of
+the curious accidents of molecules--which is essentially Professor
+Loeb's view; or whether to look upon the living body as the result of a
+"specific something" that organizes, that is, of "dominating organic
+agencies," be they psychic or super-mundane, which dominate and
+determine the organization of the different parts of the body into a
+whole. Yet he is troubled with the idea that this specific something may
+be "nothing more than accidental chemical peculiarities of cells." But
+would these accidental peculiarities be constant? Do accidents happen
+millions of times in the same way? The cell is without variableness or
+shadow of turning. The cells are the minute people that build up all
+living forms, and what prompts them to build a man in the one case, and
+the man's dog in another, is the mystery that puzzles Professor Rand.
+"Tissue cells," he says, "are not structures like stone blocks
+laboriously carved and immovably cemented in place. They are rather like
+the local eddies in an ever-flowing and ever-changing stream of fluids.
+Substance which was at one moment a part of a cell, passes out and a new
+substance enters. What is it that prevents the local whirl in this
+unstable stream from changing its form? How is it that a million muscle
+cells remain alike, collectively ready to respond to a nerve impulse?"
+According to one view, expressed by Professor Rand, "Organization is
+something that we read into natural phenomena. It is in itself nothing."
+The alternative view holds that there is a specific organizing agent
+that brings about the harmonious operation of all the organs and parts
+of the system--a superior dynamic force controlling and guiding all the
+individual parts.
+
+A most determined and thorough-going attempt to hunt down the secret of
+vitality, and to determine how far its phenomena can be interpreted in
+terms of mechanics and chemistry, is to be found in Professor H. W.
+Conn's volume entitled "The Living Machine." Professor Conn justifies
+his title by defining a machine as "a piece of apparatus so designed
+that it can change one kind of energy into another for a definite
+purpose." Of course the adjective "living" takes it out of the category
+of all mere mechanical devices and makes it super-mechanical, just as
+Haeckel's application of the word "living" to his inorganics ("living
+inorganics"), takes them out of the category of the inorganic. In every
+machine, properly so called, all the factors are known; but do we know
+all the factors in a living body? Professor Conn applies his searching
+analysis to most of the functions of the human body, to digestion, to
+assimilation, to circulation, to respiration, to metabolism, and so on,
+and he finds in every function something that does not fall within his
+category--some force not mechanical nor chemical, which he names vital.
+
+In following the processes of digestion, all goes well with his
+chemistry and his mechanics till he comes to the absorption of
+food-particles, or their passage through the walls of the intestines
+into the blood. Here, the ordinary physical forces fail him, and living
+matter comes to his aid. The inner wall of the intestine is not a
+lifeless membrane, and osmosis will not solve the mystery. There is
+something there that seizes hold of the droplets of oil by means of
+little extruded processes, and then passes them through its own body to
+excrete them on an inner surface into the blood-vessels. "This fat
+absorption thus appears to be a vital process and not one simply
+controlled by physical forces like osmosis. Here our explanation runs
+against what we call 'vital power' of the ultimate elements of the
+body." Professor Conn next analyzes the processes of circulation, and
+his ready-made mechanical concepts carry him along swimmingly, till he
+tries to explain by them the beating of the heart, and the contraction
+of the small blood-vessels which regulate the blood-supply. Here comes
+in play the mysterious vital power again. He comes upon the same power
+when he tries to determine what it is that enables the muscle-fibre to
+take from the lymph the material needed for its use, and to discard the
+rest. The fibre acts as if it knew what it wanted--a very unmechanical
+attribute.
+
+Then Professor Conn applies his mechanics and chemistry to the
+respiratory process and, of course, makes out a very clear case till he
+comes to the removal of the waste, or ash. The steam-engine cannot
+remove its own ash; the "living machine" can. Much of this ash takes
+the form of urea, and "the seizing upon the urea by the kidney cells is
+a vital phenomenon." Is not the peristaltic movement of the bowels, by
+which the solid matter is removed, also a vital phenomenon? Is not the
+conception of a pipe or a tube that forces semi-fluid matter along its
+hollow interior, by the contraction of its walls, quite beyond the reach
+of mechanics? The force is as mechanical as the squeezing of the bulb of
+a syringe by the hand, but in the case of the intestines, what does the
+squeezing? The vital force?
+
+When the mechanical and chemical concepts are applied to the phenomena
+of the nervous system, they work very well till we come to mental
+phenomena. When we try to correlate physical energy with thought or
+consciousness, we are at the end of our tether. Here is a gulf we cannot
+span. The theory of the machine breaks down. Some other force than
+material force is demanded here, namely, psychical,--a force or
+principle quite beyond the sphere of the analytic method.
+
+Hence Professor Conn concludes that there are vital factors and that
+they are the primal factors in the organism. The mechanical and chemical
+forces are the secondary factors. It is the primal factors that elude
+scientific analysis. Why a muscle contracts, or why a gland secretes, or
+"why the oxidation of starch in the living machine gives rise to motion,
+growth, and reproduction, while if the oxidation occurs in the
+chemist's laboratory ... it simply gives rise to heat," are questions he
+cannot answer. In all his inquiries into the parts played by mechanical
+and chemical laws in the organism, he is compelled to "assume as their
+foundation the simple vital properties of living phenomena."
+
+
+VI
+
+It should not surprise nor disturb us that the scientific interpretation
+of life leads to materialism, or to the conviction of the
+all-sufficiency of the mechanical and chemical forces of dead matter to
+account for all living phenomena. It need not surprise us because
+positive science, as such, can deal only with physical and chemical
+forces. If there is anything in this universe besides physical and
+chemical force, science does not know it. It does not know it because it
+is absolutely beyond the reach of its analysis. When we go beyond the
+sphere of the concrete, the experimental, the verifiable, only our
+philosophy can help us. The world within us, the world of psychic
+forces, is beyond the ken of science. It can analyze the living body,
+trace all its vital processes, resolve them into their mechanical and
+chemical equivalents, show us the parts played by the primary elements,
+the part played by the enzymes, or ferments, and the like, and yet it
+cannot tell us the secret of life--of that which makes organic chemistry
+so vastly different from inorganic. It discloses to us the wonders of
+the cell--a world of mystery by itself; it analyzes the animal body into
+organs, and the organs into tissues, and the tissues into cells, but the
+secret of organization utterly baffles it. After Professor Wilson had
+concluded his masterly work on the cell, he was forced to admit that the
+final mystery of the cell eluded him, and that his investigation "on the
+whole seemed to widen rather than to narrow the enormous gap that
+separates even the lowest forms of life from the inorganic world."
+
+All there is outside the sphere of physical science belongs to religion,
+to philosophy, to art, to literature. Huxley spoke strictly and honestly
+as a man of science, when he related consciousness to the body, as the
+sound of a clock when it strikes is related to the machinery of the
+clock. The scientific analysis of a living body reveals nothing but the
+action of the mechanical and chemical principles. If you analyze it by
+fire or by cremation, you get gases and vapors and mineral ash, that is
+all; the main thing about the live body--its organization, its life--you
+do not get. Of course science knows this; and to account for this
+missing something, it philosophizes, and relegates it to the interior
+world of molecular physics--it is all in the way the ultimate particles
+of matter were joined or compounded, were held together in the bonds of
+molecular matrimony. What factor or agent or intelligence is active or
+directive in this molecular marriage of the atoms, science does not
+inquire. Only philosophy can deal with that problem.
+
+What can science see or find in the brain of man that answers to the
+soul? Only certain movements of matter in the brain cortex. What
+difference does it find between inert matter and a living organism? Only
+a vastly more complex mechanics and chemistry in the latter. A wide
+difference, not of kind, but of degree. The something we call vitality,
+that a child recognizes, science does not find; vitality is something
+_sui generis_. Scientific analysis cannot show us the difference between
+the germ cell of a starfish and the germ cell of a man; and yet think of
+what a world of difference is hidden in those microscopic germs! What
+force is there in inert matter that can build a machine by the
+adjustment of parts to each other? We can explain the most complex
+chemical compounds by the action of chemical forces and chemical
+affinity, but they cannot explain that adjustment of parts to each
+other, the cooerdination of their activities that makes a living machine.
+
+In organized matter there is something that organizes. "The cell itself
+is an organization of smaller units," and to drive or follow the
+organizing principle into the last hiding-place is past the power of
+biological chemistry. What constitutes the guiding force or principle of
+a living body, adjusting all its parts, making them pull together,
+making of the circulation one system in which the heart, the veins, the
+arteries, the lungs, all work to one common end, cooerdinating several
+different organs into a digestive system, and other parts into the
+nervous system, is a mystery that no objective analysis of the body can
+disclose.
+
+To refer vitality to complexity alone, is to dodge the question.
+Multiplying the complexity of a machine, say of a watch, any conceivable
+number of times would not make it any the less a machine, or change it
+from the automatic order to the vital order. A motor-car is a vastly
+more complex mechanism than a wheelbarrow, and yet it is not the less a
+machine. On the other hand, an amoeba is a far simpler animal than a
+man, and yet it is just as truly living. To refer life to complexity
+does not help us; we want to know what lies back of the complexity--what
+makes it a new species of complexity.
+
+We cannot explain the origin of living matter by the properties which
+living matter possesses. There are three things that mechanics and
+chemistry cannot explain: the relation of the psychical to the physical
+through the law of the conservation and correlation of forces; the agent
+or principle that guides the blind chemical and physical forces so as to
+produce the living body; and the kind of forces that have contributed to
+the origin of that morphological unit--the cell.
+
+A Western university professor in a recent essay sounds quite a
+different note on this subject from the one that comes to us from
+Harvard. Says Professor Otto C. Glaser, of the University of Michigan,
+in a recent issue of the "Popular Science Monthly": "Does not the
+fitness of living things; the fact that they perform acts useful to
+themselves in an environment which is constantly shifting, and often
+very harsh; the fact that in general everything during development,
+during digestion, during any of the complicated chains of processes
+which we find, happens at the right time, in the right place, and to the
+proper extent; does not all this force us to believe that there is
+involved something more than mere chemistry and physics?--something, not
+consciousness necessarily, yet its analogue--a vital _x_?"
+
+There is this suggestive fact about these recent biological experiments
+of Dr. Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute: they seem to prove that the
+life of a man is not merely the sum of the life of the myriad cells of
+his body. Stab the man to death, and the cells of his body still live
+and will continue to live if grafted upon another live man. Probably
+every part of the body would continue to live and grow indefinitely, in
+the proper medium. That the cell life should continue after the soul
+life has ceased is very significant. It seems a legitimate inference
+from this fact that the human body is the organ or instrument of some
+agent that is not of the body. The functional or physiological life of
+the body as a whole, also seems quite independent of our conscious
+volitional or psychic life. That which repairs and renews the body,
+heals its wounds, controls and coordinates its parts, adapts it to its
+environment, carries on its processes during sleep, in fact in all our
+involuntary life, seems quite independent of the man himself. Is the
+spirit of a race or a nation, or of the times in which we live, another
+illustration of the same mysterious entity?
+
+If the vital principle, or vital force, is a fiction, invented to give
+the mind something to take hold of, we are in no worse case than we are
+in some other matters. Science tells us that there is no such _thing_ as
+heat, or light; these are only modes of activity in matter.
+
+In the same way we seem forced to think of life, vitality, as an
+entity--a fact as real as electricity or light, though it may be only a
+mode of motion. It may be of physico-chemical origin, as much so as
+heat, or light; and yet it is something as distinctive as they are among
+material things, and is involved in the same mystery. Is magnetism or
+gravitation a real thing? or, in the moral world, is love, charity, or
+consciousness itself? The world seems to be run by nonentities. Heat,
+light, life, seem nonentities. That which organizes the different parts
+or organs of the human body into a unit, and makes of the many organs
+one organism, is a nonentity. That which makes an oak an oak, and a
+pine a pine, is a nonentity. That which makes a sheep a sheep, and an ox
+an ox, is to science a nonentity. To physical science the soul is a
+nonentity.
+
+There is something in the cells of the muscles that makes them contract,
+and in the cells of the heart that makes it beat; that something is not
+active in the other cells of the body. But it is a nonentity. The body
+is a machine and a laboratory combined, but that which cooerdinates them
+and makes them work together--what is that? Another nonentity. That
+which distinguishes a living machine from a dead machine, science has no
+name for, except molecular attraction and repulsion, and these are names
+merely; they are nonentities. Is there not molecular attraction and
+repulsion in a steam-engine also? And yet it is not alive. What has to
+supplement the mechanical and the chemical to make matter alive? We have
+no name for it but the vital, be it an entity or a nonentity. We have no
+name for a flash of lightning but electricity, be it an entity or a
+nonentity. We have no name for that which distinguishes a man from a
+brute, but mind, soul, be it an entity or a nonentity. We have no name
+for that which distinguishes the organic from the inorganic but
+vitality, be it an entity or a nonentity.
+
+
+VII
+
+Without metaphysics we can do nothing; without mental concepts, where
+are we? Natural selection is as much a metaphysical phrase as is
+consciousness, or the subjective and the objective. Natural selection is
+not an entity, it is a name for what we conceive of as a process. It is
+natural rejection as well. The vital principle is a metaphysical
+concept; so is instinct; so is reason; so is the soul; so is God.
+
+Many of our concepts have been wrong. The concept of witches, of disease
+as the work of evil spirits, of famine and pestilence as the visitation
+of the wrath of God, and the like, were unfounded. Science sets us right
+about all such matters. It corrects our philosophy, but it cannot
+dispense with the philosophical attitude of mind. The philosophical must
+supplement the experimental.
+
+In fact, in considering this question of life, it is about as difficult
+for the unscientific mind to get along without postulating a vital
+principle or force--which, Huxley says, is analogous to the idea of a
+principle of aquosity in water--as it is to walk upon the air, or to
+hang one's coat upon a sunbeam. It seems as if something must breathe
+upon the dead matter, as at the first, to make it live. Yet if there is
+a distinct vital force it must be correlated with physical force, it
+must be related causally to the rest. The idea of a vital force as
+something new and distinct and injected into matter from without at a
+given time and place in the earth's history, must undoubtedly be given
+up. Instead of escaping from mechanism, this notion surrenders one into
+the hands of mechanism, since to supplement or reinforce a principle
+with some other principle from without, is strictly a mechanical
+procedure. But the conception of vitality as potential in matter, or of
+the whole universe as permeated with spirit, which to me is the same
+thing, is a conception that takes life out of the categories of the
+fortuitous and the automatic.
+
+No doubt but that all things in the material world are causally related,
+no doubt of the constancy of matter and force, no doubt but that all
+phenomena are the result of natural principles, no doubt that the living
+arose from the non-living, no doubt that the evolution process was
+inherent in the constitution of the world; and yet there is a mystery
+about it all that is insoluble. The miracle of vitality takes place
+behind a veil that we cannot penetrate, in the inmost sanctuary of the
+molecules of matter, in that invisible, imaginary world on the
+borderland between the material and the immaterial. We may fancy that it
+is here that the psychical effects its entrance into the physical--that
+spirit weds matter--that the creative energy kindles the spark we call
+vitality. At any rate, vitality evidently begins in that inner world of
+atoms and molecules; but whether as the result of their peculiar and
+very complex compounding or as the cause of the compounding--how are we
+ever to know? Is it not just as scientific to postulate a new principle,
+the principle of vitality, as to postulate a new process, or a new
+behavior of an old principle? In either case, we are in the world of the
+unverifiable; we take a step in the dark. Most of us, I fancy, will
+sympathize with George Eliot, who says in one of her letters: "To me the
+Development Theory, and all other explanations of processes by which
+things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery
+that lies under the processes."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+SCIENTIFIC VITALISM
+
+I
+
+
+All living bodies, when life leaves them, go back to the earth from
+whence they came. What was it in the first instance that gathered their
+elements from the earth and built them up into such wonderful
+mechanisms? If we say it was nature, do we mean by nature a physical
+force or an immaterial principle? Did the earth itself bring forth a
+man, or did something breathe upon the inert clay till it became a
+living spirit?
+
+As life is a physical phenomenon, appearing in a concrete physical
+world, it is, to that extent, within the domain of physical science, and
+appeals to the scientific mind. Physical science is at home only in the
+experimental, the verifiable. Its domain ends where that of philosophy
+begins.
+
+The question of how life arose in a universe of dead matter is just as
+baffling a question to the ordinary mind, as how the universe itself
+arose. If we assume that the germs of life drifted to us from other
+spheres, propelled by the rays of the sun, or some other celestial
+agency, as certain modern scientific philosophers have assumed, we have
+only removed the mystery farther away from us. If we assume that it
+came by spontaneous generation, as Haeckel and others assume, then we
+are only cutting a knot which we cannot untie. The god of spontaneous
+generation is as miraculous as any other god. We cannot break the causal
+sequence without a miracle. If something came from nothing, then there
+is not only the end of the problem, but also the end of our boasted
+science.
+
+Science is at home in discussing all the material manifestations of
+life--the parts played by colloids and ferments, by fluids and gases,
+and all the organic compounds, and by mechanical and chemical
+principles; it may analyze and tabulate all life processes, and show the
+living body as a most wonderful and complex piece of mechanism, but
+before the question of the origin of life itself it stands dumb, and,
+when speaking through such a man as Tyndall, it also stands humble and
+reverent. After Tyndall had, to his own satisfaction, reduced all like
+phenomena to mechanical attraction and repulsion, he stood with
+uncovered head before what he called the "mystery and miracle of
+vitality." The mystery and miracle lie in the fact that in the organic
+world the same elements combine with results so different from those of
+the inorganic world. Something seems to have inspired them with a new
+purpose. In the inorganic world, the primary elements go their ceaseless
+round from compound to compound, from solid to fluid or gaseous, and
+back again, forming the world of inert matter as we know it, but in the
+organic world the same elements form thousands of new combinations
+unknown to them before, and thus give rise to the myriad forms of life
+that inhabit the earth.
+
+The much-debated life question has lately found an interesting exponent
+in Professor Benjamin Moore, of the University of Liverpool. His volume
+on the subject in the "Home University Library" is very readable, and,
+in many respects, convincing. At least, so far as it is the word of
+exact science on the subject it is convincing; so far as it is
+speculative, or philosophical, it is or is not convincing, according to
+the type of mind of the reader. Professor Moore is not a bald mechanist
+or materialist like Professor Loeb, or Ernst Haeckel, nor is he an
+idealist or spiritualist, like Henri Bergson or Sir Oliver Lodge. He may
+be called a scientific vitalist. He keeps close to lines of scientific
+research as these lines lead him through the maze of the primordial
+elements of matter, from electron to atom, from atom to molecule, from
+molecule to colloid, and so up to the border of the living world. His
+analysis of the processes of molecular physics as they appear in the
+organism leads him to recognize and to name a new force, or a new
+manifestation of force, which he hesitates to call vital, because of the
+associations of this term with a prescientific age, but which he calls
+"biotic energy."
+
+Biotic energy is peculiar to living bodies, and "there are precisely the
+same criteria for its existence," says Professor Moore, "as for the
+existence of any one of the inorganic energy types, viz., a set of
+discrete phenomena; and its nature is as mysterious to us as the cause
+of any one of these inorganic forms about which also we know so little.
+It is biotic energy which guides the development of the ovum, which
+regulates the exchanges of the cell, and causes such phenomena as nerve
+impulse, muscular contraction, and gland secretion, and it is a form of
+energy which arises in colloidal structures, just as magnetism appears
+in iron, or radio-activity in uranium or radium, and in its
+manifestations it undergoes exchanges with other forms of energy, in the
+same manner as these do among one another."
+
+Like Professor Henderson, Professor Moore concedes to the vitalists
+about all they claim--namely, that there is some form of force or
+manifestation of energy peculiar to living bodies, and one that cannot
+be adequately described in terms of physics and chemistry. Professor
+Moore says this biotic energy "arises in colloidal structures," and so
+far as biochemistry can make out, arises _spontaneously_ and gives rise
+to that marvelous bit of mechanism, the cell. In the cell appears "a
+form of energy unknown outside life processes which leads the mazy dance
+of life from point to point, each new development furnishing a starting
+point for the next one." It not only leads the dance along our own line
+of descent from our remote ancestors--it leads the dance along the long
+road of evolution from the first unicellular form in the dim palaeozoic
+seas to the complex and highly specialized forms of our own day.
+
+The secret of this life force, or biotic energy, according to Professor
+Moore, is in the keeping of matter itself. The steps or stages from the
+depths of matter by which life arose, lead up from that imaginary
+something, the electron, to the inorganic colloids, or to the
+crystallo-colloids, which are the threshold of life, each stage showing
+some new transformation of energy. There must be an all-potent energy
+transformation before we can get chemical energy out of physical energy,
+and then biotic energy out of chemical energy. This transformation of
+inorganic energy into life energy cannot be traced or repeated in the
+laboratory, yet science believes the secret will sometime be in its
+hands. It is here that the materialistic philosophers, such as
+Professors Moore and Loeb, differ from the spiritualistic philosophers,
+such as Bergson, Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor Thompson, and others.
+
+Professor Moore has no sympathy with those narrow mechanistic views that
+see in the life processes "no problems save those of chemistry and
+physics." "Each link in the living chain may be physico-chemical, but
+the chain as a whole, and its purpose, is something else." He draws an
+analogy from the production of music in which purely physical factors
+are concerned; the laws of harmonics account for all; but back of all is
+something that is not mechanical and chemical--there is the mind of the
+composer, and the performers, and the auditors, and something that takes
+cognizance of the whole effect. A complete human philosophy cannot be
+built upon physical science alone. He thinks the evolution of life from
+inert matter is of the same type as the evolution of one form of matter
+from another, or the evolution of one form of energy from another--a
+mystery, to be sure, but little more startling in the one case than in
+the other. "The fundamental mystery lies in the existence of those
+entities, or things, which we call matter and energy," out of the play
+and interaction of which all life phenomena have arisen. Organic
+evolution is a series of energy exchanges and transformations from lower
+to higher, but science is powerless to go behind the phenomena presented
+and name or verify the underlying mystery. Only philosophy can do this.
+And Professor Moore turns philosopher when he says there is beauty and
+design in it all, "and an eternal purpose which is ever progressing."
+
+Bergson sets forth his views of evolution in terms of literature and
+philosophy. Professor Moore embodies similar views in his volume, set
+forth in terms of molecular science. Both make evolution a creative and
+a continuous process. Bergson lays the emphasis upon the cosmic spirit
+interacting with matter. Professor Moore lays the emphasis upon the
+indwelling potencies of matter itself (probably the same spirit
+conceived of in different terms). Professor Moore philosophizes as truly
+as does Bergson when he says "there must exist a whole world of living
+creatures which the microscope has never shown us, leading up to the
+bacteria and the protozoa. The brink of life lies not at the production
+of protozoa and bacteria, which are highly developed inhabitants of our
+world, but away down among the colloids; and the beginning of life was
+not a fortuitous event occurring millions of years ago and never again
+repeated, but one which in its primordial stages keeps on repeating
+itself all the time in our generation. So that if all intelligent
+creatures were by some holocaust destroyed, up out of the depths in
+process of millions of years, intelligent beings would once more
+emerge." This passage shows what a speculative leap or flight the
+scientific mind is at times compelled to take when it ventures beyond
+the bounds of positive methods. It is good philosophy, I hope, but we
+cannot call it science. Thrilled with cosmic emotion, Walt Whitman made
+a similar daring assertion:--
+
+    "There is no stoppage, and never can be stoppage,
+    If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces,
+      were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would
+      not avail in the long run,
+    We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
+    And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther."
+
+
+II
+
+Evolution is creative, whether it works in matter--as Bergson describes,
+or whether its path lies up through electrons and atoms and molecules,
+as Professor Moore describes. There is something that creates and makes
+matter plastic to its will. Whether we call matter "the living garment
+of God," as Goethe did, or a reservoir of creative energy, as Tyndall
+and his school did, and as Professor Moore still does, we are paying
+homage to a power that is super-material. Life came to our earth, says
+Professor Moore, through a "well-regulated orderly development," and it
+"comes to every mother earth of the universe in the maturity of her
+creation when the conditions arrive within suitable limits." That no
+intelligent beings appeared upon the earth for millions upon millions of
+years, that for whole geologic ages there was no creature with more
+brains than a snail possesses, shows the almost infinitely slow progress
+of development, and that there has been no arbitrary or high-handed
+exercise of creative power. The universe is not run on principles of
+modern business efficiency, and man is at the head of living forms, not
+by the fiat of some omnipotent power, some superman, but as the result
+of the operation of forces that balk at no delay, or waste, or failure,
+and that are dependent upon the infinitely slow ripening and
+amelioration of both cosmic and terrestrial conditions.
+
+We do not get rid of God by any such dictum, but we get rid of the
+anthropomorphic views which we have so long been wont to read into the
+processes of nature. We dehumanize the universe, but we do not render it
+the less grand and mysterious. Professor Moore points out to us how life
+came to a cooling planet as soon as the temperature became low enough
+for certain chemical combinations to appear. There must first be oxides
+and saline compounds, there must be carbonates of calcium and magnesium,
+and the like. As the temperature falls, more and more complex compounds,
+such as life requires, appear; till, in due time, carbon dioxide and
+water are at hand, and life can make a start. At the white heat of some
+of the fixed stars, the primary chemical elements are not yet evolved;
+but more and more elements appear, and more and more complex compounds
+are formed as the cooling process progresses.
+
+"This note cannot be too strongly sounded, that as matter is allowed
+capacity for assuming complex forms, those complex forms appear. As soon
+as oxides can be there, oxides appear; when temperature admits of
+carbonates, then carbonates are forthwith formed. These are experiments
+which any chemist can to-day repeat in a crucible. And on a cooling
+planet, as soon as temperature will admit the presence of life, then
+life appears, as the evidence of geology shows us." When we speak of the
+beginning of life, it is not clear just what we mean. The unit of all
+organized bodies is the cell, but the cell is itself an organized body,
+and must have organic matter to feed upon. Hence the cell is only a more
+complex form of more primitive living matter. As we go down the scale
+toward the inorganic, can we find the point where the living and the
+non-living meet and become one? "Life had to surge a long way up from
+the depths before a green plant cell came into being." When the green
+plant cell was found, life was fairly launched. This plant cell, in the
+form of chlorophyll, by the aid of water and the trace of carbon dioxide
+in the air, began to store up the solar energy in fruit and grain and
+woody tissue, and thus furnish power to run all forms of life machinery.
+
+The materialists or naturalists are right in urging that we live in a
+much more wonderful universe than we have ever imagined, and that in
+matter itself sleep potencies and possibilities not dreamt of in our
+philosophy. The world of complex though invisible activities which
+science reveals all about us, the solar and stellar energies raining
+upon us from above, the terrestrial energies and influences playing
+through us from below, the transformations and transmutations taking
+place on every hand, the terrible alertness and potency of the world of
+inert matter as revealed by a flash of lightning, the mysteries of
+chemical affinity, of magnetism, of radio-activity, all point to deep
+beneath deep in matter itself. It is little wonder that men who dwell
+habitually upon these things and are saturated with the spirit and
+traditions of laboratory investigation, should believe that in some way
+matter itself holds the mystery of the origin of life. On the other
+hand, a different type of mind, the more imaginative, artistic, and
+religious type, recoils from the materialistic view.
+
+The sun is the source of all terrestrial energy, but the different forms
+that energy takes--in the plant, in the animal, in the brain of
+man--this type of mind is bound to ask questions about that. Gravity
+pulls matter down; life lifts it up; chemical forces pull it to pieces;
+vital forces draw it together and organize it; the winds and the waters
+dissolve and scatter it; vegetation recaptures and integrates it and
+gives it new qualities. At every turn, minds like that of Sir Oliver
+Lodge are compelled to think of life as a principle or force doing
+something with matter. The physico-chemical forces will not do in the
+hands of man what they do in the hands of Nature. Such minds, therefore,
+feel justified in thinking that something which we call "the hands of
+Nature," plays a part--some principle or force which the hands of man do
+not hold.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+A BIRD OF PASSAGE
+
+I
+
+
+There is one phase of the much-discussed question of the nature and
+origin of life which, so far as I know, has not been considered either
+by those who hold a brief for the physico-chemical view or by those who
+stand for some form of vitalism or idealism. I refer to the small part
+that life plays in the total scheme of things. The great cosmic machine
+would go on just as well without it. Its relation to the whole appears
+to be little different from that of a man to the train in which he
+journeys. Life rides on the mechanical and chemical forces, but it does
+not seem to be a part of them, nor identical with them, because they
+were before it, and will continue after it is gone.
+
+The everlasting, all-inclusive thing in this universe seems to be inert
+matter with the energy it holds; while the slight, flitting, casual
+thing seems to be living matter. The inorganic is from all eternity to
+all eternity; it is distributed throughout all space and endures through
+all time, while the organic is, in comparison, only of the here and the
+now; it was not here yesterday, and it may not be here to-morrow; it
+comes and goes. Life is like a bird of passage which alights and tarries
+for a time and is gone, and the places where it perched and nested and
+led forth its brood know it no more. Apparently it flits from world to
+world as the great cosmic spring comes to each, and departs as the
+cosmic winter returns to each. It is a visitor, a migrant, a frail,
+timid thing, which waits upon the seasons and flees from the coming
+tempests and vicissitudes.
+
+How casual, uncertain, and inconsequential the vital order seems in our
+own solar system--a mere incident or by-product in its cosmic evolution!
+Astronomy sounds the depths of space, and sees only mechanical and
+chemical forces at work there. It is almost certain that only a small
+fraction of the planetary surfaces is the abode of life. On the earth
+alone, of all the great family of planets and satellites, is the vital
+order in full career. It may yet linger upon Mars, but it is evidently
+waning. On the inferior planets it probably had its day long ago, while
+it must be millions of years before it comes to the superior planets, if
+it ever comes to them. What a vast, inconceivable outlay of time and
+energy for such small returns! Evidently the vital order is only an
+episode, a transient or secondary phase of matter in the process of
+sidereal evolution. Astronomic space is strewn with dead worlds, as a
+New England field is with drift boulders. That life has touched and
+tarried here and there upon them can hardly be doubted, but if it is
+anything more than a passing incident, an infant crying in the night, a
+flush of color upon the cheek, a flower blooming by the wayside,
+appearances are against it.
+
+We read our astronomy and geology in the light of our enormous egotism,
+and appropriate all to ourselves; but science sees in our appearance
+here a no more significant event than in the foam and bubbles that whirl
+and dance for a moment upon the river's current. The bubbles have their
+reason for being; all the mysteries of molecular attraction and
+repulsion may be involved in their production; without the solar energy,
+and the revolution of the earth upon its axis, they would not appear;
+and yet they are only bubbles upon the river's current, as we are
+bubbles upon the stream of energy that flows through the universe.
+Apparently the cosmic game is played for us no more than for the
+parasites that infest our bodies, or for the frost ferns that form upon
+our window-panes in winter. The making of suns and systems goes on in
+the depths of space, and doubtless will go on to all eternity, without
+any more reference to the vital order than to the chemical compounds.
+
+The amount of living matter in the universe, so far as we can penetrate
+it, compared with the non-living, is, in amount, like a flurry of snow
+that whitens the fields and hills of a spring morning compared to the
+miles of rock and soil beneath it; and with reference to geologic time
+it is about as fleeting. In the vast welter of suns and systems in the
+heavens above us, we see only dead matter, and most of it is in a
+condition of glowing metallic vapor. There are doubtless living
+organisms upon some of the invisible planetary bodies, but they are
+probably as fugitive and temporary as upon our own world. Much of the
+surface of the earth is clothed in a light vestment of life, which, back
+in geologic time, seems to have more completely enveloped it than at
+present, as both the arctic and the antarctic regions bear evidence in
+their coal-beds and other fossil remains of luxuriant vegetable growths.
+
+Strip the earth of its thin pellicle of soil, thinner with reference to
+the mass than is the peel to the apple, and you have stripped it of its
+life. Or, rob it of its watery vapor and the carbon dioxide in the air,
+both stages in its evolution, and you have a dead world. The huge globe
+swings through space only as a mass of insensate rock. So limited and
+evanescent is the world of living matter, so vast and enduring is the
+world of the non-living. Looked at in this way, in the light of physical
+science, life, I repeat, seems like a mere passing phase of the cosmic
+evolution, a flitting and temporary stage of matter which it passes
+through in the procession of changes on the surface of a cooling planet.
+Between the fiery mist of the nebula, and the frigid and consolidated
+globe, there is a brief span, ranging over about one hundred and twenty
+degrees of temperature, where life appears and organic evolution takes
+place. Compared with the whole scale of temperature, from absolute zero
+to the white heat of the hottest stars, it is about a hand's-breadth
+compared to a mile.
+
+Life processes cease, but chemical and mechanical processes go on
+forever. Life is as fugitive and uncertain as the bow in the clouds,
+and, like the bow in the clouds, is confined to a limited range of
+conditions. Like the bow, also, it is a perpetual creation, a constant
+becoming, and its source is not in the matter through which it is
+manifested, though inseparable from it. The material substance of life,
+like the rain-drops, is in perpetual flux and change; it hangs always on
+the verge of dissolution and vanishes when the material conditions fail,
+to be renewed again when they return. We know, do we not? that life is
+as literally dependent upon the sun as is the rainbow, and equally
+dependent upon the material elements; but whether the physical
+conditions sum up the whole truth about it, as they do with the bow, is
+the insoluble question. Science says "Yes," but our philosophy and our
+religion say "No." The poets and the prophets say "No," and our hopes
+and aspirations say "No."
+
+
+II
+
+Where, then, shall we look for the key to this mysterious thing we call
+life? Modern biochemistry will not listen to the old notion of a vital
+force--that is only a metaphysical will-o'-the-wisp that leaves us
+floundering in the quagmire. If I question the forces about me, what
+answer do I get? Molecular attraction and repulsion seem to say, "It is
+not in us; we are as active in the clod as in the flower." The four
+principal elements--oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon--say, "It is
+not in us, because we are from all eternity, and life is not; we form
+only its physical basis." Warmth and moisture say, "It is not in us; we
+are only its faithful nurses and handmaidens." The sun says: "It is not
+in me; I shine on dead worlds as well. I but quicken life after it is
+planted." The stars say, "It is not in us; we have seen life come and go
+among myriads of worlds for untold ages." No questioning of the heavens
+above nor of the earth below can reveal to us the secret we are in quest
+of.
+
+I can fancy brute matter saying to life: "You tarry with me at your
+peril. You will always be on the firing-line of my blind, contending
+forces; they will respect you not; you must take your chances amid my
+flying missiles. My forces go their eternal round without variableness
+or shadow of turning, and woe to you if you cross their courses. You
+may bring all your gods with you--gods of love, mercy, gentleness,
+altruism; but I know them not. Your prayers will fall upon ears of
+stone, your appealing gesture upon eyes of stone, your cries for mercy
+upon hearts of stone. I shall be neither your enemy nor your friend. I
+shall be utterly indifferent to you. My floods will drown you, my winds
+wreck you, my fires burn you, my quicksands suck you down, and not know
+what they are doing. My earth is a theatre of storms and cyclones, of
+avalanches and earthquakes, of lightnings and cloudbursts; wrecks and
+ruins strew my course. All my elements and forces are at your service;
+all my fluids and gases and solids; my stars in their courses will fight
+on your side, if you put and keep yourself in right relations to them.
+My atoms and electrons will build your houses, my lightning do your
+errands, my winds sail your ships, on the same terms. You cannot live
+without my air and my water and my warmth; but each of them is a source
+of power that will crush or engulf or devour you before it will turn one
+hair's-breadth from its course. Your trees will be uprooted by my
+tornadoes, your fair fields will be laid waste by floods or fires; my
+mountains will fall on your delicate forms and utterly crush and bury
+them; my glaciers will overspread vast areas and banish or destroy whole
+tribes and races of your handiwork; the shrinking and wrinkling crust of
+my earth will fold in its insensate bosom vast forests of your tropical
+growths, and convert them into black rock, and I will make rock of the
+myriad forms of minute life with which you plant the seas; through
+immense geologic ages my relentless, unseeing, unfeeling forces will
+drive on like the ploughshare that buries every flower and grass-blade
+and tiny creature in its path. My winds are life-giving breezes to-day,
+and the besom of destruction to-morrow; my rains will moisten and
+nourish you one day, and wash you into the gulf the next; my earthquakes
+will bury your cities as if they were ant-hills. So you must take your
+chances, but the chances are on your side. I am not all tempest, or
+flood, or fire, or earthquake. Your career will be a warfare, but you
+will win more battles than you will lose. But remember, you are nothing
+to me, while I am everything to you. I have nothing to lose or gain,
+while you have everything to gain. Without my soils and moisture and
+warmth, without my carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen, you can
+do or be nothing; without my sunshine you perish; but you have these
+things on condition of effort and struggle. You have evolution on
+condition of pain and failure and the hazard of the warring geologic
+ages. Fate and necessity rule in my realm. When you fail, or are crushed
+or swallowed by my remorseless forces, do not blame my gods, or your
+own; there is no blame, there is only the price to be paid: the hazards
+of invading the closed circle of my unseeing forces."
+
+In California I saw an epitome of the merciless way inorganic Nature
+deals with life. An old, dried, and hardened asphalt lake near Los
+Angeles tells a horrible tale of animal suffering and failure. It had
+been a pit of horrors for long ages; it was Nature concentrated--her
+wild welter of struggling and devouring forms through the geologic ages
+made visible and tangible in a small patch of mingled pitch and animal
+bones. There was nearly as much bone as pitch. The fate of the unlucky
+flies that alight upon tangle-foot fly-paper in our houses had been the
+fate of the victims that had perished here. How many wild creatures had
+turned appealing eyes to the great unheeding void as they felt
+themselves helpless and sinking in this all-engulfing pitch! In like
+manner how many human beings in storms and disasters at sea and in flood
+and fire upon land have turned the same appealing look to the unpitying
+heavens! There is no power in the world of physical forces, or apart
+from our own kind, that heeds us or turns aside for us, or bestows one
+pitying glance upon us. Life has run, and still runs, the gantlet of a
+long line of hostile forces, and escapes by dint of fleetness of foot,
+or agility in dodging, or else by toughness of fibre.
+
+Yet here we are; here is love and charity and mercy and intelligence;
+the fair face of childhood, the beautiful face of youth, the clear,
+strong face of manhood and womanhood, and the calm, benign face of old
+age, seen, it is true, as against a background of their opposites, but
+seeming to indicate something above chance and change at the heart of
+Nature. Here is life in the midst of death; but death forever playing
+into the hands of life; here is the organic in the midst of the
+inorganic, at strife with it, hourly crushed by it, yet sustained and
+kept going by its aid.
+
+
+III
+
+Vitality is only a word, but it marks a class of phenomena in nature
+that stands apart from all merely mechanical manifestations in the
+universe. The cosmos is a vast machine, but in this machine--this
+tremendous complex of physical forces--there appears, at least on this
+earth, in the course of its evolution, this something, or this peculiar
+manifestation of energy, that we call vital. Apparently it is a
+transient phase of activity in matter, which, unlike other chemical and
+physical activities, has its beginning and its ending, and out of which
+have arisen all the myriad forms of terrestrial life. The merely
+material forces, blind and haphazard from the first, did not arise in
+matter; they are inseparable from it; they are as eternal as matter
+itself; but the activities called vital arose in time and place, and
+must eventually disappear as they arose, while the career of the
+inorganic elements goes on as if life had never visited the sphere. Was
+it, or is it, a visitation--something _ab extra_ that implies
+super-mundane, or supernatural, powers?
+
+Added to this wonder is the fact that the vital order has gone on
+unfolding through the geologic ages, mounting from form to form, or from
+order to order, becoming more and more complex, passing from the
+emphasis of size of body, to the emphasis of size of brain, and finally
+from instinct and reflex activities to free volition, and the reason and
+consciousness of man; while the purely physical and chemical forces
+remain where they began. There has been endless change among them,
+endless shifting of the balance of power, but always the tendency to a
+dead equilibrium, while the genius of the organic forces has been in the
+power to disturb the equilibrium and to ride into port on the crest of
+the wave it has created, or to hang forever between the stable and the
+unstable.
+
+So there we are, confronted by two apparently contrary truths. It is to
+me unthinkable that the vital order is not as truly rooted in the
+constitution of things as are the mechanical and chemical orders; and
+yet, here we are face to face with its limited, fugitive, or
+transitional character. It comes and goes like the dews of the morning;
+it has all the features of an exceptional, unexpected, extraordinary
+occurrence--of miracle, if you will; but if the light which physical
+science turns on the universe is not a delusion, if the habit of mind
+which it begets is not a false one, then life belongs to the same
+category of things as do day and night, rain and sun, rest and motion.
+Who shall reconcile these contradictions?
+
+Huxley spoke for physical science when he said that he did not know what
+it was that constituted life--what it was that made the "wonderful
+difference between the dead particles and the living particles of matter
+appearing in other respects identical." He thought there might be some
+bond between physico-chemical phenomena, on the one hand, and vital
+phenomena, on the other, which philosophers will some day find out.
+Living matter is characterized by "spontaneity of action," which is
+entirely absent from inert matter. Huxley cannot or does not think of a
+vital force distinct from all other forces, as the cause of life
+phenomena, as so many philosophers have done, from Aristotle down to our
+day. He finds protoplasm to be the physical basis of life; it is one in
+both the vegetable and animal worlds; the animal takes it from the
+vegetable, and the vegetable, by the aid of sunlight, takes or
+manufactures it from the inorganic elements. But protoplasm is living
+matter. Before there was any protoplasm, what brought about the
+stupendous change of the dead into the living? Protoplasm makes more
+protoplasm, as fire makes more fire, but what kindled the first spark of
+this living flame? Here we corner the mystery, but it is still a
+mystery that defies us. Cause and effect meet and are lost in each
+other. Science cannot admit a miracle, or a break in the continuity of
+life, yet here it reaches a point where no step can be taken. Huxley's
+illustrations do not help his argument. "Protoplasm," he says, "is the
+clay of the potter; which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains
+clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick
+or sun-dried clod." Clay is certainly the physical basis of the potter's
+art, but would there be any pottery in the world if it contained only
+clay? Do we not have to think of the potter? In the same way, do we not
+have to think of something that fashions these myriad forms of life out
+of protoplasm?--and back of that, of something that begat protoplasm out
+of non-protoplasmic matter, and started the flame of life going? Life
+accounts for protoplasm, but what accounts for life? We have to think of
+the living clay as separated by Nature from the inert "sun-dried clod."
+There is something in the one that is not in the other. There is really
+no authentic analogy between the potter's art and Nature's art of life.
+
+The force of the analogy, if it has any, drives us to the conclusion
+that life is an entity, or an agent, working upon matter and independent
+of it.
+
+There is more wit than science in Huxley's question, "What better
+philosophical status has vitality than aquosity?" There is at least this
+difference: When vitality is gone, you cannot recall it, or reproduce
+it by your chemistry; but you can recombine the two gases in which you
+have decomposed water, any number of times, and get your aquosity back
+again; it never fails; it is a power of chemistry. But vitality will not
+come at your beck; it is not a chemical product, at least in the same
+sense that water is; it is not in the same category as the wetness or
+liquidity of water. It is a name for a phenomenon--the most remarkable
+phenomenon in nature. It is one that the art of man is powerless to
+reproduce, while water may be made to go through its cycle of
+change--solid, fluid, vapor, gas--and always come back to water. Well
+does the late Professor Brooks, of Johns Hopkins, say that "living
+things do, in some way and in some degree, control or condition
+inorganic nature; that they hold their own by setting the mechanical
+properties of matter in opposition to each other, and that this is their
+most notable and distinctive characteristic." Does not Ray Lankester,
+the irate champion of the mechanistic view of life, say essentially the
+same thing when he calls man the great Insurgent in Nature's
+camp--"crossing her courses, reversing her processes, and defeating her
+ends?"
+
+Life appears like the introduction of a new element or force or tendency
+into the cosmos. Henceforth the elements go new ways, form new
+compounds, build up new forms, and change the face of nature. Rivers
+flow where they never would have flowed without it, mountains fall in a
+space of time during which they never would have fallen; barriers arise,
+rough ways are made smooth, a new world appears--the world of man's
+physical and mental activities.
+
+If the gods of the inorganic elements are neither for nor against us,
+but utterly indifferent to us, how came we here? Nature's method is
+always from the inside, while ours is from the outside; hers is circular
+while ours is direct. We think, as Bergson says, of things created, and
+of a thing that creates, but things in nature are not created, they are
+evolved; they grow, and the thing that grows is not separable from the
+force that causes it to grow. The water turns the wheel, and can be shut
+off or let on. This is the way of the mechanical world. But the wheels
+in organic nature go around from something inside them, a kind of
+perpetual motion, or self-supplying power. They are not turned, they
+turn; they are not repaired, they repair. The nature of living things
+cannot be interpreted by the laws of mechanical and chemical things,
+though mechanics and chemistry play the visible, tangible part in them.
+If we must discard the notion of a vital force, we may, as Professor
+Hartog suggests, make use of the term "vital behavior."
+
+Of course man tries everything by himself and his own standards. He
+knows no intelligence but his own, no prudence, no love, no mercy, no
+justice, no economy, but his own, no god but such a one as fits his
+conception.
+
+In view of all these things, how man got here is a problem. Why the
+slender thread of his line of descent was not broken in the warrings and
+upheavals of the terrible geologic ages, what power or agent took a hand
+in furthering his development, is beyond the reach of our biologic
+science.
+
+Man's is the only intelligence, as we understand the word, in the
+universe, and his intelligence demands something akin to intelligence in
+the nature from which he sprang.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+LIFE AND MIND
+
+I
+
+
+There are three kinds of change in the world in which we live--physical
+and mechanical change which goes on in time and place among the tangible
+bodies about us, chemical change which goes on in the world of hidden
+molecules and atoms of which bodies are composed, and vital change which
+involves the two former, but which also involves the mysterious
+principle or activity which we call life. Life comes and goes, but the
+physical and chemical orders remain. The vegetable and animal kingdoms
+wax and wane, or disappear entirely, but the physico-chemical forces are
+as indestructible as matter itself. This fugitive and evanescent
+character of life, the way it uses and triumphs over the material
+forces, setting up new chemical activities in matter, sweeping over the
+land-areas of the earth like a conflagration, lifting the inorganic
+elements up into myriads of changing and beautiful forms, instituting a
+vast number of new chemical processes and compounds, defying the
+laboratory to reproduce it or kindle its least spark--a flame that
+cannot exist without carbon and oxygen, but of which carbon and oxygen
+do not hold the secret, a fire reversed, building up instead of pulling
+down, in the vegetable with power to absorb and transmute the inorganic
+elements into leaves and fruit and tissue; in the animal with power to
+change the vegetable products into bone and muscle and nerve and brain,
+and finally into thought and consciousness; run by the solar energy and
+dependent upon it, yet involving something which the sunlight cannot
+give us; in short, an activity in matter, or in a limited part of
+matter, as real as the physico-chemical activity, but, unlike it,
+defying all analysis and explanation and all our attempts at synthesis.
+It is this character of life, I say, that so easily leads us to look
+upon it as something _ab extra_, or super-added to matter, and not an
+evolution from it. It has led Sir Oliver Lodge to conceive of life as a
+distinct entity, existing independent of matter, and it is this
+conception that gives the key to Henri Bergson's wonderful book,
+"Creative Evolution."
+
+There is possibly or probably a fourth change in matter, physical in its
+nature, but much more subtle and mysterious than any of the physical
+changes which our senses reveal to us. I refer to radioactive change, or
+to the atomic transformation of one element into another, such as the
+change of radium into helium, and the change of helium into lead--a
+subject that takes us to the borderland between physics and chemistry
+where is still debatable ground.
+
+I began by saying that there were three kinds of changes in matter--the
+physical, the chemical, and the vital. But if we follow up this idea and
+declare that there are three kinds of force also, claiming this
+distinction for the third term of our proposition, we shall be running
+counter to the main current of recent biological science. "The idea that
+a peculiar 'vital force' acts in the chemistry of life," says Professor
+Soddy, "is extinct."
+
+"Only chemical and physical agents influence the vital processes," says
+Professor Czapek, of the University of Prague, "and we need no longer
+take refuge in mysterious 'vital forces' when we want to explain these."
+
+Tyndall was obliged to think of a force that guided the molecules of
+matter into the special forms of a tree. This force was in the ultimate
+particles of matter. But when he came to the brain and to consciousness,
+he said a new product appeared that defies mechanical treatment.
+
+The attempt of the biological science of our time to wipe out all
+distinctions between the living and the non-living, solely because
+scientific analysis reveals no difference, is a curious and interesting
+phenomenon.
+
+Professor Schaefer, in his presidential address before the British
+Association in 1912, argued that all the main characteristics of living
+matter, such as assimilation and disassimilation, growth and
+reproduction, spontaneous and amoeboid movement, osmotic pressure,
+karyokinesis, etc., were equally apparent in the non-living; therefore
+he concluded that life is only one of the many chemical reactions, and
+that it is not improbable that it will yet be produced by chemical
+synthesis in the laboratory. The logic of the position taken by
+Professor Schaefer and of the school to which he belongs, demands this
+artificial production of life--an achievement that seems no nearer than
+it did a half-century ago. When it has been attained, the problem will
+be simplified, but the mystery of life will by no means have been
+cleared up. One follows these later biochemists in working out their
+problem of the genesis of life with keen interest, but always with a
+feeling that there is more in their conclusions than is justified by
+their premises. For my own part, I am convinced that whatever is, is
+natural, but to obtain life I feel the need of something of a different
+order from the force that evokes the spark from the flint and the steel,
+or brings about the reaction of chemical compounds. If asked to explain
+what this something is that is characteristic of living matter, I should
+say intelligence.
+
+The new school of biologists start with matter that possesses
+extraordinary properties--with matter that seems inspired with the
+desire for life, and behaving in a way that it never will behave in the
+laboratory. They begin with the earth's surface warm and moist, the
+atmosphere saturated with watery vapor and carbon dioxide and many other
+complex unstable compounds; then they summon all the material elements
+of life--carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, with a little sodium,
+chlorine, iron, sulphur, phosphorus, and others--and make these run
+together to form a jelly-like body called a colloid; then they endow
+this jelly mass with the power of growth, and of subdivision when it
+gets too large; they make it able to absorb various unstable compounds
+from the air, giving it internal stores of energy, "the setting free of
+which would cause automatic movements in the lump of jelly." Thus they
+lay the foundations of life. This carbonaceous material with properties
+of movement and subdivision due to mechanical and physical forces is the
+immediate ancestor of the first imaginary living being, the _protobion_.
+To get this _protobion_ the chemists summon a reagent known as a
+catalyser. The catalyser works its magic on the jelly mass. It sets up a
+wonderful reaction by its mere presence, without parting with any of its
+substance. Thus, if a bit of platinum which has this catalytic power is
+dropped into a vessel containing a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen, the
+two gases instantly unite and form water. A catalyser introduced in the
+primordial jelly liberates energy and gives the substance power to break
+up the various complex unstable compounds into food, and promote growth
+and subdivision. In fact, it awakens or imparts a vital force and leads
+to "indefinite increase, subdivision, and movement."
+
+With Professor Schaefer there is first "the fortuitous production of life
+upon this globe"--the chance meeting or jostling of the elements that
+resulted in a bit of living protoplasm, "or a mass of colloid slime" in
+the old seas, or on their shores, "possessing the property of
+assimilation and therefore of growth." Here the whole mystery is
+swallowed at one gulp. "Reproduction would follow as a matter of
+course," because all material of this physical nature--fluid or
+semi-fluid in character--"has a tendency to undergo subdivision when its
+bulk exceeds a certain size."
+
+"A mass of colloidal slime" that has the power of assimilation and of
+growth and reproduction, is certainly a new thing in the world, and no
+chemical analysis of it can clear up the mystery. It is easy enough to
+produce colloidal slime, but to endow it with these wonderful powers so
+that "the promise and the potency of all terrestrial life" slumbers in
+it is a staggering proposition.
+
+Whatever the character of this subdivision, whether into equal parts or
+in the form of buds, "every separate part would resemble the parent in
+chemical and physical properties, and would equally possess the property
+of taking in and assimilating suitable material from its liquid
+environment, growing in bulk and reproducing its like by subdivision.
+In this way from any beginning of living material a primitive form of
+life would spread and would gradually people the globe. The
+establishment of life being once effected, all forms of organization
+follow under the inevitable laws of evolution." Why all forms of
+organization--why the body and brain of man--must inevitably follow from
+the primitive bit of living matter, is just the question upon which we
+want light. The proposition begs the question. Certainly when you have
+got the evolutionary process once started in matter which has these
+wonderful powers, all is easy. The professor simply describes what has
+taken place and seems to think that the mystery is thereby cleared up,
+as if by naming all the parts of a machine and their relation to one
+another, the machine is accounted for. What caused the iron and steel
+and wood of the machine to take this special form, while in other cases
+the iron and steel and wood took other radically different forms, and
+vast quantities of these substances took no form at all?
+
+In working out the evolution of living forms by the aid of the blind
+physical and chemical agents alone, Professor Schaefer unconsciously
+ascribes the power of choice and purpose to the individual cells, as
+when he says that the cells of the external layer sink below the surface
+for better protection and better nutrition. It seems to have been a
+matter of choice or will that the cells developed a nervous system in
+the animal and not in the vegetable. Man came because a few cells in
+some early form of life acquired a slightly greater tendency to react to
+an external stimulus. In this way they were brought into closer touch
+with the outer world and thereby gained the lead of their duller
+neighbor cells, and became the real rulers of the body, and developed
+the mind.
+
+It is bewildering to be told by so competent a person as Professor
+Schaefer that at bottom there is no fundamental difference between the
+living and non-living. We need not urge the existence of a peculiar
+vital force, as distinct from all other forces, but all distinctions
+between things are useless if we cannot say that a new behavior is set
+up in matter which we describe by the word "vital," and that a new
+principle is operative in organized matter which we must call
+"intelligence." Of course all movements and processes of living beings
+are in conformity with the general laws of matter, but does such a
+statement necessarily rule out all idea of the operation of an
+organizing and directing principle that is not operative in the world of
+inanimate things?
+
+In Schaefer's philosophy evolution is purely a mechanical process--there
+is no inborn tendency, no inherent push, no organizing effort, but all
+results from the blind groping and chance jostling of the inorganic
+elements; from the molecules of undifferentiated protoplasm to the
+brain of a Christ or a Plato, is just one series of unintelligent
+physical and chemical activities in matter.
+
+May we not say that all the marks or characteristics of a living body
+which distinguish it in our experience from an inanimate body, are of a
+non-scientific character, or outside the sphere of experimental science?
+We recognize them as readily as we distinguish day from night, but we
+cannot describe them in the fixed terms of science. When we say growth,
+metabolism, osmosis, the colloidal state, science points out that all
+this may be affirmed of inorganic bodies. When we say a life principle,
+a vital force or soul or spirit or intelligence, science turns a deaf
+ear.
+
+The difference between the living and the non-living is not so much a
+physical difference as a metaphysical difference. Living matter is
+actuated by intelligence. Its activities are spontaneous and
+self-directing. The rock, and the tree that grows beside it, and the
+insects and rodents that burrow under it, may all be made of one stuff,
+but their difference to the beholder is fundamental; there is an
+intelligent activity in the one that is not in the other. Now no
+scientific analysis of a body will reveal the secret of this activity.
+As well might your analysis of a phonographic record hope to disclose a
+sonata of Beethoven latent in the waving lines. No power of chemistry
+could reveal any difference between the gray matter of Plato's brain
+and that of the humblest citizen of Athens. All the difference between
+man, all that makes a man a man, and an ox an ox, is beyond the reach of
+any of your physico-chemical tests. By the same token the gulf that
+separates the organic from the inorganic is not within the power of
+science to disclose. The biochemist is bound to put life in the category
+of the material forces because his science can deal with no other. To
+him the word "vital" is a word merely, it stands for no reality, and the
+secret of life is merely a chemical reaction. A living body awakens a
+train of ideas in our minds that a non-living fails to awaken--a train
+of ideas that belong to another order from that awakened by scientific
+demonstration. We cannot blame science for ruling out that which it
+cannot touch with its analysis, or repeat with its synthesis. The
+phenomena of life are as obvious to us as anything in the world; we know
+their signs and ways, and witness their power, yet in the alembic of our
+science they turn out to be only physico-chemical processes; hence that
+is all there is of them. Vitality, says Huxley, has no more reality than
+the horology of a clock. Yet Huxley sees three equal realities in the
+universe--matter, energy, and consciousness. But consciousness is the
+crown of a vital process. Hence it would seem as if there must be
+something more real in vitality than Huxley is willing to admit.
+
+
+II
+
+Nearly all the later biologists or biological philosophers are as shy of
+the term "vital force," and even of the word "vitality," as they are of
+the words "soul," "spirit," "intelligence," when discussing natural
+phenomena. To experimental science such words have no meaning because
+the supposed realities for which they stand are quite beyond the reach
+of scientific analysis. Ray Lankester, in his "Science from an Easy
+Chair," following Huxley, compares vitality with aquosity, and says that
+to have recourse to a vital principle or force to explain a living body
+is no better philosophy than to appeal to a principle of aquosity to
+explain water. Of course words are words, and they have such weight with
+us that when we have got a name for a thing it is very easy to persuade
+ourselves that the thing exists. The terms "vitality," "vital force,"
+have long been in use, and it is not easy to convince one's self that
+they stand for no reality. Certain it is that living and non-living
+matter are sharply separated, though when reduced to their chemical
+constituents in the laboratory they are found to be identical. The
+carbon, the hydrogen, the nitrogen, the oxygen, and the lime, sulphur,
+iron, etc., in a living body are in no way peculiar, but are the same as
+these elements in the rocks and the soil. We are all made of one stuff;
+a man and his dog are made of one stuff; an oak and a pine are made of
+one stuff; Jew and Gentile are made of one stuff. Should we be
+justified, then, in saying that there is no difference between them?
+There is certainly a moral and an intellectual difference between a man
+and his dog, if there is no chemical and mechanical difference. And
+there is as certainly as wide or a wider difference between living and
+non-living matter, though it be beyond the reach of science to detect.
+For this difference we have to have a name, and we use the words
+"vital," "vitality," which seem to me to stand for as undeniable
+realities as the words heat, light, chemical affinity, gravitation.
+There is not a principle of roundness, though "nature centres into
+balls," nor of squareness, though crystallization is in right lines, nor
+of aquosity, though two thirds of the surface of the earth is covered
+with water. Can we on any better philosophical grounds say that there is
+a principle of vitality, though the earth swarms with living beings? Yet
+the word vitality stands for a reality, it stands for a peculiar
+activity in matter--for certain movements and characteristics for which
+we have no other term. I fail to see any analogy between aquosity and
+that condition of matter we call vital or living. Aquosity is not an
+activity, it is a property, the property of wetness; viscosity is a term
+to describe other conditions of matter; solidity, to describe still
+another condition; and opacity and transparency, to describe still
+others--as they affect another of our senses. But the vital activity in
+matter is a concrete reality. With it there goes the organizing tendency
+or impulse, and upon it hinges the whole evolutionary movement of the
+biological history of the globe. We can do all sorts of things with
+water and still keep its aquosity. If we resolve it into its constituent
+gases we destroy its aquosity, but by uniting these gases chemically we
+have the wetness back again. But if a body loses its vitality, its life,
+can we by the power of chemistry, or any other power within our reach,
+bring the vitality back to it? Can we make the dead live? You may bray
+your living body in a mortar, destroy every one of its myriad cells, and
+yet you may not extinguish the last spark of life; the protoplasm is
+still living. But boil it or bake it and the vitality is gone, and all
+the art and science of mankind cannot bring it back again. The physical
+and chemical activities remain after the vital activities have ceased.
+Do we not then have to supply a non-chemical, a non-physical force or
+factor to account for the living body? Is there no difference between
+the growth of a plant or an animal, and the increase in size of a
+sand-bank or a snow-bank, or a river delta? or between the wear and
+repair of a working-man's body and the wear and repair of the machine he
+drives? Excretion and secretion are not in the same categories. The
+living and the non-living mark off the two grand divisions of matter in
+the world in which we live, as no two terms merely descriptive of
+chemical and physical phenomena ever can. Life is a motion in matter,
+but of another order from that of the physico-chemical, though
+inseparable from it. We may forego the convenient term "vital force."
+Modern science shies at the term "force." We must have force or energy
+or pressure of some kind to lift dead matter up into the myriad forms of
+life, though in the last analysis of it it may all date from the sun.
+When it builds a living body, we call it a vital force; when it builds a
+gravel-bank, or moves a glacier, we call it a mechanical force; when it
+writes a poem or composes a symphony, we call it a psychic force--all
+distinctions which we cannot well dispense with, though of the ultimate
+reality for which these terms stand we can know little. In the latest
+science heat and light are not substances, though electricity is. They
+are peculiar motions in matter which give rise to sensations in certain
+living bodies that we name light and heat, as another peculiar motion in
+matter gives rise to a sensation we call sound. Life is another kind of
+motion in certain aggregates of matter--more mysterious or inexplicable
+than all others because it cannot be described in terms of the others,
+and because it defies the art and science of man to reproduce.
+
+Though the concepts "vital force" and "life principle" have no standing
+in the court of modern biological science, it is interesting to observe
+how often recourse is had by biological writers to terms that embody
+the same idea. Thus the German physiologist Verworn, the determined
+enemy of the old conception of life, in his great work on
+"Irritability," has recourse to "the specific energy of living
+substances." One is forced to believe that without this "specific
+energy" his "living substances" would never have arisen out of the
+non-living.
+
+Professor Moore, of Liverpool University, as I have already pointed out
+while discussing the term "vital force," invents a new phrase, "biotic
+energy," to explain the same phenomena. Surely a force by any other name
+is no more and no less potent. Both Verworn and Moore feel the need, as
+we all do, of some term, or terms, by which to explain that activity in
+matter which we call vital. Other writers have referred to "a peculiar
+power of synthesis" in plants and animals, which the inanimate forms do
+not possess.
+
+Ray Lankester, to whom I have already referred in discussing this
+subject, helps himself out by inventing, not a new force, but a new
+substance in which he fancies "resides the peculiar property of living
+matter." He calls this hypothetical substance "plasmogen," and thinks of
+it as an ultimate chemical compound hidden in protoplasm. Has this
+"ultimate molecule of life" any more scientific or philosophical
+validity than the old conception of a vital force? It looks very much
+like another name for the same thing--an attempt to give the mind
+something to take hold of in dealing with the mystery of living things.
+This imaginary "life-stuff" of the British scientist is entirely beyond
+the reach of chemical analysis; no man has ever seen it or proved its
+existence. In fact it is simply an invention of Ray Lankester to fill a
+break in the sequence of observed phenomena. Something seems to possess
+the power of starting or kindling that organizing activity in a living
+body, and it seems to me it matters little whether we call it
+"plasmogen," or a "life principle," or "biotic energy," or what not; it
+surely leavens the loaf. Matter takes on new activities under its
+influence. Ray Lankester thinks that plasmogen came into being in early
+geologic ages, and that the conditions which led to its formation have
+probably never recurred. Whether he thinks its formation was merely a
+chance hit or not, he does not say.
+
+We see matter all about us, acted upon by the mechanico-chemical forces,
+that never takes on any of the distinctive phenomena of living bodies.
+Yet Verworn is convinced that if we could bring the elements of a living
+body together as Nature does, in the same order and proportion, and
+combine them in the selfsame way, or bring about the vital conditions, a
+living being would result. Undoubtedly. It amounts to saying that if we
+had Nature's power we could do what she does. _If_ we could marry the
+elements as she does, and bless the banns as she seems to, we could
+build a man out of a clay-bank. But clearly physics and chemistry alone,
+as we know and practice them, are not equal to the task.
+
+
+III
+
+One of the fundamental characteristics of life is power of adaptation;
+it will adapt itself to almost any condition; it is willing and
+accommodating. It is like a stream that can be turned into various
+channels; the gall insects turn it into channels to suit their ends when
+they sting the leaf of a tree or the stalk of a plant, and deposit an
+egg in the wound. "Build me a home and a nursery for my young," says the
+insect. "With all my heart," says the leaf, and forthwith forgets its
+function as a leaf, and proceeds to build up a structure, often of great
+delicacy and complexity, to house and cradle its enemy. The current of
+life flows on blindly and takes any form imposed upon it. But in the
+case of the vegetable galls it takes life to control life. Man cannot
+produce these galls by artificial means. But we can take various
+mechanical and chemical liberties with embryonic animal life in its
+lower sea-forms. Professor Loeb has fertilized the eggs of sea-urchins
+by artificial means. The eggs of certain forms may be made to produce
+twins by altering the constitution of the sea-water, and the twins can
+be made to grow together so as to produce monstrosities by another
+chemical change in the sea-water. The eyes of certain fish embryos may
+be fused into a single cyclopean eye by adding magnesium chloride to the
+water in which they live. Loeb says, "It is _a priori_ obvious that an
+unlimited number of pathological variations might be produced by a
+variation in the concentration and constitution of the sea water, and
+experience confirms this statement." It has been found that when frog's
+eggs are turned upside down and compressed between two glass plates for
+a number of hours, some of the eggs give rise to twins. Professor Morgan
+found that if he destroyed half of a frog's egg after the first
+segmentation, the remaining half gave rise to half an embryo, but that
+if he put the half-egg upside down, and compressed it between two glass
+plates, he got a perfect embryo frog of half the normal size. Such
+things show how plastic and adaptive life is. Dr. Carrel's experiments
+with living animal tissue immersed in a proper mother-liquid illustrate
+how the vital process--cell-multiplication--may be induced to go on and
+on, blindly, aimlessly, for an almost indefinite time. The cells
+multiply, but they do not organize themselves into a constructive
+community and build an organ or any purposeful part. They may be likened
+to a lot of blind masons piling up brick and mortar without any
+architect to direct their work or furnish them a plan. A living body of
+the higher type is not merely an association of cells; it is an
+association and cooeperation of communities of cells, each community
+working to a definite end and building an harmonious whole. The
+biochemist who would produce life in the laboratory has before him the
+problem of compounding matter charged with this organizing tendency or
+power, and doubtless if he ever should evoke this mysterious process
+through his chemical reactions, it would possess this power, as this is
+what distinguishes the organic from the inorganic.
+
+I do not see mind or intelligence in the inorganic world in the sense in
+which I see it in the organic. In the heavens one sees power, vastness,
+sublimity, unspeakable, but one sees only the physical laws working on a
+grander scale than on the earth. Celestial mechanics do not differ from
+terrestrial mechanics, however tremendous and imposing the result of
+their activities. But in the humblest living thing--in a spear of grass
+by the roadside, in a gnat, in a flea--there lurks a greater mystery. In
+an animate body, however small, there abides something of which we get
+no trace in the vast reaches of astronomy, a kind of activity that is
+incalculable, indeterminate, and super-mechanical, not lawless, but
+making its own laws, and escaping from the iron necessity that rules in
+the inorganic world.
+
+Our mathematics and our science can break into the circle of the
+celestial and the terrestrial forces, and weigh and measure and separate
+them, and in a degree understand them; but the forces of life defy our
+analysis as well as our synthesis.
+
+Knowing as we do all the elements that make up the body and brain of a
+man, all the physiological processes, and all the relations and
+interdependence of his various organs, if, in addition, we knew all his
+inheritances, his whole ancestry back to the primordial cells from which
+he sprang, and if we also knew that of every person with whom he comes
+in contact and who influences his life, could we forecast his future,
+predict the orbit in which his life would revolve, indicate its
+eclipses, its perturbations, and the like, as we do that of an
+astronomic body? or could we foresee his affinities and combinations as
+we do that of a chemical body? Had we known any of the animal forms in
+his line of ascent, could we have foretold man as we know him to-day?
+Could we have foretold the future of any form of life from its remote
+beginnings? Would our mathematics and our chemistry have been of any
+avail in our dealing with such a problem? Biology is not in the same
+category with geology and astronomy. In the inorganic world, chemical
+affinity builds up and pulls down. It integrates the rocks and, under
+changed conditions, it disintegrates them. In the organic world chemical
+affinity is equally active, but it plays a subordinate part. It neither
+builds up nor pulls down. Vital activities, if we must shun the term
+"vital force," do both. Barring accidents, the life of all organisms is
+terminated by other organisms. In the order of nature, life destroys
+life, and compounds destroy compounds. When the air and soil and water
+hold no invisible living germs, organic bodies never decay. It is not
+the heat that begets putrefaction, but germs in the air. Sufficient heat
+kills the germs, but what disintegrates the germs and reduces them to
+dust? Other still smaller organisms? and so on _ad infinitum_? Does the
+sequence of life have no end? The destruction of one chemical compound
+means the formation of other chemical compounds; chemical affinity
+cannot be annulled, but the activity we call vital is easily arrested. A
+living body can be killed, but a chemical body can only be changed into
+another chemical body.
+
+The least of living things, I repeat, holds a more profound mystery than
+all our astronomy and our geology hold. It introduces us to activities
+which our mathematics do not help us to deal with. Our science can
+describe the processes of a living body, and name all the material
+elements that enter into it, but it cannot tell us in what the peculiar
+activity consists, or just what it is that differentiates living matter
+from non-living. Its analysis reveals no difference. But this difference
+consists in something beyond the reach of chemistry and of physics; it
+is active intelligence, the power of self-direction, of self-adjustment,
+of self-maintenance, of adapting means to an end. It is notorious that
+the hand cannot always cover the flea; this atom has will, and knows
+the road to safety. Behold what our bodies know over and above what we
+know! Professor Czapek reveals to us a chemist at work in the body who
+proceeds precisely like the chemist in his laboratory; they might both
+have graduated at the same school. Thus the chemist in the laboratory is
+accustomed to dissolve the substance which is to be used in an
+experiment to react on other substances. The chemical course in living
+cells is the same. All substances destined for reactions are first
+dissolved. No compound is taken up in living cells before it is
+dissolved. Digestion is essentially identical with dissolving or
+bringing into a liquid state. On the other hand, when the chemist wishes
+to preserve a living substance from chemical change, he transfers it
+from a state of solution into a solid state. The chemist in the living
+body does the same thing. Substances which are to be stored up, such as
+starch, fat, or protein bodies, are deposited in insoluble form, ready
+to be dissolved and used whenever wanted for the life processes.
+Poisonous substances are eliminated from living bodies by the same
+process of precipitation. Oxalic acid is a product of oxidation in
+living cells, and has strong poisonous properties. To get rid of it, the
+chemist inside the body, by the aid of calcium salts, forms insoluble
+compounds of it, and thus casts it out. To separate substances from each
+other by filtration, or by shaking with suitable liquids, is one of the
+daily tasks of the chemist. Analogous processes occur regularly in
+living cells. Again, when the chemist wishes to finish his filtration
+quickly, he uses filters which have a large surface. "In living
+protoplasms, this condition is very well fulfilled by the foam-like
+structure which affords an immense surface in a very small space." In
+the laboratory the chemist mixes his substances by stirring. The body
+chemist achieves the same result by the streaming of protoplasm. The
+cells know what they want, and how to attain it, as clearly as the
+chemist does. The intelligence of the living body, or what we must call
+such for want of a better term, is shown in scores of ways--by the means
+it takes to protect itself against microbes, by the antitoxins that it
+forms. Indeed, if we knew all that our bodies know, what mysteries would
+be revealed to us!
+
+
+IV
+
+Life goes up-stream--goes against the tendency to a static equilibrium
+in matter; decay and death go down. What is it in the body that
+struggles against poisons and seeks to neutralize their effects? What is
+it that protects the body against a second attack of certain diseases,
+making it immune? Chemical changes, undoubtedly, but what brings about
+the chemical changes? The body is a _colony_ of living units called
+cells, that behaves much like a colony of insects when it takes measures
+to protect itself against its enemies. The body forms anti-toxins when
+it has to. It knows how to do it as well as bees know how to ventilate
+the hive, or how to seal up or entomb the grub of an invading moth.
+Indeed, how much the act of the body, in encysting a bullet in its
+tissues, is like the act of the bees in encasing with wax a worm in the
+combs!
+
+What is that in the body which at great altitudes increases the number
+of red corpuscles in the blood, those oxygen-bearers, so as to make up
+for the lessened amount of oxygen breathed by reason of the rarity of
+the air? Under such conditions, the amount of haemoglobin is almost
+doubled. I do not call this thing a force; I call it an
+intelligence--the intelligence that pervades the body and all animate
+nature, and does the right thing at the right time. We, no doubt, speak
+too loosely of it when we say that it prompts or causes the body to do
+this, or to do that; it _is_ the body; the relation of the two has no
+human analogy; the two are one.
+
+Man breaks into the circuit of the natural inorganic forces and arrests
+them and controls them, and makes them do his work--turn his wheels,
+drive his engines, run his errands, etc.; but he cannot do this in the
+same sense with the organic forces; he cannot put a spell upon the pine
+tree and cause it to build him a house or a nursery. Only the insects
+can do a thing like that; only certain insects can break into the
+circuit of vegetable life and divert its forces to serve their special
+ends. One kind of an insect stings a bud or a leaf of the oak, and the
+tree forthwith grows a solid nutlike protuberance the size of a
+chestnut, in which the larvae of the insect live and feed and mature.
+Another insect stings the same leaf and produces the common oak-apple--a
+smooth, round, green, shell-like body filled with a network of radiating
+filaments, with the egg and then the grub of the insect at the centre.
+Still another kind of insect stings the oak bud and deposits its eggs
+there, and the oak proceeds to grow a large white ball made up of a kind
+of succulent vegetable wool with red spots evenly distributed over its
+surface, as if it were some kind of spotted fruit or flower. In June, it
+is about the size of a small apple. Cut it in half and you find scores
+of small shell-like growths radiating from the bud-stem, like the seeds
+of the dandelion, each with a kind of vegetable pappus rising from it,
+and together making up the ball as the pappus of the dandelion seeds
+makes up the seed-globe of this plant. It is one of the most singular
+vegetable products, or vegetable perversions, that I know of. A sham
+fruit filled with sham seeds; each seed-like growth contains a grub,
+which later in the season pupates and eats its way out, a winged insect.
+How foreign to anything we know as mechanical or chemical it all
+is!--the surprising and incalculable tricks of life!
+
+Another kind of insect stings the oak leaf and there develops a pale,
+smooth, solid, semi-transparent sphere, the size of a robin's egg, dense
+and succulent like the flesh of an apple, with the larvae of the insect
+subsisting in its interior. Each of these widely different forms is
+evoked from the oak leaf by the magic of an insect's ovipositor.
+Chemically, the constituents of all of them are undoubtedly the same.
+
+It is one of the most curious and suggestive things in living nature. It
+shows how plastic and versatile life is, and how utterly unmechanical.
+Life plays so many and such various tunes upon the same instruments; or
+rather, the living organism is like many instruments in one; the tones
+of all instruments slumber in it to be awakened when the right performer
+appears. At least four different insects get four different tunes, so to
+speak, out of the oak leaf.
+
+Certain insects avail themselves of the animal organism also and go
+through their cycle of development and metamorphosis within its tissues
+or organs in a similar manner.
+
+
+V
+
+On the threshold of the world of living organisms stands that wonderful
+minute body, the cell, the unit of life--a piece of self-regulating and
+self-renewing mechanism that holds the key to all the myriads of living
+forms that fill the world, from the amoeba up to man. For chemistry
+to produce the cell is apparently as impossible as for it to produce a
+bird's egg, or a living flower, or the heart and brain of man. The body
+is a communal state made up of myriads of cells that all work together
+to build up and keep going the human personality. There is the same
+cooeperation and division of labor that takes place in the civic state,
+and in certain insect communities. As in the social and political
+organism, thousands of the citizen cells die every day and new cells of
+the same kind take their place. Or, it is like an army in battle being
+constantly recruited--as fast as a soldier falls another takes his
+place, till the whole army is changed, and yet remains the same. The
+waste is greatest at the surface of the body through the skin, and
+through the stomach and lungs. The worker cells, namely, the tissue
+cells, like the worker bees in the hive, pass away the most rapidly;
+then, according to Haeckel, there are certain constants, certain cells
+that remain throughout life. "There is always a solid groundwork of
+conservative cells, the descendants of which secure the further
+regeneration." The traditions of the state are kept up by the
+citizen-cells that remain, so that, though all is changed in time, the
+genius of the state remains; the individuality of the man is not lost.
+"The sense of personal identity is maintained across the flight of
+molecules," just as it is maintained in the state or nation, by the
+units that remain, and by the established order. There is an unwritten
+constitution, a spirit that governs, like Maeterlinck's "spirit of the
+hive." The traditions of the body are handed down from mother cell to
+daughter cell, though just what that means in terms of physiology or
+metabolism I do not know. But this we know--that you are you and I am I,
+and that human life and personality can never be fully explained or
+accounted for in terms of the material forces.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+LIFE AND SCIENCE
+
+I
+
+
+The limited and peculiar activity which arises in matter and which we
+call vital; which comes and goes; which will not stay to be analyzed;
+which we in vain try to reproduce in our laboratories; which is
+inseparable from chemistry and physics, but which is not summed up by
+them; which seems to use them and direct them to new ends,--an entity
+which seems to have invaded the kingdom of inert matter at some definite
+time in the earth's history, and to have set up an insurgent movement
+there; cutting across the circuits of the mechanical and chemical
+forces; turning them about, pitting one against the other; availing
+itself of gravity, of chemical affinity, of fluids and gases, of osmosis
+and exosmosis, of colloids, of oxidation and hydration, and yet
+explicable by none of these things; clothing itself with garments of
+warmth and color and perfume woven from the cold, insensate elements;
+setting up new activities in matter; building up myriads of new unstable
+compounds; struggling against the tendency of the physical forces to a
+dead equilibrium; indeterminate, intermittent, fugitive; limited in
+time, limited in space; present in some worlds, absent from others;
+breaking up the old routine of the material forces, and instituting new
+currents, new tendencies; departing from the linear activities of the
+inorganic, and setting up the circular activities of living currents;
+replacing change by metamorphosis, revolution by evolution, accretion by
+secretion, crystallization by cell-formation, aggregation by growth;
+and, finally, introducing a new power into the world--the mind and soul
+of man--this wonderful, and apparently transcendental something which we
+call life--how baffling and yet how fascinating is the inquiry into its
+nature and origin! Are we to regard it as Tyndall did, and as others
+before and since his time did and do, as potential in the constitution
+of matter, and self-evolved, like the chemical compounds that are
+involved in its processes?
+
+As mechanical energy is latent in coal, and in all combustible bodies,
+is vital energy latent in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so forth,
+needing only the right conditions to bring it out? Mechanical energy is
+convertible into electrical energy, and _vice versa_. Indeed, the circle
+of the physical forces is easily traced, easily broken into, but when or
+how these forces merge into the vital and psychic forces, or support
+them, or become them--there is the puzzle. If we limit the natural to
+the inorganic order, then are living bodies supernatural?
+Super-mechanical and super-chemical certainly, and chemics and
+mechanics and electro-statics include all the material forces. Is life
+outside this circle? It is certain that this circle does not always
+include life, but can life exist outside this circle? When it appears it
+is always inside it.
+
+Science can only deal with life as a physical phenomenon; as a psychic
+phenomenon it is beyond its scope, except so far as the psychic is
+manifested through the physical. Not till it has produced living matter
+from dead can it speak with authority upon the question of the origin of
+life. Its province is limited to the description and analysis of life
+processes, but when it essays to name what institutes the processes, or
+to disclose the secret of organization, it becomes philosophy or
+theology. When Haeckel says that life originated spontaneously, he does
+not speak with the authority of science, because he cannot prove his
+assertion; it is his opinion, and that is all. When Helmholtz says that
+life had no beginning, he is in the same case. When our later
+biophysicists say that life is of physico-chemical origin, they are in
+the same case; when Tyndall says that there is no energy in the universe
+but solar energy, he is in the same case; when Sir Oliver Lodge says
+that life is an entity outside of and independent of matter, he is in
+the same case. Philosophy and theology can take leaps in the dark, but
+science must have solid ground to go upon. When it speculates or
+theorizes, it must make its speculations good. Scientific prophecy is
+amenable to the same tests as other prophecy. In the absence of proof by
+experiment--scientific proof--to get the living out of the non-living we
+have either got to conceive of matter itself as fundamentally creative,
+as the new materialism assumes, or else we have got to have an external
+Creator, as the old theology assumes. And the difference is more
+apparent than real. Tyndall is "baffled and bewildered" by the fact that
+out of its molecular vibrations and activities "things so utterly
+incongruous with them as sensation, thought, and emotion can be
+derived." His science is baffled and bewildered because it cannot, bound
+as it is by the iron law of the conservation and correlation of energy,
+trace the connection between them. But his philosophy or his theology
+would experience little difficulty. Henri Bergson shows no hesitation in
+declaring that the fate of consciousness is not involved in the fate of
+the brain through which it is manifested, but it is his philosophy and
+not his science that inspires this faith. Tyndall deifies matter to get
+life out of it--makes the creative energy potential in it. Bergson
+deifies or spiritualizes life as a psychic, creative principle, and
+makes matter its instrument or vehicle.
+
+Science is supreme in its own sphere, the sphere, or hemisphere, of the
+objective world, but it does not embrace the whole of human life,
+because human life is made up of two spheres, or hemispheres, one of
+which is the subjective world. There is a world within us also, the
+world of our memories, thoughts, emotions, aspirations, imaginings,
+which overarches the world of our practical lives and material
+experience, as the sky overarches the earth. It is in the spirit of
+science that we conquer and use the material world in which we live; it
+is in the spirit of art and literature, philosophy and religion, that we
+explore and draw upon the immaterial world of our own hearts and souls.
+Of course the man of science is also a philosopher--may I not even say
+he is also a prophet and poet? Not otherwise could he organize his
+scientific facts and see their due relations, see their drift and the
+sequence of forces that bind the universe into a whole. As a man of
+science he traces out the causes of the tides and the seasons, the
+nature and origin of disease, and a thousand and one other things; but
+only as a philosopher can he see the body as a whole and speculate about
+the mystery of its organization; only as a philosopher can he frame
+theories and compare values and interpret the phenomena he sees about
+him.
+
+
+II
+
+We can only know, in the scientific sense, the physical and chemical
+phenomena of life; its essence, its origin, we can only know as
+philosophy and idealism know them. We have to turn philosophers when we
+ask any ultimate question. The feeling we have that the scientific
+conception of life is inadequate springs from the philosophical habit of
+mind. Yet this habit is quite as legitimate as the scientific habit, and
+is bound to supplement the latter all through life.
+
+The great men of science, like Darwin and Huxley, are philosophers in
+their theories and conclusions, and men of science in their observations
+and experiments. The limitations of science in dealing with such a
+problem are seen in the fact that science can take no step till it has
+life to begin with. When it has got the living body, it can analyze its
+phenomena and reduce them to their chemical and physical equivalents,
+and thus persuade itself that the secret of life may yet be hit upon in
+the laboratory. Professor Czapek, of the University of Prague, in his
+work on "The Chemical Phenomena of Life" speaks for science when he
+says, "What we call life is nothing else but a complex of innumerable
+chemical reactions in the living substance which we call protoplasm."
+The "living substance" is assumed to begin with, and then we are told
+that the secret of its living lies in its chemical and physical
+processes. This is in one sense true. No doubt at all that if these
+processes were arrested, life would speedily end, but do they alone
+account for its origin? Is it not like accounting for a baby in terms of
+its breathing and eating? It was a baby before it did either, and it
+would seem as if life must in some way ante-date the physical and
+chemical processes that attend it, or at least be bound up in them in a
+way that no scientific analysis can reveal.
+
+If life is merely a mode of motion in matter, it is fundamentally unlike
+any and all other modes of motion, because, while we can institute all
+the others at will, we are powerless to institute this. The mode of
+motion we call heat is going on in varying degrees of velocity all about
+us at all times and seasons, but the vital motion of matter is limited
+to a comparatively narrow circle. We can end it, but we cannot start it.
+
+The rigidly scientific type of mind sees no greater mystery in the
+difference in contour of different animal bodies than a mere difference
+in the density of the germ cells: "one density results in a sequence of
+cell-densities to form a horse; another a dog; another a cat"; and avers
+that if we "repeat the same complex conditions, the same results are as
+inevitable as the sequences of forces that result in the formation of
+hydrogen monoxide from hydrogen and oxygen."
+
+Different degrees of density may throw light on the different behavior
+of gases and fluids and solids, but can it throw any light on the
+question of why a horse is a horse, and a dog a dog? or why one is an
+herbivorous feeder, and the other a carnivorous?
+
+The scientific explanation of life phenomena is analogous to reducing a
+living body to its ashes and pointing to them--the lime, the iron, the
+phosphorus, the hydrogen, the oxygen, the carbon, the nitrogen--as the
+whole secret.
+
+Professor Czapek is not entirely consistent. He says that it is his
+conviction that there is something in physiology that transcends the
+chemistry and the physics of inorganic nature. At the same time he
+affirms, "It becomes more and more improbable that Life develops forces
+which are unknown in inanimate Nature." But psychic forces are a product
+of life, and they certainly are not found in inanimate nature. But
+without laying stress upon this fact, may we not say that if no new
+force is developed by, or is characteristic of, life, certainly new
+effects, new processes, new compounds of matter are produced by life?
+Matter undergoes some change that chemical analysis does not reveal. The
+mystery of isomeric substances appears, a vast number of new compounds
+of carbon appear, the face of the earth changes. The appearance of life
+in inert matter is a change analogous to the appearance of the mind of
+man in animate nature. The old elements and forces are turned to new and
+higher uses. Man does not add to the list of forces or elements in the
+earth, but he develops them, and turns them to new purposes; they now
+obey and serve him, just as the old chemistry and physics obey and
+serve life. Czapek tells us of the vast number of what are called
+enzymes, or ferments, that appear in living bodies--"never found in
+inorganic Nature and not to be gained by chemical synthesis." Orders and
+suborders of enzymes, they play a part in respiration, in digestion, in
+assimilation. Some act on the fats, some on the carbohydrates, some
+produce inversion, others dissolution and precipitation. These enzymes
+are at once the products and the agents of life. They must exert force,
+chemical force, or, shall we say, they transform chemical force into
+life force, or, to use Professor Moore's term, into "biotic energy"?
+
+
+III
+
+The inorganic seems dreaming of the organic. Behold its dreams in the
+fern and tree forms upon the window pane and upon the stone flagging of
+a winter morning! In the Brunonian movement of matter in solution, in
+crystallization, in chemical affinity, in polarity, in osmosis, in the
+growth of flint or chert nodules, in limestone formations--like seeking
+like--in these and in other activities, inert matter seems dreaming of
+life.
+
+The chemists have played upon this tendency in the inorganic to parody
+or simulate some of the forms of living matter. A noted European
+chemist, Dr. Leduc, has produced what he calls "osmotic growths," from
+purely unorganized mineral matter--growths in form like seaweed and
+polyps and corals and trees. His seeds are fragments of calcium
+chloride, and his soil is a solution of the alkaline carbonates,
+phosphates, or silicates. When his seeds are sown in these solutions, we
+see inert matter germinating, "putting forth bud and stem and root and
+branch and leaf and fruit," precisely as in the living vegetable
+kingdom. It is not a growth by accretion, as in crystallization, but by
+intussusception, as in life. These ghostly things exhibit the phenomena
+of circulation and respiration and nutrition, and a crude sort of
+reproduction by budding; they repair their injuries, and are able to
+perform periodic movements, just as does an animal or a plant; they have
+a period of vigorous youthful growth, of old age, of decay, and of
+death. In form, in color, in texture, and in cell structure, they
+imitate so closely the cell structures of organic growth as to suggest
+something uncanny or diabolical. And yet the author of them does not
+claim that they are alive. They are not edible, they contain no
+protoplasm--no starch or sugar or peptone or fats or carbohydrates.
+These chemical creations by Dr. Leduc are still dead matter--dead
+colloids--only one remove from crystallization; on the road to life,
+fore-runners of life, but not life. If he could set up the
+chlorophyllian process in his chemical reactions among inorganic
+compounds, the secret of life would be in his hands. But only the green
+leaf can produce chlorophyll; and yet, which was first, the leaf or the
+chlorophyll?
+
+Professor Czapek is convinced that "some substances must exist in
+protoplasm which are directly responsible for the life processes," and
+yet the chemists cannot isolate and identify those substances.
+
+How utterly unmechanical a living body is, at least how far it
+transcends mere mechanics is shown by what the chemists call
+"autolysis." Pulverize your watch, and you have completely destroyed
+everything that made it a watch except the dead matter; but pulverize or
+reduce to a pulp a living plant, and though you have destroyed all cell
+structure, you have not yet destroyed the living substance; you have
+annihilated the mechanism, but you have not killed the something that
+keeps up the life process. Protoplasm takes time to die, but your
+machine stops instantly, and its elements are no more potent in a new
+machine than they were at first. "In the pulp prepared by grinding down
+living organisms in a mortar, some vital phenomena continue for a long
+time." The life processes cease, and the substances or elements of the
+dead body remain as before. Their chemical reactions are the same. There
+is no new chemistry, no new mechanics, no new substance in a live body,
+but there is a new tendency or force or impulse acting in matter,
+inspiring it, so to speak, to new ends. It is here that idealism parts
+company with exact science. It is here that the philosophers go one
+way, and the rigid scientists the other. It is from this point of view
+that the philosophy of Henri Bergson, based so largely as it is upon
+scientific material, has been so bitterly assailed from the scientific
+camp.
+
+The living cell is a wonderful machine, but if we ask which is first,
+life or the cell, where are we? There is the synthetical reaction in the
+cell, and the analytical or splitting reaction--the organizing, and the
+disorganizing processes--what keeps up this seesaw and preserves the
+equilibrium? A life force, said the older scientists; only chemical
+laws, say the new. A prodigious change in the behavior of matter is
+wrought by life, and whether we say it is by chemical laws, or by a life
+force, the mystery remains.
+
+The whole secret of life centres in the cell, in the plant cell; and
+this cell does not exceed .005 millimetres in diameter. An enormous
+number of chemical reactions take place in this minute space. It is a
+world in little. Here are bodies of different shapes whose service is to
+absorb carbon dioxide, and form sugar and carbohydrates. Must we go
+outside of matter itself, and of chemical reactions, to account for it?
+Call this unknown factor "vital force," as has so long been done, or
+name it "biotic energy," as Professor Moore has lately done, and the
+mystery remains the same. It is a new behavior in matter, call it by
+what name we will.
+
+Inanimate nature seems governed by definite laws; that is, given the
+same conditions, the same results always follow. The reactions between
+two chemical elements under the same conditions are always the same. The
+physical forces go their unchanging ways, and are variable only as the
+conditions vary. In dealing with them we know exactly what to expect. We
+know at what degree of temperature, under the same conditions, water
+will boil, and at what degree of temperature it will freeze. Chance and
+probability play no part in such matters. But when we reach the world of
+animate nature, what a contrast we behold! Here, within certain limits,
+all is in perpetual flux and change. Living bodies are never two moments
+the same. Variability is the rule. We never know just how a living body
+will behave, under given conditions, till we try it. A late spring frost
+may kill nearly every bean stalk or potato plant or hill of corn in your
+garden, or nearly every shoot upon your grapevine. The survivors have
+greater powers of resistance--a larger measure of that mysterious
+something we call vitality. One horse will endure hardships and
+exposures that will kill scores of others. What will agitate one
+community will not in the same measure agitate another. What will break
+or discourage one human heart will sit much more lightly upon another.
+Life introduces an element of uncertainty or indeterminateness that we
+do not find in the inorganic world. Bodies still have their laws or
+conditions of activity, but they are elastic and variable. Among living
+things we have in a measure escaped from the iron necessity that holds
+the world of dead matter in its grip. Dead matter ever tends to a static
+equilibrium; living matter to a dynamic poise, or a balance between the
+intake and the output of energy. Life is a peculiar activity in matter.
+If the bicyclist stops, his wheel falls down; no mechanical contrivance
+could be devised that could take his place on the wheel, and no
+combination of purely chemical and physical forces can alone do with
+matter what life does with it. The analogy here hinted at is only
+tentative. I would not imply that the relation of life to matter is
+merely mechanical and external, like that of the rider to his wheel. In
+life, the rider and his wheel are one, but when life vanishes, the wheel
+falls down. The chemical and physical activity of matter is perpetual;
+with a high-power microscope we may see the Brunonian movement in
+liquids and gases any time and at all times, but the movement we call
+vitality dominates these and turns them to new ends. I suppose the
+nature of the activity of the bombarding molecules of gases and liquids
+is the same in our bodies as out; that turmoil of the particles goes on
+forever; it is, in itself, blind, fateful, purposeless; but life
+furnishes, or _is_, an organizing principle that brings order and
+purpose out of this chaos. It does not annul any of the mechanical or
+chemical principles, but under its tutelage or inspiration they produce
+a host of new substances, and a world of new and beautiful and wonderful
+forms.
+
+
+IV
+
+Bergson says the intellect is characterized by a natural inability to
+understand life. Certain it is, I think, that science alone cannot grasp
+its mystery. We must finally appeal to philosophy; we must have recourse
+to ideal values--to a non-scientific or super-scientific principle. We
+cannot live intellectually or emotionally upon science alone. Science
+reveals to us the relations and inter-dependence of things in the
+physical world and their relations to our physical well-being;
+philosophy reveals their relations to our mental and spiritual life,
+their meanings and their ideal values. Poor, indeed, is the man who has
+no philosophy, no commanding outlook over the tangles and contradictions
+of the world of sense. There is probably some unknown and unknowable
+factor involved in the genesis of life, but that that factor or
+principle does not belong to the natural, universal order is
+unthinkable. Yet to fail to see that what we must call intelligence
+pervades and is active in all organic nature is to be spiritually blind.
+But to see it as something foreign to or separable from nature is to do
+violence to our faith in the constancy and sufficiency of the natural
+order. One star differeth from another in glory. There are degrees of
+mystery in the universe. The most mystifying thing in inorganic nature
+is electricity,--that disembodied energy that slumbers in the ultimate
+particles of matter, unseen, unfelt, unknown, till it suddenly leaps
+forth with such terrible vividness and power on the face of the storm,
+or till we summon it through the transformation of some other form of
+energy. A still higher and more inscrutable mystery is life, that
+something which clothes itself in each infinitely varied and beautiful
+as well as unbeautiful form of matter. We can evoke electricity at will
+from many different sources, but we can evoke life only from other life;
+the biogenetic law is inviolable.
+
+Professor Soddy says, "Natural philosophy may explain a rainbow but not
+a rabbit." There is no secret about a rainbow; we can produce it at will
+out of perfectly colorless beginnings. "But nothing but rabbits will or
+can produce a rabbit, a proof again that we cannot say what a rabbit is,
+though we may have a perfect knowledge of every anatomical and
+microscopic detail."
+
+To regard life as of non-natural origin puts it beyond the sphere of
+legitimate inquiry; to look upon it as of natural origin, or as bound in
+a chain of chemical sequences, as so many late biochemists do, is still
+to put it where our science cannot unlock the mystery. If we should ever
+succeed in producing living matter in our laboratories, it would not
+lessen the mystery any more than the birth of a baby in the household
+lessens the mystery of generation. It only brings it nearer home.
+
+
+V
+
+What is peculiar to organic nature is the living cell. Inside the cell,
+doubtless, the same old chemistry and physics go on--the same universal
+law of the transformation of energy is operative. In its minute compass
+the transmutation of the inorganic into the organic, which constitutes
+what Tyndall called "the miracle and the mystery of vitality," is
+perpetually enacted. But what is the secret of the cell itself? Science
+is powerless to tell us. You may point out to your heart's content that
+only chemical and physical forces are discoverable in living matter;
+that there is no element or force in a plant that is not in the stone
+beside which it grew, or in the soil in which it takes root; and yet,
+until your chemistry and your physics will enable you to produce the
+living cell, or account for its mysterious self-directed activities,
+your science avails not. "Living cells," says a late European authority,
+"possess most effective means to accelerate reactions and to cause
+surprising chemical results."
+
+Behold the four principal elements forming stones and soils and water
+and air for whole geologic or astronomic ages, and then behold them
+forming plants and animals, and finally forming the brains that give us
+art and literature and philosophy and modern civilization. What prompted
+the elements to this new and extraordinary behavior? Science is dumb
+before such a question.
+
+Living bodies are immersed in physical conditions as in a sea. External
+agencies--light, moisture, air, gravity, mechanical and chemical
+influences--cause great changes in them; but their power to adapt
+themselves to these changes, and profit by them, remains unexplained.
+Are morphological processes identical with chemical ones?
+
+In the inorganic world we everywhere see mechanical adjustment, repose,
+stability, equilibrium, through the action and interaction of outward
+physical forces; a natural bridge is a striking example of the action of
+blind mechanical forces among the rocks. In the organic world we see
+living adaptation which involves a non-mechanical principle. An
+adjustment is an outward fitting together of parts; an adaptation
+implies something flowing, unstable, plastic, compromising; it is a
+moulding process; passivity on one side, and activity on the other.
+Living things struggle; they struggle up as well as down; they struggle
+all round the circle, while the pull of dead matter is down only.
+
+Behold what a good chemist a plant is! With what skill it analyzes the
+carbonic acid in the air, retaining the carbon and returning the oxygen
+to the atmosphere! Then the plant can do what no chemist has yet been
+able to do; it can manufacture chlorophyll, a substance which is the
+basis of all life on the globe. Without chlorophyll (the green substance
+in plants) the solar energy could not be stored up in the vegetable
+world. Chlorophyll makes the plant, and the plant makes chlorophyll. To
+ask which is first is to call up the old puzzle, Which is first, the
+egg, or the hen that laid it?
+
+According to Professor Soddy, the engineer's unit of power, that of the
+British cart-horse, has to be multiplied many times in a machine before
+it can do the work of a horse. He says that a car which two horses used
+to pull, it now takes twelve or fifteen engine-horse to pull. The
+machine horse belongs to a different order. He does not respond to the
+whip; he has no nervous system; he has none of the mysterious reserve
+power which a machine built up of living cells seems to possess; he is
+inelastic, non-creative, non-adaptive; he cannot take advantage of the
+ground; his pull is a dead, unvarying pull. Living energy is elastic,
+adaptive, self-directive, and suffers little loss through friction, or
+through imperfect adjustment of the parts. A live body converts its fuel
+into energy at a low temperature. One of the great problems of the
+mechanics of the future is to develop electricity or power directly from
+fuel and thus cut out the enormous loss of eighty or ninety per cent
+which we now suffer. The growing body does this all the time; life
+possesses this secret; the solar energy stored up in fuel suffers no
+loss in being transformed into work by the animal mechanism.
+
+Soddy asks whether or not the minute cells of the body may not have the
+power of taking advantage of the difference in temperature of the
+molecules bombarding them, and thus of utilizing energy that is beyond
+the capacity of the machinery of the motor-car. Man can make no machine
+that can avail itself of the stores of energy in the uniform temperature
+of the earth or air or water, or that can draw upon the potential energy
+of the atoms, but it may be that the living cell can do this, and thus a
+horse can pull more than a one-horse-power engine. Soddy makes the
+suggestive inquiry: "If life begins in a single cell, does intelligence?
+does the physical distinction between living and dead matter begin in
+the jostling molecular crowd? Inanimate molecules, in all their
+movements, obey the law of probability, the law which governs the
+successive falls of a true die. In the presence of a rudimentary
+intelligence, do they still follow that law, or do they now obey another
+law--the law of a die that is loaded?" In a machine the energy of fuel
+has first to be converted into heat before it is available, but in a
+living machine the chemical energy of food undergoes direct
+transformation into work, and the wasteful heat-process is cut off.
+
+
+VI
+
+Professor Soddy, in discussing the relation of life to energy, does not
+commit himself to the theory of the vitalistic or non-mechanical origin
+of life, but makes the significant statement that there is a consensus
+of opinion that the life processes are not bound by the second law of
+thermo-dynamics, namely, the law of the non-availability of the energy
+latent in low temperatures, or in the chaotic movements of molecules
+everywhere around us. To get energy, one must have a fall or an incline
+of some sort, as of water from a higher to a lower level, or of
+temperature from a higher to a lower degree, or of electricity from one
+condition of high stress to another less so. But the living machine
+seems able to dispense with this break or incline, or else has the
+secret of creating one for itself.
+
+In the living body the chemical energy of food is directly transformed
+into work, without first being converted into heat. Why a horse can do
+more work than a one-horse-power engine is probably because his living
+cells can and do draw upon this molecular energy. Molecules of matter
+outside the living body all obey the law of probability, or the law of
+chance; but inside the living body they at least seem to obey some other
+law--the law of design, or of dice that are loaded, as Soddy says. They
+are more likely always to act in a particular way. Life supplies a
+directing agency. Soddy asks if the physical distinction between living
+and dead matter begins in the jostling molecular crowd--begins by the
+crowd being directed and governed in a particular way. If so, by what?
+Ah! that is the question. Science will have none of it, because science
+would have to go outside of matter for such an agent, and that science
+cannot do. Such a theory implies intelligence apart from matter, or
+working in matter. Is that a hard proposition? Intelligence clearly
+works in our bodies and brains, and in those of all the animals--a
+controlled and directed activity in matter that seems to be life. The
+cell which builds up all living bodies behaves not like a machine, but
+like a living being; its activities, so far as we can judge, are
+spontaneous, its motions and all its other processes are self-prompted.
+But, of course, in it the mechanical, the chemical, and the vital are so
+blended, so interdependent, that we may never hope to separate them; but
+without the activity called vital, there would be no cell, and hence no
+body.
+
+It were unreasonable to expect that scientific analysis should show that
+the physics and chemistry of a living body differs from that of the
+non-living. What is new and beyond the reach of science to explain is
+the _kind of activity_ of these elements. They enter into new compounds;
+they build up bodies that have new powers and properties; they people
+the seas and the air and the earth with living creatures, they build
+the body and brain of man. The secret of the activity in matter that we
+call vital is certainly beyond the power of science to tell us. It is
+like expecting that the paint and oil used in a great picture must
+differ from those in a daub. The great artist mixed his paint with
+brains, and the universal elements in a living body are mixed with
+something that science cannot disclose. Organic chemistry does not
+differ intrinsically from inorganic; the difference between the two lies
+in the purposive activity of the elements that build up a living body.
+
+Or is life, as a New England college professor claims, "an _x_-entity,
+additional to matter and energy, but of the same cosmic rank as they,"
+and "manifesting itself to our senses only through its power to keep a
+certain quantity of matter and energy in the continuous orderly ferment
+we call life"?
+
+I recall that Huxley said that there was a third reality in this
+universe besides matter and energy, and this third reality was
+consciousness. But neither the "_x_-entity" of Professor Ganong nor the
+"consciousness" of Huxley can be said to be of the same cosmic rank as
+matter and energy, because they do not pervade the universe as matter
+and energy do. These forces abound throughout all space and endure
+throughout all time, but life and consciousness are flitting and
+uncertain phenomena of matter. A prick of a pin, or a blow from a
+hammer, may destroy both. Unless we consider them as potential in all
+matter (and who shall say that they are not?) may we look upon them as
+of cosmic rank?
+
+It is often urged that it is not the eye that sees, or the brain that
+thinks, but something in them. But it is something in them that never
+went into them; it arose in them. It is the living eye and the living
+brain that do the seeing and the thinking. When the life activity
+ceases, these organs cease to see and to think. Their activity is kept
+up by certain physiological processes in the organs of the body, and to
+ask what keeps up these is like the puppy trying to overtake its own
+tail, or to run a race with its own shadow.
+
+The brain is not merely the organ of the mind in an external and
+mechanical sense; it is the mind. When we come to living things, all
+such analogies fail us. Life is not a thing; thought is not a thing; but
+rather the effect of a certain activity in matter, which mind alone can
+recognize. When we try to explain or account for that which we are, it
+is as if a man were trying to lift himself.
+
+Life seems like something apart. It does not seem to be amenable to the
+law of the correlation and conservation of forces. You cannot transform
+it into heat or light or electricity. The force which a man extracts
+from the food he eats while he is writing a poem, or doing any other
+mental work, seems lost to the universe. The force which the engine, or
+any machine, uses up, reappears as work done, or as heat or light or
+some other physical manifestation. But the energy of foodstuffs which a
+man uses up in a mental effort does not appear again in the circuit of
+the law of the conservation of energy. A man uses up more energy in his
+waking moments, though his body be passive, than in his sleeping. What
+we call mental force cannot be accounted for in terms of physical force.
+The sun's energy goes into our bodies through the food we eat, and so
+runs our mental faculties, but how does it get back again into the
+physical realm? Science does not know.
+
+It must be some sort of energy that lights the lamps of the firefly and
+the glow-worm, and it must be some sort or degree of energy that keeps
+consciousness going. The brain of a Newton, or of a Plato, must make a
+larger draft on the solar energy latent in food-stuffs than the brain of
+a day laborer, and his body less. The same amount of food-consumption,
+or of oxidation, results in physical force in the one case, and mental
+force in the other, but the mental force escapes the great law of the
+equivalence of the material forces.
+
+John Fiske solves the problem when he drops his physical science and
+takes up his philosophy, declaring that the relation of the mind to the
+body is that of a musician to his instrument, and this is practically
+the position of Sir Oliver Lodge.
+
+Inheritance and adaptation, says Haeckel, are sufficient to account for
+all the variety of animal and vegetable forms on the earth. But is there
+not a previous question? Do we not want inheritance and adaptation
+accounted for? What mysteries they hold! Does the river-bed account for
+the river? How can a body adapt itself to its environment unless it
+possess an inherent, plastic, changing, and adaptive principle? A stone
+does not adapt itself to its surroundings; its change is external and
+not internal. There is mechanical adjustment between inert bodies, but
+there is no adaptation without the push of life. A response to new
+conditions by change of form implies something actively
+responsive--something that profits by the change.
+
+
+VII
+
+If we could tell what determines the division of labor in the hive of
+bees or a colony of ants, we could tell what determines the division of
+labor among the cells in the body. A hive of bees and a colony of ants
+is a unit--a single organism. The spirit of the body, that which
+regulates all its economies, which directs all its functions, which
+cooerdinates its powers, which brings about all its adaptations, which
+adjusts it to its environment, which sees to its repairs, heals its
+wounds, meets its demands, provides more force when more is needed,
+which makes one organ help do the work of another, which wages war on
+disease germs by specific ferments, which renders us immune to this or
+that disease; in fact, which carries on all the processes of our
+physical life without asking leave or seeking counsel of us,--all this
+is on another plane from the mechanical or chemical--super-mechanical.
+
+The human spirit, the brute spirit, the vegetable spirit--all are mere
+names to fill a void. The spirit of the oak, the beech, the pine, the
+palm--how different! how different the plan or idea or interior
+economies of each, though the chemical and mechanical processes are the
+same, the same mineral and gaseous elements build them up, the same sun
+is their architect! But what physical principle can account for the
+difference between a pine and an oak, or, for that matter, between a man
+and his dog, or a bird and a fish, or a crow and a lark? What play and
+action or interaction and reaction of purely chemical and mechanical
+forces can throw any light on the course evolution has taken in the
+animal life of the globe--why the camel is the camel, and the horse the
+horse? or in the development of the nervous system, or the circulatory
+system, or the digestive system, or of the eye, or of the ear?
+
+A living body is never in a state of chemical repose, but inorganic
+bodies usually are. Take away the organism and the environment remains
+essentially the same; take away the environment and the organism changes
+rapidly and perishes--it goes back to the inorganic. Now, what keeps up
+the constant interchange--this seesaw? The environment is permanent; the
+organism is transient. The spray of the falls is permanent; the bow
+comes and goes. Life struggles to appropriate the environment; a rock,
+for example, does not, in the same sense, struggle with its
+surroundings, it weathers passively, but a tree struggles with the
+winds, and to appropriate minerals and water from the soil, and the
+leaves struggle to store up the sun's energy. The body struggles to
+eliminate poisons or to neutralize them; it becomes immune to certain
+diseases, learns to resist them; the thing is _alive_. Organisms
+struggle with one another; inert bodies clash and pulverize one another,
+but do not devour one another.
+
+Life is a struggle between two forces, a force within and a force
+without, but the force within does all the struggling. The air does not
+struggle to get into the lungs, nor the lime and iron to get into our
+blood. The body struggles to digest and assimilate the food; the
+chlorophyll in the leaf struggles to store up the solar energy. The
+environment is unaware of the organism; the light is indifferent to the
+sensitized plate of the photographer. Something in the seed we plant
+avails itself of the heat and the moisture. The relation is not that of
+a thermometer or hygrometer to the warmth and moisture of the air; it is
+a vital relation.
+
+Life may be called an aquatic phenomenon, because there can be no life
+without water. It may be called a thermal phenomenon, because there can
+be no life below or above a certain degree of temperature. It may be
+called a chemical phenomenon, because there can be no life without
+chemical reactions. Yet none of these things define life. We may discuss
+biological facts in terms of chemistry without throwing any light on the
+nature of life itself. If we say the particular essence of life is
+chemical, do we mean any more than that life is inseparable from
+chemical reactions?
+
+After we have mastered the chemistry of life, laid bare all its
+processes, named all its transformations and transmutations, analyzed
+the living cell, seen the inorganic pass into the organic, and beheld
+chemical reaction, the chief priestess of this hidden rite, we shall
+have to ask ourselves, Is chemistry the creator of life, or does life
+create or use chemistry? These "chemical reaction complexes" in living
+cells, as the biochemists call them, are they the cause of life, or only
+the effect of life? We shall decide according to our temperaments or our
+habits of thought.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE JOURNEYING ATOMS
+
+I
+
+
+Emerson confessed in his "Journal" that he could not read the
+physicists; their works did not appeal to him. He was probably repelled
+by their formulas and their mathematics. But add a touch of chemistry,
+and he was interested. Chemistry leads up to life. He said he did not
+think he would feel threatened or insulted if a chemist should take his
+protoplasm, or mix his hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and make an
+animalcule incontestably swimming and jumping before his eyes. It would
+be only evidence of a new degree of power over matter which man had
+attained to. It would all finally redound to the glory of matter itself,
+which, it appears, "is impregnated with thought and heaven, and is
+really of God, and not of the Devil, as we had too hastily believed."
+This conception of matter underlies the new materialism of such men as
+Huxley and Tyndall. But there is much in the new physics apart from its
+chemical aspects that ought to appeal to the Emersonian type of mind.
+Did not Emerson in his first poem, "The Sphinx," sing of
+
+    Journeying atoms,
+    Primordial wholes?
+
+In those ever-moving and indivisible atoms he touches the very
+corner-stone of the modern scientific conception of matter. It is hardly
+an exaggeration to say that in this conception we are brought into
+contact with a kind of transcendental physics. A new world for the
+imagination is open--a world where the laws and necessities of
+ponderable bodies do not apply. The world of gross matter disappears,
+and in its place we see matter dematerialized, and escaping from the
+bondage of the world of tangible bodies; we see a world where friction
+is abolished, where perpetual motion is no longer impossible; where two
+bodies may occupy the same space at the same time; where collisions and
+disruptions take place without loss of energy; where subtraction often
+means more--as when the poison of a substance is rendered more virulent
+by the removal of one or more atoms of one of the elements; and where
+addition often means less--as when three parts of the gases of oxygen
+and hydrogen unite and form only two parts of watery vapor; where mass
+and form, centre and circumference, size and structure, exist without
+any of the qualities ordinarily associated with these things through our
+experience in a three-dimension world. We see, or contemplate, bodies
+which are indivisible; if we divide them, their nature changes; if we
+divide a molecule of water, we get atoms of hydrogen and oxygen gas; if
+we divide a molecule of salt, we get atoms of chlorine gas and atoms of
+the metal sodium, which means that we have reached a point where matter
+is no longer divisible in a mechanical sense, but only in a chemical
+sense; which again means that great and small, place and time, inside
+and outside, dimensions and spatial relations, have lost their ordinary
+meanings. Two bodies get inside of each other. To the physicist, heat
+and motion are one; light is only a mechanical vibration in the ether;
+sound is only a vibration in the air, which the ear interprets as sound.
+The world is as still as death till the living ear comes to receive the
+vibrations in the air; motion, or the energy which it implies, is the
+life of the universe.
+
+Physics proves to us the impossibility of perpetual motion among
+visible, tangible bodies, at the same time that it reveals to us a world
+where perpetual motion is the rule--the world of molecules and atoms. In
+the world of gross matter, or of ponderable bodies, perpetual motion is
+impossible because here it takes energy, or its equivalent, to beget
+energy. Friction very soon turns the kinetic energy of motion into the
+potential energy of heat, which quickly disappears in that great sea of
+energy, the low uniform temperature of the earth. But when we reach the
+interior world of matter, the world of molecules, atoms, and electrons,
+we have reached a world where perpetual motion _is_ the rule; we have
+reached the fountain-head of energy, and the motion of one body is not
+at the expense of the motion of some other body, but is a part of the
+spontaneous struggling and jostling and vibration that go on forever in
+all the matter of the universe. What is called the Brunonian movement
+(first discovered by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827) is within reach
+of the eye armed with a high-power microscope. Look into any liquid that
+holds in suspension very small particles of solid matter, such as dust
+particles in the air, or the granules of ordinary water-color paints
+dissolved in water: not a single one of the particles is at rest; they
+are all mysteriously agitated; they jump hither and thither; it is a
+wild chaotic whirl and dance of minute particles. Brown at first thought
+they were alive, but they were only non-living particles dancing to the
+same tune which probably sets suns and systems whirling in the heavens.
+Ramsay says that tobacco smoke confined in the small flat chamber formed
+in the slide of a microscope, shows this movement, in appearance like
+the flight of minute butterflies. The Brunonian movement is now believed
+to be due to the bombardment of the particles by the molecules of the
+liquid or gas in which they are suspended. The smaller the particles,
+the livelier they are. These particles themselves are made up of a vast
+number of molecules, among which the same movement or agitation, much
+more intense, is supposed to be taking place; the atoms which compose
+the molecules are dancing and frisking about like gnats in the air, and
+the electrons inside the atoms are still more rapidly changing places.
+
+We meet with the same staggering figures in the science of the
+infinitely little that we do in the science of the infinitely vast. Thus
+the physicist deals with a quantity of matter a million million times
+smaller than can be detected in the most delicate chemical balance.
+Molecules inconceivably small rush about in molecular space
+inconceivably small. Ramsay calculates how many collisions the molecules
+of gas make with other molecules every second, which is four and one
+half quintillions. This staggers the mind like the tremendous
+revelations of astronomy. Mathematics has no trouble to compute the
+figures, but our slow, clumsy minds feel helpless before them. In every
+drop of water we drink, and in every mouthful of air we breathe, there
+is a movement and collision of particles so rapid in every second of
+time that it can only be expressed by four with eighteen naughts. If the
+movement of these particles were attended by friction, or if the energy
+of their impact were translated into heat, what hot mouthfuls we should
+have! But the heat, as well as the particles, is infinitesimal, and is
+not perceptible.
+
+
+II
+
+The molecules and atoms and electrons into which science resolves matter
+are hypothetical bodies which no human eye has ever seen, or ever can
+see, but they build up the solid frame of the universe. The air and the
+rocks are not so far apart in their constituents as they might seem to
+our senses. The invisible and indivisible molecules of oxygen which we
+breathe, and which keep our life-currents going, form about half the
+crust of the earth. The soft breeze that fans and refreshes us, and the
+rocks that crush us, are at least half-brothers. And herein we get a
+glimpse of the magic of chemical combinations. That mysterious property
+in matter which we call chemical affinity, a property beside which human
+affinities and passions are tame and inconstant affairs, is the
+architect of the universe. Certain elements attract certain other
+elements with a fierce and unalterable attraction, and when they unite,
+the resultant compound is a body totally unlike either of the
+constituents. Both substances have disappeared, and a new one has taken
+their place. This is the magic of chemical change. A physical change, as
+of water into ice, or into steam, is a simple matter; it is merely a
+matter of more or less heat; but the change of oxygen and hydrogen into
+water, or of chlorine gas and the mineral sodium into common salt, is a
+chemical change. In nature, chlorine and sodium are not found in a free
+or separate state; they hunted each other up long ago, and united to
+produce the enormous quantities of rock salt that the earth holds. One
+can give his imagination free range in trying to picture what takes
+place when two or more elements unite chemically, but probably there is
+no physical image that can afford even a hint of it. A snake trying to
+swallow himself, or two fishes swallowing each other, or two bullets
+meeting in the air and each going through the centre of the other, or
+the fourth dimension, or almost any other impossible thing, from the
+point of view of tangible bodies, will serve as well as anything. The
+atoms seem to get inside of one another, to jump down one another's
+throats, and to suffer a complete transformation. Yet we know that they
+do not; oxygen is still oxygen, and carbon still carbon, amid all the
+strange partnerships entered into, and all the disguises assumed. We can
+easily evoke hydrogen and oxygen from water, but just how their
+molecules unite, how they interpenetrate and are lost in one another, it
+is impossible for us to conceive.
+
+We cannot visualize a chemical combination because we have no experience
+upon which to found it. It is so fundamentally unlike a mechanical
+mixture that even our imagination can give us no clew to it. It is
+thinkable that the particles of two or more substances however fine,
+mechanically mixed, could be seen and recognized if sufficiently
+magnified; but in a chemical combination, say like iron sulphide, no
+amount of magnification could reveal the two elements of iron and
+sulphur. They no longer exist. A third substance unlike either has taken
+their place.
+
+We extract aluminum from clay, but no conceivable power of vision could
+reveal to us that metal in the clay. It is there only potentially. In a
+chemical combination the different substances interpenetrate and are
+lost in one another: they are not mechanically separable nor
+individually distinguishable. The iron in the red corpuscles of the
+blood is not the metal we know, but one of its many chemical disguises.
+Indeed it seems as if what we call the ultimate particles of matter did
+not belong to the visible order and hence were incapable of
+magnification.
+
+That mysterious force, chemical affinity, is the true and original
+magic. That two substances should cleave to each other and absorb each
+other and produce a third totally unlike either is one of the profound
+mysteries of science. Of the nature of the change that takes place, I
+say, we can form no image. Chemical force is selective; it is not
+promiscuous and indiscriminate like gravity, but specific and
+individual. Nearly all the elements have their preferences and they will
+choose no other. Oxygen comes the nearest to being a free lover among
+the elements, but its power of choice is limited.
+
+Science conceives of all matter as grained or discrete, like a bag of
+shot, or a pile of sand. Matter does not occupy space continuously, not
+even in the hardest substances, such as the diamond; there is space,
+molecular space, between the particles. A rifle bullet whizzing past is
+no more a continuous body than is a flock of birds wheeling and swooping
+in the air. Air spaces separate the birds, and molecular spaces separate
+the molecules of the bullet. Of course it is unthinkable that
+indivisible particles of matter can occupy space and have dimensions.
+But science goes upon this hypothesis, and the hypothesis proves itself.
+
+After we have reached the point of the utmost divisibility of matter in
+the atom, we are called upon to go still further and divide the
+indivisible. The electrons, of which the atom is composed, are one
+hundred thousand times smaller, and two thousand times lighter than the
+smallest particle hitherto recognized, namely, the hydrogen atom. A
+French physicist conceives of the electrons as rushing about in the
+interior of the atom like swarms of gnats whirling about in the dome of
+a cathedral. The smallest particle of dust that we can recognize in the
+air is millions of times larger than the atom, and millions of millions
+of times larger than the electron. Yet science avers that the
+manifestations of energy which we call light, radiant heat, magnetism,
+and electricity, all come from the activities of the electrons. Sir J.
+J. Thomson conceives of a free electron as dashing about from one atom
+to another at a speed so great as to change its location forty million
+times a second. In the electron we have matter dematerialized; the
+electron is not a material particle. Hence the step to the electric
+constitution of matter is an easy one. In the last analysis we have pure
+disembodied energy. "With many of the feelings of an air-man," says
+Soddy, "who has left behind for the first time the solid ground beneath
+him," we make this plunge into the demonstrable verities of the newest
+physics; matter in the old sense--gross matter--fades away. To the three
+states in which we have always known it, the solid, the liquid, and the
+gaseous, we must add a fourth, the ethereal--the state of matter which
+Sir Oliver Lodge thinks borders on, or is identical with, what we call
+the spiritual, and which affords the key to all the occult phenomena of
+life and mind.
+
+As we have said, no human eye has ever seen, or will see, an atom; only
+the mind's eye, or the imagination, sees atoms and molecules, yet the
+atomic theory of matter rests upon the sure foundation of experimental
+science. Both the chemist and the physicist are as convinced of the
+existence of these atoms as they are of the objects we see and touch.
+The theory "is a necessity to explain the experimental facts of chemical
+composition." "Through metaphysics first," says Soddy, "then through
+alchemy and chemistry, through physical and astronomical spectroscopy,
+lastly through radio-activity, science has slowly groped its way to the
+atom." The physicists make definite statements about these hypothetical
+bodies all based upon definite chemical phenomena. Thus Clerk Maxwell
+assumes that they are spherical, that the spheres are hard and elastic
+like billiard-balls, that they collide and glance off from one another
+in the same way, that is, that they collide at their surfaces and not at
+their centres.
+
+Only two of our senses make us acquainted with matter in a state which
+may be said to approach the atomic--smell and taste. Odors are material
+emanations, and represent a division of matter into inconceivably small
+particles. What are the perfumes we smell but emanations, flying atoms
+or electrons, radiating in all directions, and continuing for a shorter
+or longer time without any appreciable diminution in bulk or weight of
+the substances that give them off? How many millions or trillions of
+times does the rose divide its heart in the perfume it sheds so freely
+upon the air? The odor of the musk of certain animals lingers under
+certain conditions for years. The imagination is baffled in trying to
+conceive of the number and minuteness of the particles which the fox
+leaves of itself in the snow where its foot was imprinted--so palpable
+that the scent of a hound can seize upon them hours after the fox has
+passed! The all but infinite divisibility of matter is proved by every
+odor that the breeze brings us from field and wood, and by the delicate
+flavors that the tongue detects in the food we eat and drink. But these
+emanations and solutions that affect our senses probably do not
+represent a chemical division of matter; when we smell an apple or a
+flower, we probably get a real fragment of the apple, or of the flower,
+and not one or more of its chemical constituents represented by atoms or
+electrons. A chemical analysis of odors, if it were possible, would
+probably show the elements in the same state of combination as the
+substances from which the odors emanated.
+
+The physicists herd these ultimate particles of matter about; they have
+a regular circus with them; they make them go through films and screens;
+they guide them through openings; they count them as their tiny flash is
+seen on a sensitized plate; they weigh them; they reckon their velocity.
+The alpha-rays from radio-active substances are swarms of tiny meteors
+flying at the incredible speed of twelve thousand miles a second, while
+the meteors of the midnight sky fly at the speed of only forty miles a
+second. Those alpha particles are helium atoms. They are much larger
+than beta particles, and have less penetrative power. Sir J. J. Thomson
+has devised a method by which he has been able to photograph the atoms.
+The photographic plate upon which their flight is recorded suggests a
+shower of shooting stars. Oxygen is found to be made up of atoms of
+several different forms.
+
+
+III
+
+The "free path" of molecules, both in liquids and in gases, is so minute
+as to be beyond the reach of the most powerful microscope. This free
+path in liquids is a zigzag course, owing to the perpetual collisions
+with other molecules. The molecular behavior of liquids differs from
+that of gases only in what is called surface tension. Liquids have a
+skin, a peculiar stress of the surface molecules; gases do not, but tend
+to dissipate and fill all space. A drop of water remains intact till
+vaporization sets in; then it too becomes more and more diffused.
+
+When two substances combine chemically, more or less heat is evolved.
+When the combination is effected slowly, as in an animal's body, heat is
+slowly evolved. When the combustion is rapid, as in actual fire, heat is
+rapidly evolved. The same phenomenon may reach the eye as light, and the
+hand as heat, though different senses get two different impressions of
+the same thing. So a mechanical disturbance may reach the ear as sound,
+and be so interpreted, and reach the hand as motion in matter. In
+combustion, the oxygen combines rapidly with the carbon, giving out heat
+and light and carbon dioxide, but why it does so admits of no
+explanation. Herein again is where life differs from fire; we can
+describe combustion in terms of chemistry, but after we have described
+life in the same terms something--and this something is the main
+thing--remains untouched.
+
+The facts of radio-activity alone demonstrate the truth of the atomic
+theory. The beta rays, or emanations from radium, penetrating one foot
+of solid iron are very convincing. And this may go on for hundreds of
+years without any appreciable diminution of size or weight of the
+radio-active substance. "A gram of such substance," says Sir Oliver
+Lodge, "might lose a few thousand of atoms a second, and yet we could
+not detect the loss if we continued to weigh it for a century." The
+volatile essences of organic bodies which we detect in odors and
+flavors, are not potent like the radium emanations. We can confine them
+and control them, but we cannot control the rays of radio-active matter
+any more than we can confine a spirit. We can separate the three
+different kinds of rays--the alpha, the beta, and the gamma--by magnetic
+devices, but we cannot cork them up and isolate them, as we can musk and
+the attar of roses.
+
+And these emanations are taking place more or less continuously all
+about us and we know it not. In fact, we are at all times subjected to a
+molecular bombardment of which we never dream; minute projectiles,
+indivisible points of matter, are shot out at us in the form of
+electrons from glowing metals, from lighted candles, and from other
+noiseless and unsuspected batteries at a speed of tens of thousands of
+miles a second, and we are none the wiser for it. Indeed, if we could
+see or feel or be made aware of it, in what a different world we should
+find ourselves! How many million-or billion-fold our sense of sight and
+touch would have to be increased to bring this about! We live in a world
+of collisions, disruptions, and hurtling missiles of which our senses
+give us not the slightest evidence, and it is well that they do not.
+There is a tremendous activity in the air we breathe, in the water we
+drink, in the food we eat, and in the soil we walk upon, which, if
+magnified till our senses could take it in, would probably drive us mad.
+It is in this interior world of molecular activity, this world of
+electric vibrations and oscillations, that the many transformations of
+energy take place. This is the hiding-place of the lightning, of the
+electrons which moulded together make the thunderbolt. What an
+underworld of mystery and power it is! In it slumbers all the might and
+menace of the storm, the power that rends the earth and shakes the
+heavens. With the mind's eye one can see the indivisible atoms giving up
+their electrons, see the invisible hosts, in numbers beyond the power of
+mathematics to compute, being summoned and marshalled by some mysterious
+commander and hurled in terrible fiery phalanxes across the battlefield
+of the storm.
+
+The physicist describes the atom and talks about it as if it were "a
+tangible body which one could hold in his hand like a baseball." "An
+atom," Sir Oliver Lodge says, "consists of a globular mass of positive
+electricity with minute negative electrons embedded in it." He speaks of
+the spherical form of the atom, and of its outer surface, of its centre,
+and of its passing through other atoms, and of the electrons that
+revolve around its centre as planets around a sun. The electron, one
+hundred thousand times smaller than an atom, yet has surface, and that
+surface is a dimpled and corrugated sheet--like the cover of a mattress.
+What a flight of the scientific imagination is that!
+
+The disproportion between the size of an atom and the size of an
+electron is vastly greater than that between the sun and the earth.
+Represent an atom, says Sir Oliver Lodge, by a church one hundred and
+sixty feet long, eighty feet broad, and forty feet high; the electrons
+are like gnats inside it. Yet on the electric theory of matter,
+electrons are all of the atom there is; there is no church, but only the
+gnats rushing about. We know of nothing so empty and hollow, so near a
+vacuum, as matter in this conception of it. Indeed, in the new physics,
+matter is only a hole in the ether. Hence the newspaper joke about the
+bank sliding down and leaving the woodchuck-hole sticking out, looks
+like pretty good physics. The electrons give matter its inertia, and
+give it the force we call cohesion, give it its toughness, its strength,
+and all its other properties. They make water wet, and the diamond hard.
+They are the fountain-head of the immense stores of the inter-atomic
+energy, which, if it could be tapped and controlled, would so easily do
+all the work of the world. But this we cannot do. "We are no more
+competent," says Professor Soddy, "to make use of these supplies of
+atomic energy than a savage, ignorant of how to kindle a fire, could
+make use of a steam-engine." The natural rate of flow of this energy
+from its atomic sources we get as heat, and it suffices to keep life
+going upon this planet. It is the source of all the activity we see upon
+the globe. Its results, in the geologic ages, are stored up for us in
+coal and oil and natural gas, and, in our day, are available in the
+winds, the tides, and the waterfalls, and in electricity.
+
+
+IV
+
+The electric constitution of matter is quite beyond anything we can
+imagine. The atoms are little worlds by themselves, and the whole
+mystery of life and death is in their keeping. The whole difference in
+the types of mind and character among men is supposed to be in their
+keeping. The different qualities and properties of bodies are in their
+keeping. Whether an object is hot or cold to our senses, depends upon
+the character of their vibrations; whether it be sweet or sour,
+poisonous or innocuous to us, depends upon how the atoms select their
+partners in the whirl and dance of their activities. The hardness and
+brilliancy of the diamond is supposed to depend upon how the atoms of
+carbon unite and join hands.
+
+I have heard the view expressed that all matter, as such, is dead
+matter, that the molecules of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron,
+phosphorus, calcium, and so on, in a living body, are themselves no more
+alive than the same molecules in inorganic matter. Nearly nine tenths of
+a living body is water; is not this water the same as the water we get
+at the spring or the brook? is it any more alive? does water undergo any
+chemical change in the body? is it anything more than a solvent, than a
+current that carries the other elements to all parts of the body? There
+are any number of chemical changes or reactions in a living body, but
+are the atoms and molecules that are involved in such changes radically
+changed? Can oxygen be anything but oxygen, or carbon anything but
+carbon? Is what we call life the result of their various new
+combinations? Many modern biologists hold to this view. In this
+conception merely a change in the order of arrangement of the molecules
+of a substance--which follows which or which is joined to which--is
+fraught with consequences as great as the order in which the letters of
+the alphabet are arranged in words, or the words themselves are arranged
+in sentences. The change of one letter in a word often utterly changes
+the meaning of that word, and the changing of a word in the sentence may
+give expression to an entirely different idea. Reverse the letters in
+the word "God," and you get the name of our faithful friend the dog.
+Huxley and Tyndall both taught that it was the way that the ultimate
+particles of matter are compounded that makes the whole difference
+between a cabbage and an oak, or between a frog and a man. It is a hard
+proposition. We know with scientific certainty that the difference
+between a diamond and a piece of charcoal, or between a pearl and an
+oyster-shell, is the way that the particles of carbon in the one case,
+and of calcium carbide in the other, are arranged. We know with equal
+certainty that the difference between certain chemical bodies, like
+alcohol and ether, is the arrangement of their ultimate particles, since
+both have the same chemical formula. We do not spell acetic acid,
+alcohol, sugar, starch, animal fat, vegetable oils, glycerine, and the
+like, with the same letters; yet nature compounds them all of the same
+atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, but in different proportions and
+in different orders.
+
+Chemistry is all-potent. A mechanical mixture of two or more elements
+is a simple affair, but a chemical mixture introduces an element of
+magic. No conjurer's trick can approach such a transformation as that of
+oxygen and hydrogen gases into water. The miracle of turning water into
+wine is tame by comparison. Dip plain cotton into a mixture of nitric
+and sulphuric acids and let it dry, and we have that terrible explosive,
+guncotton. Or, take the cellulose of which cotton is composed, and add
+two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, and we have sugar. But we are
+to remember that the difference here indicated is not a quantitative,
+but a qualitative one, not one affecting bulk, but affecting structure.
+Truly chemistry works wonders. Take ethyl alcohol, or ordinary spirits
+of wine, and add four more atoms of carbon to the carbon molecule, and
+we have the poison carbolic acid. Pure alcohol can be turned into a
+deadly poison, not by adding to, but simply by taking from it; take out
+one atom of carbon and two of hydrogen from the alcohol molecule, and we
+have the poison methyl alcohol. But we are to remember that the
+difference here indicated is not a quantitative, but a qualitative one,
+not one affecting bulk, but affecting structure.
+
+In our atmosphere we have a mechanical mixture of nitrogen and oxygen,
+four parts of nitrogen to one of oxygen. By uniting the nitrogen and
+oxygen chemically (N_{2}O) we have nitrous oxide, laughing-gas. Ordinary
+starch is made up of three different elements--six parts of carbon, ten
+parts of hydrogen, and five parts of oxygen (C_{6}H_{10}O_{5}). Now if
+we add water to this compound, we have a simple mixture of starch and
+water, but if we bring about a chemical union with the elements of water
+(hydrogen and oxygen), we have grape sugar. This sugar is formed in
+green leaves by the agency of sunlight, and is the basis of all plant
+and animal food, and hence one of the most important things in nature.
+
+Carbon is a solid, and is seen in its pure state in the diamond, the
+hardest body in nature and the most valued of all precious stones, but
+it enters largely into all living bodies and is an important constituent
+of all the food we eat. As a gas, united with the oxygen of the air,
+forming carbon dioxide, it was present at the beginning of life, and
+probably helped kindle the first vital spark. In the shape of wood and
+coal, it now warms us and makes the wheels of our material civilization
+go round. Diamond stuff, through the magic of chemistry, plays one of
+the principle roles in our physical life; we eat it, and are warmed and
+propelled by it, and cheered by it. Taken as carbonic acid gas into our
+lungs, it poisons us; taken into our stomachs, it stimulates us;
+dissolved in water, it disintegrates the rocks, eating out the carbonate
+of lime which they contain. It is one of the principal actors in the
+drama of organized matter.
+
+
+V
+
+We have a good illustration of the power of chemistry, and how closely
+it is dogging the footsteps of life, in the many organic compounds it
+has built up out of the elements, such as sugar, starch, indigo,
+camphor, rubber, and so forth, all of which used to be looked upon as
+impossible aside from life-processes. It is such progress as this that
+leads some men of science to believe that the creation of life itself is
+within the reach of chemistry. I do not believe that any occult or
+transcendental principle bars the way, but that some unknown and perhaps
+unknowable condition does, as mysterious and unrepeatable as that which
+separates our mental life from our physical. The transmutation of the
+physical into the psychical takes place, but the secret of it we do not
+know. It does not seem to fall within the law of the correlation and the
+conservation of energy.
+
+Free or single atoms are very rare; they all quickly find their mates or
+partners. This eagerness of the elements to combine is one of the
+mysteries. If the world of visible matter were at one stroke resolved
+into its constituent atoms, it would practically disappear; we might
+smell it, or taste it, if we were left, but we could not see it, or feel
+it; the water would vanish, the solid ground would vanish--more than
+half of it into oxygen atoms, and the rest mainly into silicon atoms.
+
+The atoms of different bodies are all alike, and presumably each holds
+the same amount of electric energy. One wonders, then, how the order in
+which they are arranged can affect them so widely as to produce bodies
+so unlike as, say, alcohol and ether. This brings before us again the
+mystery of chemical arrangement or combination, so different from
+anything we know among tangible bodies. It seems to imply that each atom
+has its own individuality. Mix up a lot of pebbles together, and the
+result would be hardly affected by the order of the arrangement, but mix
+up a lot of people, and the result would be greatly affected by the fact
+of who is elbowing who. It seems the same among the mysterious atoms, as
+if some complemented or stimulated those next them, or had an opposite
+effect. But can we think of the atoms in a chemical compound as being
+next one another, or merely in juxtaposition? Do we not rather have to
+think of them as identified with one another to an extent that has no
+parallel in the world of ponderable bodies? A kind of sympathy or
+affinity makes them one in a sense that we only see realized among
+living beings.
+
+Chemical activity is the first step from physical activity to vital
+activity, but the last step is taken rarely--the other two are
+universal. Chemical changes involve the atom. What do vital changes
+involve? We do not know. We can easily bring about the chemical
+changes, but not so the vital changes. A chemical change destroys one or
+more substances and produces others totally unlike them; a vital change
+breaks up substances and builds up other bodies out of them; it results
+in new compounds that finally cover the earth with myriads of new and
+strange forms.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE VITAL ORDER
+
+I
+
+
+The mechanistic theory of life--the theory that all living things can be
+explained and fully accounted for on purely physico-chemical
+principles--has many defenders in our day. The main aim of the foregoing
+chapters is to point out the inadequacy of this view. At the risk of
+wearying my reader I am going to collect under the above heading a few
+more considerations bearing on this point.
+
+A thing that grows, that develops, cannot, except by very free use of
+language, be called a machine. We speak of the body as a machine, but we
+have to qualify it by prefixing the adjective living--the living
+machine, which takes it out of the mechanical order of things
+fabricated, contrived, built up from without, and puts it in the order
+we call vital, the order of things self-developed from within, the order
+of things autonomous, as contrasted with things automatic. All the
+mechanical principles are operative in the life processes, but they have
+been vitalized, not changed in any way but in the service of a new order
+of reality. The heart with its chambers and valves is a pump that
+forces the blood through the system, but a pump that works itself and
+does not depend upon pneumatic pressure--a pump in which vital energy
+takes the place of gravitational energy. The peristaltic movement in the
+intestines involves a mechanical principle, but it is set up by an
+inward stimulus, and not by outward force. It is these inward stimuli,
+which of course involve chemical reactions, that afford the motive power
+for all living bodies and that put the living in another order from the
+mechanical. The eye is an optical instrument,--a rather crude one, it is
+said,--but it cannot be separated from its function, as can a mere
+instrument--the eye sees as literally as the brain thinks. In breathing
+we unconsciously apply the principle of the bellows; it is a bellows
+again which works itself, but the function of which, in a very limited
+sense, we can inhibit and control. An artificial, or man-made, machine
+always implies an artificer, but the living machine is not made in any
+such sense; it grows, it arises out of the organizing principle that
+becomes active in matter under conditions that we only dimly understand,
+and that we cannot reproduce.
+
+The vital and the mechanical cooeperate in all our bodily functions.
+Swallowing our food is a mechanical process, the digestion of it is a
+chemical process and the assimilation and elimination of it a vital
+process. Inhaling and exhaling the air is a mechanical process, the
+oxidation of the blood is a chemical process, and the renewal of the
+corpuscles is a vital process. Growth, assimilation, elimination,
+reproduction, metabolism, and secretion, are all vital processes which
+cannot be described in terms of physics and chemistry. All our bodily
+movements--lifting, striking, walking, running--are mechanical, but
+seeing, hearing, and tasting, are of another order. And that which
+controls, directs, cooerdinates, and inhibits our activities belongs to a
+still higher order, the psychic. The world of thoughts and emotions
+within us, while dependent upon and interacting with the physical world
+without us, cannot be accounted for in terms of the physical world. A
+living thing is more than a machine, more than a chemical laboratory.
+
+We can analyze the processes of a tree into their mechanical and
+chemical elements, but there is besides a kind of force there which we
+must call vital. The whole growth and development of the tree, its
+manner of branching and gripping the soil, its fixity of species, its
+individuality--all imply something that does not belong to the order of
+the inorganic, automatic forces. In the living animal how the psychic
+stands related to the physical or physiological and arises out of it,
+science cannot tell us, but the relation must be real; only philosophy
+can grapple with that question. To resolve the psychic and the vital
+into the mechanical and chemical and refuse to see any other factors at
+work is the essence of materialism.
+
+
+II
+
+Any contrivance which shows an interdependence of parts, that results in
+unity of action, is super-mechanical. The solar system may be regarded
+as a unit, but it has not the purposive unity of a living body. It is
+one only in the sense that its separate bodies are all made of one
+stuff, and obey the same laws and move together in the same direction,
+but a living body is a unit because all its parts are in the service of
+one purposive end. An army is a unit, a flock of gregarious birds, a
+colony of ants or bees, is a unit because the spirit and purpose of one
+is the spirit and purpose of all; the unity is psychological.
+
+Only living bodies are adaptive. Adaptation, of course, has its physics
+or its chemistry, because it is a physical phenomenon; but there is no
+adaptation of a rock or a clay-bank to its environment; there is only
+mechanical and chemical adjustment. The influence of the environment may
+bring about chemical and physical changes in a non-living body, but they
+are not purposive as in a living body. The fat in the seeds of plants in
+northern countries is liquid and solid at a lower temperature than in
+tropical climates. Living organisms alone react in a formative or
+deformative way to external stimuli. In warm climates the fur of
+animals and the wool of sheep become thin and light. The colder the
+climate, the thicker these coverings. Such facts only show that in the
+matter of adaptation among living organisms, there is a factor at work
+other than chemistry and physics--not independent of them, but making a
+purposive use of them. Cut off the central shoot that leads the young
+spruce tree upwards, and one of the shoots from the whirl of lateral
+branches below it slowly rises up and takes the place of the lost
+leader. Here is an action not prompted by the environment, but by the
+morphological needs of the tree, and it illustrates how different is its
+unity from the unity of a mere machine. I am only aiming to point out
+that in all living things the material forces behave in a purposive way
+to a degree that cannot be affirmed of them in non-living, and that,
+therefore, they imply intelligence.
+
+Evidently the cells in the body do not all have the same degree of
+life,--that is, the same degree of irritability. The bone cells and the
+hair cells, for instance, can hardly be so much alive--or so
+irritable--as the muscle cells; nor these as intensely alive as the
+nerve and brain cells. Does not a bird possess a higher degree of life
+than a mollusk, or a turtle? Is not a brook trout more alive than a
+mud-sucker? You can freeze the latter as stiff as an icicle and
+resuscitate it, but not the former. There is a scale of degrees in life
+as clearly as there is a scale of degrees in temperature. There is an
+endless gradation of sensibilities of the living cells, dependent
+probably upon the degree of differentiation of function. Anaesthetics
+dull or suspend this irritability. The more highly developed and complex
+the nervous system, the higher the degree of life, till we pass from
+mere physical life to psychic life. Science might trace this difference
+to cell structure, but what brings about the change in the character of
+the cell, or starts the cells to building a complex nervous system, is a
+question unanswerable to science. The biologist imagines this and that
+about the invisible or hypothetical molecular structure; he assigns
+different functions to the atoms; some are for endosmosis, others for
+contraction, others for conduction of stimuli. Intramolecular oxygen
+plays a part. Other names are given to the mystery--the micellar strings
+of Naegeli, the biophores of Weismann, the plastidules of Haeckel; they
+all presuppose millions of molecules peculiarly arranged in the
+protoplasm.
+
+On purely mechanical and chemical principles Tyndall accounts for the
+growth from the germ of a tree. The germ would be quiet, but the solar
+light and heat disturb its dreams, break up its atomic equilibrium. The
+germ makes an "effort" to restore it (why does it make an effort?),
+which effort is necessarily defeated and incessantly renewed, and in
+the turmoil or "scrapping" between the germ and the solar forces, matter
+is gathered from the soil and from the air and built into the special
+form of a tree. Why not in the form of a cabbage, or a donkey, or a
+clam? If the forces are purely automatic, why not? Why should matter be
+gathered in at all in a mechanical struggle between inorganic elements?
+But these are not all inorganic; the seed is organic. Ah! that makes the
+difference! That accounts for the "effort." So we have to have the
+organic to start with, then the rest is easy. No doubt the molecules of
+the seed would remain in a quiescent state, if they were not disturbed
+by external influences, chemical and mechanical. But there is something
+latent or potential in that seed that is the opposite of the mechanical,
+namely, the vital, and in what that consists, and where it came from, is
+the mystery.
+
+
+III
+
+I fancy that the difficulty which an increasing number of persons find
+in accepting the mechanistic view of life, or evolution,--the view which
+Herbert Spencer built into such a ponderous system of philosophy, and
+which such men as Huxley, Tyndall, Gifford, Haeckel, Verworn, and
+others, have upheld and illustrated,--is temperamental rather than
+logical. The view is distasteful to a certain type of mind--the
+flexible, imaginative, artistic, and literary type--the type that loves
+to see itself reflected in nature or that reads its own thoughts and
+emotions into nature. In a few eminent examples the two types of mind to
+which I refer seem more or less blended. Sir Oliver Lodge is a case in
+point. Sir Oliver is an eminent physicist who in his conception of the
+totality of things is yet a thoroughgoing idealist and mystic. His
+solution of the problem of living things is extra-scientific. He sees in
+life a distinct transcendental principle, not involved in the
+constitution of matter, but independent of it, entering into it and
+using it for its own purposes.
+
+Tyndall was another great scientist with an inborn idealistic strain in
+him. His famous, and to many minds disquieting, declaration, made in his
+Belfast address over thirty years ago, that in matter itself he saw the
+promise and the potency of all terrestrial life, stamps him as a
+scientific materialist. But his conception of matter, as "at bottom
+essentially mystical and transcendental," stamps him as also an
+idealist. The idealist in him speaks very eloquently in the passage
+which, in the same address, he puts into the mouth of Bishop Butler, in
+the latter's imaginary debate with Lucretius: "Your atoms," says the
+Bishop, "are individually without sensation, much more are they without
+intelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your hand upon this problem.
+Take your dead hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your dead carbon
+atoms, your dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus atoms, and all
+the other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the brain is formed.
+Imagine them separate and sensationless, observe them running together
+and forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely mechanical
+process, is _seeable_ by the mind. But can you see or dream, or in any
+way imagine, how out of that mechanical art, and from these individually
+dead atoms, sensation, thought, and emotion are to arise? Are you likely
+to extract Homer out of the rattling of dice, or the Differential
+Calculus out of the clash of billiard balls?" Could any vitalist, or
+Bergsonian idealist have stated his case better?
+
+Now the Bishop Butler type of mind--the visualizing, idealizing,
+analogy-loving, literary, and philosophical mind--is shared by a good
+many people; it is shared by or is characteristic of all the great
+poets, artists, seers, idealists of the world; it is the humanistic type
+that sees man everywhere reflected in nature; and is radically different
+from the strictly scientific type which dehumanizes nature and reduces
+it to impersonal laws and forces, which distrusts analogy and sentiment
+and poetry, and clings to a rigid logical method.
+
+This type of mind is bound to have trouble in accepting the
+physico-chemical theory of the nature and origin of life. It visualizes
+life, sees it as a distinct force or principle working in and through
+matter but not of it, super-physical in its origin and psychological in
+its nature. This is the view Henri Bergson exploits in his "Creative
+Evolution." This is the view Kant took when he said, "It is quite
+certain that we cannot even satisfactorily understand, much less
+explain, the nature of an organism and its internal forces on purely
+mechanical principles." It is the view Goethe took when he said, "Matter
+can never exist without spirit, nor spirit without matter."
+
+Tyndall says Goethe was helped by his poetic training in the field of
+natural history, but hindered as regards the physical and mechanical
+sciences. "He could not formulate distinct mechanical conceptions; he
+could not see the force of mechanical reasoning." His literary culture
+helped him to a literary interpretation of living nature, but not to a
+scientific explanation of it; it helped put him in sympathy with living
+things, and just to that extent barred him from the mechanistic
+conception of those of pure science. Goethe, like every great poet, saw
+the universe through the colored medium of his imagination, his
+emotional and aesthetic nature; in short, through his humanism, and not
+in the white light of the scientific reason. His contributions to
+literature were of the first order, but his contributions to science
+have not taken high rank. He was a "prophet of the soul," and not a
+disciple of the scientific understanding.
+
+If we look upon life as inherent or potential in the constitution of
+matter, dependent upon outward physical and chemical conditions for its
+development, we are accounting for life in terms of matter and motion,
+and are in the ranks of the materialists. But if we find ourselves
+unable to set the ultimate particles of matter in action, or so working
+as to produce the reaction which results in life, without conceiving of
+some new force or principle operating upon them, then we are in the
+ranks of the vitalists or idealists. The idealists see the original
+atoms slumbering there in rock and sea and soil for untold ages, till,
+moved upon by some unknown factor, they draw together in certain fixed
+order and numbers, and life is the result. Something seems to put a
+spell upon them and cause them to behave so differently from the way
+they behaved before they were drawn into the life circuit.
+
+When we think of life, as the materialists do, as of mechanico-chemical
+origin, or explicable in terms of the natural universal order, we think
+of the play of material forces amid which we live, we think of their
+subtle action and interaction all about us--of osmosis, capillarity,
+radio-activity, electricity, thermism, and the like; we think of the
+four states of matter,--solid, fluid, gaseous, and ethereal,--of how
+little our senses take in of their total activities, and we do not feel
+the need of invoking a transcendental principle to account for it.
+
+Yet to fail to see that what we must call intelligence pervades and is
+active in all organic nature is to be spiritually blind. But to see it
+as something foreign to, or separable from, nature is to do violence to
+our faith in the constancy and sufficiency of the natural order. One
+star differeth from another star in glory. There are degrees of mystery
+in the universe. The most mysterious thing in inorganic nature is
+electricity--that disembodied energy that slumbers in the ultimate
+particles of matter--unseen, unfelt, unknown, till it suddenly leaps
+forth with such terrible vividness and power on the face of the storm,
+or till we summon it through the transformation of some other form of
+energy. A still higher and more inscrutable mystery is life--that
+something which clothes itself in such infinitely varied and beautiful
+as well as unbeautiful forms of matter. We can evoke electricity at will
+from many different sources, but we can evoke life only from other life;
+the biogenetic law is inviolable.
+
+
+IV
+
+It takes some of the cold iron out of the mechanistic theory of life if
+we divest it of all our associations with the machine-mad and
+machine-ridden world in which we live and out of which our material
+civilization came. The mechanical, the automatic, is the antithesis of
+the spontaneous and the poetic, and it repels us on that account. We are
+so made that the artificial systems please us far less than the natural
+systems. A sailing-ship takes us more than a steamship. It is nearer
+life, nearer the winged creatures. There is determinism in nature,
+mechanical forces are everywhere operative, but there are no machines in
+the proper sense of the word. When we call an organism a living machine
+we at once take it out of the categories of the merely mechanical and
+automatic and lift it into a higher order--the vital order.
+
+Professor Le Dantec says we are mechanisms in the third degree, a
+mechanism of a mechanism of a mechanism. The body is a mechanism by
+virtue of its anatomy--its framework, its levers, its hinges; it is a
+mechanism by virtue of its chemical activities; and it is a mechanism by
+virtue of its colloid states--three kinds of mechanisms in one, and all
+acting together harmoniously and as a unit--in other words, a
+super-mechanical combination of activities.
+
+The mechanical conception of life repels us because of its association
+in our minds with the fabrications of our own hands--the dead metal and
+wood and the noise and dust of our machine-ridden and machine-produced
+civilization.
+
+But Nature makes no machines like our own. She uses mechanical
+principles everywhere, in inert matter and in living bodies, but she
+does not use them in the bald and literal way we do. We must divest her
+mechanisms of the rigidity and angularity that pertain to the works of
+our own hands. Her hooks and hinges and springs and sails and coils and
+aeroplanes, all involve mechanical contrivances, but how differently
+they impress us from our own application of the same principles! Even in
+inert matter--in the dews, the rains, the winds, the tides, the snows,
+the streams,--her mechanics and her chemistry and her hydrostatics and
+pneumatics, seem much nearer akin to life than our own. We must remember
+that Nature's machines are not human machines. When we place our machine
+so that it is driven by the great universal currents,--the wheel in the
+stream, the sail on the water,--the result is much more pleasing and
+poetic than when propelled by artificial power. The more machinery we
+get between ourselves and Nature, the farther off Nature seems. The
+marvels of crystallization, the beautiful vegetable forms which the
+frost etches upon the stone flagging of the sidewalk, and upon the
+window-pane, delight us and we do not reason why. A natural bridge
+pleases more than one which is the work of an engineer, yet the natural
+bridge can only stand when it is based upon good engineering principles.
+I found at the great Colorado Canon, that the more the monuments of
+erosion were suggestive of human structures, or engineering and
+architectural works, the more I was impressed by them. We are pleased
+when Nature imitates man, and we are pleased when man imitates Nature,
+and yet we recoil from the thought that life is only applied mechanics
+and chemistry. But the thought that it is mechanics and chemistry
+applied by something of which they as such, form no part, some agent or
+principle which we call vitality, is welcome to us. No machine we have
+ever made or seen can wind itself up, or has life, no chemical compound
+from the laboratories ever develops a bit of organic matter, and
+therefore we are disbelievers in the powers of these things.
+
+
+V
+
+Is gravity or chemical affinity any more real to the mind than vitality?
+Both are names for mysteries. Something which we call life lifts matter
+up, in opposition to gravity, into thousands of living forms. The tree
+lifts potash, silica, and lime up one or two hundred feet into the air;
+it elbows the soil away from its hole where it enters the ground; its
+roots split rocks. A giant sequoia lifts tons of solid matter and water
+up hundreds of feet. So will an explosion of powder or dynamite, but the
+tree does it slowly and silently by the organizing power of life. The
+vital is as inscrutably identified with the mechanical and chemical as
+the soul is identified with the body. They are one while yet they are
+two.
+
+For purely mechanical things we can find equivalents. Arrest a purely
+mechanical process, and the machine only rests or rusts; arrest a vital
+process, and the machine evaporates, disintegrates, myriads of other
+machines reduce it to its original mineral and gaseous elements. In the
+organic world we strike a principle that is incalculable in its
+operation and incommensurable in its results. The physico-chemical
+forces we can bring to book; we know their orbits, their attractions and
+repulsions, and just what they will and will not do; we can forecast
+their movements and foresee their effects. But the vital forces
+transcend all our mathematics; we cannot anticipate their behavior.
+Start inert matter in motion and we know pretty nearly what will happen
+to it; mix the chemical elements together and we can foresee the
+results; but start processes or reactions we call life, and who can
+foresee the end? We know the sap will mount in the tree and the tree
+will be true to its type, but what do we or can we know of what it is
+that determines its kind and size? We know that in certain plants the
+leaves will always be opposite each other on the stalk, and that in
+other plants the leaves will alternate; that certain plants will have
+conspicuous and others inconspicuous flowers; but how can we know what
+it is in the cells of the plants that determines these things? We can
+graft the scion of a sour apple tree upon a sweet, and _vice versa_, and
+the fruit of the scion will be true to its kind, but no analysis of the
+scion or of the stock will reveal the secret, as it would in the case of
+chemical compounds. In inorganic nature we meet with concretions, but
+not secretions; with crystallization, but not with assimilation and
+growth from within. Chemistry tells us that the composition of animal
+bodies is identical with that of vegetable; that there is nothing in one
+that is not in the other; and yet, behold the difference! a difference
+beyond the reach of chemistry to explain. Biology can tell us all about
+these differences and many other things, but it cannot tell us the
+secret we are looking for,--what it is that fashions from the same
+elements two bodies so unlike as a tree and a man.
+
+Decay and disintegration in the inorganic world often lead to the
+production of beautiful forms. In life the reverse is true; the vital
+forces build up varied and picturesque forms which when pulled down are
+shapeless and displeasing. The immense layers of sandstone and limestone
+out of which the wonderful forms that fill the Grand Canon of the
+Colorado are carved were laid down in wide uniform sheets; if the waters
+had deposited their material in the forms which we now see, it would
+have been a miracle. We marvel and admire as we gaze upon them now; we
+do more, we have to speculate as to how it was all done by the blind,
+unintelligent forces. Giant stairways, enormous alcoves, dizzy, highly
+wrought balustrades, massive vertical walls standing four-square like
+huge foundations--how did all the unguided erosive forces do it? The
+secret is in the structure of the rock, in the lines of cleavage, in the
+unequal hardness, and in the impulsive, irregular, and unequal action of
+the eroding agents. These agents follow the lines of least resistance;
+they are active at different times and seasons, and from different
+directions; they work with infinite slowness; they undermine, they
+disintegrate, they dislodge, they transport; the hard streaks resist
+them, the soft streaks invite them; water charged with sand and gravel
+saws down; the wind, armed with fine sand, rounds off and hollows out;
+and thus the sculpturing goes on. But after you have reasoned out all
+these things, you still marvel at the symmetry and the structural beauty
+of the forms. They look like the handiwork of barbarian gods. They are
+the handiwork of physical forces which we can see and measure and in a
+degree control. But what a gulf separates them from the handiwork of the
+organic forces!
+
+
+VI
+
+Some things come and some things arise; things that already exist may
+come, but potential things arise; my friend comes to visit me, the tide
+comes up the river, the cold or hot wave comes from the west; but the
+seasons, night and morning, health and disease, and the like, do not
+come in this sense; they arise. Life does not come to dead matter in
+this sense; it arises. Day and night are not traveling round the earth,
+though we view them that way; they arise from the turning of the earth
+upon its axis. If we could keep up with the flying moments,--that is,
+with the revolution of the earth,--we could live always at sunrise, or
+sunset, or at noon, or at any other moment we cared to elect. Love or
+hate does not come to our hearts; it is born there; the breath does not
+come to the newborn infant; respiration arises there automatically. See
+how the life of the infant is involved in that first breath, yet it is
+not its life; the infant must first be alive before it can breathe. If
+it is still-born, the respiratory reaction does not take place. We can
+say, then, that the breath means life, and the life means breath; only
+we must say the latter first. We can say in the same way that
+organization means life, and life means organization. Something sets up
+the organizing process in matter. We may take all the physical elements
+of life known to us and jumble them together and shake them up to all
+eternity, and life will not result. A little friction between solid
+bodies begets heat, a little more and we get fire. But no amount of
+friction begets life. Heat and life go together, but heat is the
+secondary factor.
+
+Life is always a vanishing-point, a constant becoming--an unstable
+something that escapes us while we seem to analyze it. In its nature or
+essence, it is a metaphysical problem, and not one of physical science.
+Science cannot grasp it; it evaporates in its crucibles. And science is
+compelled finally to drive it into an imaginary region--I had almost
+said, metaphysical region, the region of the invisible, hypothetical
+atoms of matter. Here in the mysteries of molecular attraction and
+repulsion, it conceives the secret of life to lie.
+
+"Life is a wave," says Tyndall, but does not one conceive of something,
+some force or impulse in the wave that is not of the wave? What is it
+that travels along lifting new water each moment up into waves? It is a
+physical force communicated usually by the winds. When the wave dies
+upon the shore, this force is dissipated, not lost, or is turned into
+heat. Why may we not think of life as a vital force traveling through
+matter and lifting up into organic life waves in the same way? But not
+translatable into any other form of energy because not derivable from
+any other form.
+
+Every species of animal has something about it that is unique and
+individual and that no chemical or physiological analysis of it will
+show--probably some mode of motion among its ultimate particles that is
+peculiar to itself. This prevents cross-breeding among different species
+and avoids a chaos of animal and vegetable forms. Living tissues and
+living organs from one species cannot be grafted upon the individuals
+of another species; the kidney of a cat, for instance, cannot be
+substituted for that of a dog, although the functions and the anatomy of
+the two are identical. It is suggested that an element of felineness and
+an element of canineness adhere in the cells of each, and the two are
+antagonistic. This specific quality, or selfness, of an animal pervades
+every drop of its blood, so that the blood relationship of the different
+forms may be thus tested, where chemistry is incompetent to show
+agreement or antagonism. The reactions of life are surer and more subtle
+than those of chemistry. Thus the blood relationship between birds and
+reptiles is clearly shown, as is the relationship of man and the
+chimpanzee and the orang-outang. The same general fact holds true in the
+vegetable world. You cannot graft the apple upon the oak, or the plum
+upon the elm. It seems as if there were the quality of oakness and the
+quality of appleness, and they would not mix.
+
+The same thing holds among different chemical compounds. Substances
+which have precisely the same chemical formulae (called isomers) have
+properties as widely apart as alcohol and ether.
+
+If chemistry is powerless to trace the relationship between different
+forms of life, is it not highly improbable that the secret of life
+itself is in the keeping of chemistry?
+
+Analytical science has reached the end of its tether when it has
+resolved a body into its constituent elements. Why or how these elements
+build up a man in the one case, and a monkey in another, is beyond its
+province to say. It can deal with all the elements of the living body,
+vegetable and animal; it can take them apart and isolate them in
+different bottles; but it cannot put them together again as they were in
+life. It knows that the human body is built up of a vast multitude of
+minute cells, that these cells build tissues, that the tissues build
+organs, that the organs build the body; but the secret of the man, or
+the dog, or even the flea, is beyond its reach. The secret of biology,
+that which makes its laws and processes differ so widely from those of
+geology or astronomy, is a profound mystery. Science can take living
+tissue and make it grow outside of the body from which it came, but it
+will only repeat endlessly the first step of life--that of
+cell-multiplication; it is like a fire that will burn as long as fuel is
+given it and the ashes are removed; but it is entirely purposeless; it
+will not build up the organ of which it once formed a part, much less
+the whole organized body.
+
+The difference between one man and another does not reside in his
+anatomy or physiology, or in the elements of which the brains and bodies
+are composed, but in something entirely beyond the reach of experimental
+science to disclose. The difference is psychological, or, we may say,
+philosophical, and science is none the wiser for it. The mechanics and
+the chemistry of a machine are quite sufficient to account for it, plus
+the man behind it. To the physics and chemistry of a living body, we are
+compelled to add some intangible, unknowable principle or tendency that
+physics and chemistry cannot disclose or define. One hesitates to make
+such a statement lest he do violence to that oneness, that sameness,
+that pervades the universe.
+
+All trees go to the same soil for their ponderable elements, their
+ashes, and to the air and the light for their imponderable,--their
+carbon and their energy,--but what makes the tree, and makes one tree
+differ from another? Has the career of life upon this globe, the
+unfolding of the evolutionary process, been accounted for when you have
+named all the physical and material elements and processes which it
+involves? We take refuge in the phrase "the nature of things," but the
+nature of things evidently embraces something not dreamed of in our
+science.
+
+
+VII
+
+It is reported that a French scientist has discovered the secret of the
+glow-worm's light. Of course it is a chemical reaction,--what else could
+it be?--but it is a chemical reaction in a vital process. Our mental and
+spiritual life--our emotions of art, poetry, religion--are inseparable
+from physical processes in the brain and the nervous system; but is
+that their final explanation? The sunlight has little effect on a
+withered leaf, but see what effect it has upon the green leaf upon the
+tree! The sunlight is the same, but it falls upon a new force or potency
+in the chlorophyll of the leaf,--a bit of chemistry there inspired by
+life,--and the heat of the sun is stored up in the carbon or woody
+tissues of the plant or tree, to be given out again in our stoves or
+fireplaces. And behold how much more of the solar heat is stored up in
+one kind of a tree than in certain other kinds,--how much in the
+hickory, oak, maple, and how little comparatively in the pine, spruce,
+linden,--all through the magic of something in the leaf, or shall we say
+of the spirit of the tree? If the laws of matter and force alone account
+for the living organism, if we do not have to think of something that
+organizes, then how do we account for the marvelous diversity of living
+forms, and their still more marvelous power of adaptation to changed
+conditions, since the laws of matter and force are the same everywhere?
+Science can deal only with the mechanism and chemistry of life, not with
+its essence; that which sets up the new activity in matter that we call
+vital is beyond its analysis. It is hard to believe that we have told
+the whole truth about a living body when we have enumerated all its
+chemical and mechanical activities. It is by such enumeration that we
+describe a watch, or a steam-engine, or any other piece of machinery.
+Describe I say, but such description does not account for the watch or
+tell us its full significance. To do this, we must include the
+watchmaker, and the world of mind and ideas amid which he lives. Now, in
+a living machine, the machine and the maker are one. The watch is
+perpetually self-wound and self-regulated and self-repaired. It is made
+up of millions of other little watches, the cells, all working together
+for one common end and ticking out the seconds and minutes of life with
+unfailing regularity. Unlike the watch we carry in our pockets, if we
+take it apart so as to stop its ticking, it can never be put together
+again. It has not merely stopped; it is dead.
+
+The late William Keith Brooks, of Johns Hopkins University, said in
+opposition to Huxley that he held to the "old-fashioned conviction that
+living things do in some way, and in some degree, control or condition
+inorganic nature; that they hold their own by setting the mechanical
+properties of matter in opposition to each other, and that this is their
+most notable and distinctive characteristic." And yet, he said, to think
+of the living world as "anything but natural" is impossible.
+
+
+VIII
+
+Life seems to beget a new kind of chemistry, the same elements behave so
+differently when they are drawn into the life circuit from what they
+did before. Carbon, for instance, enters into hundreds of new compounds
+in the organic world that are unknown in the inorganic world. I am thus
+speaking of life as if it were something, some force or agent, that
+antedates its material manifestations, whereas in the eyes of science
+there is no separation of the one from the other. In an explosion there
+is usually something anterior to, or apart from, the explosive compound,
+that pulls the trigger, or touches the match, or completes the circuit,
+but in the slow and gentle explosions that keep the life machinery
+going, we cannot make such a distinction. The spark and the powder are
+one; the gun primes and fires itself; the battery is perpetually
+self-charged; the lamp is self-trimmed and self-lit.
+
+Sir Oliver Lodge is apparently so impressed with some such
+considerations that he spiritualizes life, and makes it some mysterious
+entity in itself, existing apart from the matter which it animates and
+uses; not a source of energy but a timer and releaser of energy. Henri
+Bergson, in his "Creative Evolution," expounds a similar philosophy of
+life. Life is a current in opposition to matter which it enters into,
+and organizes into the myriads of living forms.
+
+I confess that it is easier for me to think of life in these terms than
+in terms of physical science. The view falls in better with our
+anthropomorphic tendencies. It appeals to the imagination and to our
+myth-making aptitudes. It gives a dramatic interest to the question.
+With Bergson we see life struggling with matter, seeking to overcome its
+obduracy, compromising with it, taking a half-loaf when it cannot get a
+whole one; we see evolution as the unfolding of a vast drama acted upon
+the stage of geologic time. Creation becomes a perpetual process, the
+creative energy an ever-present and familiar fact. Bergson's book is a
+wonderful addition to the literature of science and of philosophy. The
+poet, the dreamer, the mystic, in each of us takes heart at Bergson's
+beautiful philosophy; it seems like a part of life; it goes so well with
+living things. As James said, it is like the light of the morning and
+the singing of birds; we glory in seeing the intellect humbled as he
+humbles it. The concepts of science try our mettle. They do not appeal
+to our humanity, or to our myth-making tendencies; they appeal to the
+purely intellectual, impersonal force within us. Though all our gods
+totter and fall, science goes its way; though our hearts are chilled and
+our lives are orphaned, science cannot turn aside, or veil its light. It
+does not temper the wind to the shorn lamb.
+
+Hence the scientific conception of the universe repels many people. They
+are not equal to it. To think of life as involved in the very
+constitution of matter itself is a much harder proposition than to
+conceive of it as Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge do, as an independent
+reality. The latter view gives the mind something more tangible to lay
+hold of. Indeed, science gives the mind nothing to take hold of. Does
+any chemical process give the mind any separate reality to take hold of?
+Is there a spirit of fire, or of decay, or of disease, or of health?
+
+
+IX
+
+Behold a man with his wonderful body, and still more wonderful mind; try
+to think of him as being fathered and mothered by the mere mechanical
+and chemical forces that we see at work in the rocks and soil underfoot,
+begotten by chemical affinity or the solar energy working as molecular
+physic, and mothered by the warmth and moisture, by osmosis and the
+colloid state--and all through the chance clashings and groupings of the
+irrational physical forces. Nothing is added to them, nothing guides or
+inspires them, nothing moves upon the face of the waters, nothing
+breathes upon the insensate clay. The molecules or corpuscles of the
+four principal elements--carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen--just
+happened to come together in certain definite numbers, and in a certain
+definite order, and invented or built up that most marvelous thing in
+the universe, the cell. The cells put their heads, or bodies, together,
+and built the tissues, the tissues formed the organs, the organs in
+convention assembled organized themselves into the body, and behold! a
+man, a bird, or a tree!--as chance a happening as the juxtaposition of
+the grains of sand upon the shore, or the shape of the summer clouds in
+the sky.
+
+Aristotle dwells upon the internal necessity. The teeth of an animal
+arise from necessity, he says; the animal must have them in order to
+live. Yet it must have lived before it had them, else how would the
+necessity arise? If the horns of an animal arise from the same
+necessity, the changing conditions of its life begat the necessity; its
+life problem became more and more complicated, till new tools arose to
+meet new wants. But without some indwelling principle of development and
+progress, how could the new wants arise? Spencer says this progress is
+the result of the action and reaction between organisms and their
+changing environment. But you must first get your organism before the
+environment can work its effects, and you must have something in the
+organism that organizes and reacts from the environment. We see the
+agents he names astronomic, geologic, meteorologic, having their effects
+upon inanimate objects as well, but they do not start the process of
+development in them; they change a stone, but do not transform it into
+an organism. The chemist can take the living body apart as surely as the
+watchmaker can take a watch apart, but he cannot put the parts together
+again so that life will reappear, as the watchmaker can restore the
+time-keeping power of the watch. The watch is a mere mechanical
+contrivance with parts fitted to parts externally, while the living body
+is a mechanical and chemical contrivance, with parts blended with parts
+internally, so to speak, and acting together through sympathy, and not
+merely by mechanical adjustment. Do we not have to think of some
+organizing agent embracing and controlling all the parts, and integral
+in each of them, making a vital bond instead of a mechanical one?
+
+There are degrees of vitality in living things, whereas there are only
+degrees of complexity and delicacy and efficiency in mechanical
+contrivances. One watch differs from another in the perfection of its
+works, but not as two living bodies with precisely similar structure
+differ from each other in their hold upon life, or in their measure of
+vitality. No analysis possible to science could show any difference in
+the chemistry and physics of two persons of whom one would withstand
+hardships and diseases that would kill the other, or with whom one would
+have the gift of long life and the other not. Machines differ from one
+another quantitatively--more or less efficiency; a living body differs
+from a machine qualitatively--its efficiency is of a different order;
+its unity is of a different order; its complexity is of a different
+order; the interdependence of its parts is of a different order. Yet
+what a parallel there is between a machine and a living body! Both are
+run by external forces or agents, solar energy in one applied
+mechanically from without; in the other applied vitally from within;
+both suffer from the wear and tear of time and from abuse, but one is
+self-repaired and the other powerless in this respect--two machines with
+the same treatment running the same number of years, but two men with
+the same treatment running a very unequal number of years. Machines of
+the same kind differ in durability, men differ in powers of endurance; a
+man can "screw up his courage," but a machine has no courage to screw
+up. Science may be unable to see any difference between vital mechanics,
+vital chemistry, and the chemics and mechanics of inorganic bodies--its
+analysis reveals no difference; but that there is a difference as
+between two different orders, all men see and feel.
+
+Science cannot deal with fundamental questions. Only philosophy can do
+this. Science is only a tool or a key, and it can unlock only certain
+material problems. It cannot appraise itself. It is not a judge but a
+witness. Problems of mind, of character, moral, aesthetic, literary,
+artistic problems, are not its sphere. It counts and weighs and measures
+and analyzes, it traces relations, but it cannot appraise its own
+results. Science and religion come in conflict only when the latter
+seeks to deal with objective facts, and the former seeks to deal with
+subjective ideas and emotions. On the question of miracle they clash,
+because religion is then dealing with natural phenomena and challenges
+science. Philosophy offends science when it puts its own interpretation
+upon scientific facts. Science displeases literature when it dehumanizes
+nature and shows us irrefragable laws when we had looked for humanistic
+divinities.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE ARRIVAL OF THE FIT
+
+
+In my youth I once heard the then well-known lecturer Starr King speak
+on "The Law of Disorder." I have no recollection of the main thought of
+his discourse, but can see that it might have been upon the order and
+harmony that finally come out of the disharmonies of nature and of man.
+The whole universe goes blundering on, but surely arrives. Collisions
+and dispersions in the heavens above, and failure and destruction among
+living things on the earth below, yet here we all are in a world good to
+be in! The proof that it is good to be in is that we are actually here.
+It is as if the Creator played his right hand against his left--what one
+loses the other gains.
+
+It has been aptly said that while Darwin's theory of natural selection
+may account for the survival of the fittest, it does not account for the
+arrival of the fittest. The arrival of the fittest, sooner or later,
+seems in some way guaranteed by tendencies that are beyond the
+hit-and-miss method of natural selection.
+
+When we look back over the course of organic evolution, we see the
+unfolding of a great drama, or tragedy, in which, for millions upon
+millions of years the sole actors are low and all but brainless forms
+of life, devouring and devoured, in the old seas. We see, during other
+millions upon millions of years, a savage carnival of huge bestial forms
+upon the land, amphibian monsters and dragons of the land and air,
+devouring and being devoured, a riot of blood and carnage. We see the
+shifting of land and sea, the folding and crumpling of the earth's
+crust, the rise of mountains, the engulfing of forests, a vast
+destruction of life, immense numbers of animal forms becoming extinct
+through inability to adapt themselves to new conditions, or from other
+causes. We see creatures, half beast, half bird, or half dragon, half
+fish; we see the evolutionary process thwarted or delayed apparently by
+the hardening or fixing of its own forms. We see it groping its way like
+a blind man, and experimenting with this device and with that, fumbling,
+awkward, ineffectual, trying magnitude of body and physical strength
+first, and then shifting the emphasis to size of brain and delicacy and
+complexity of nerve-organization, pushing on but gropingly, learning
+only by experience, regardless of pain and waste and suffering; whole
+races of sentient beings swept away by some terrestrial cataclysm, as at
+the end of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic times; prodigal, inhuman, riotous,
+arming some vegetable growths with spurs and thorns that tear and stab,
+some insects with stings, some serpents with deadly fangs, the
+production of pain as much a part of the scheme of things as the
+production of pleasure; the creative impulse feeling its way through the
+mollusk to the fish, and through the fish to the amphibian and the
+reptile, through the reptile to the mammal, and through the mammal to
+the anthropoid apes, and through the apes to man, then through the rude
+and savage races of man, the long-jawed, small-brained, Pliocene man,
+hairy and savage, to the cave-dwellers and stone-implement man of
+Pleistocene times, and so on to our rude ancestors whom we see dimly at
+the dawn of history, and thus rapidly upward to the European man of our
+own era. What a record! What savagery, what thwartings and delays, what
+carnage and suffering, what an absence of all that we mean by
+intelligent planning and oversight, of love, of fatherhood! Just a clash
+of forces, the battle to the strong and the race to the fleet.
+
+It is hard to believe that the course of organic evolution would have
+eventuated in man and the other higher forms of life without some
+guiding principle; yet it is equally difficult to believe that the
+course of any guiding intelligence down the ages would have been strewn
+with so many failures and monstrosities, so much waste and suffering and
+delay. Man has not been specially favored by one force or element in
+nature. Behold the enemies that beset him without and within, and that
+are armed for his destruction! The intelligence that appears to pervade
+the organic world, and that reaches its conscious expression in the
+brain of man, is just as manifest in all the forms of animals and plants
+that are inimical to him, in all his natural enemies,--venomous snakes
+and beasts of prey, and insect pests,--as in anything else. Nature is as
+wise and solicitous for rats and mice as for men. In fact, she has
+endowed many of the lower creatures with physical powers that she has
+denied him. Evidently man is only one of the cards in her pack;
+doubtless the highest one, but the game is not played for him alone.
+
+There is no economy of effort or of material in nature as a whole,
+whatever there may be in special parts. The universe is not run on
+modern business-efficiency principles. There is no question of time, or
+of profit, of solvency or insolvency. The profit-and-loss account in the
+long run always balances. In our astronomic age there are probably
+vastly more dead suns and planets strewing the depths of sidereal space
+than there are living suns and planets. But in some earlier period in
+the cycle of time the reverse may have been true, or it may be true in
+some future period.
+
+There is economy of effort in the individual organism, but not in the
+organic series, at least from the human point of view. During the
+biologic ages there have been a vast number of animal forms, great and
+small, and are still, that had no relation to man, that were not in his
+line of descent, and played no part in his evolution. During that
+carnival of monstrous and gigantic forms in Mesozoic time the ancestor
+of man was probably some small and insignificant creature whose life was
+constantly imperiled by the huge beasts about it. That it survived at
+all in the clash of forces, bestial and elemental, during those early
+ages, is one of the wonders of time. The drama or tragedy of evolution
+has had many actors, some of them fearful and terrible to look upon, who
+have played their parts and passed off the stage, as if the sole purpose
+was the entertainment of some unseen spectator. When we reach human
+history, what wasted effort, what failures, what blind groping, what
+futile undertakings!--war, famine, pestilence, delaying progress or
+bringing to naught the wisdom of generations of men! Those who live in
+this age are witnessing in the terrible European war something analogous
+to the blind, wasteful fury of the elemental forces; millions of men who
+never saw one another, and who have not the shadow of a quarrel, engage
+in a life-and-death struggle, armed with all the aids that centuries of
+science and civilization can give them--a tragedy that darkens the very
+heavens and makes a mockery of all our age-old gospel of peace and good
+will to men. It is a catastrophe on a scale with the cataclysms of
+geologic time when whole races disappeared and the face of continents
+was changed. It seems that men in the aggregate, with all their science
+and religion, are no more exempt from the operation of cosmic laws than
+are the stocks and stones. Each party to this gigantic struggle declares
+that he is in it against his will; the fate that rules in the solar
+system seems to have them all in its grip; the working of forces and
+tendencies for which no man was responsible seems to have brought it
+about. Social communities grow in grace and good-fellowship, but
+governments in their relations to one another, and often in relation to
+their own subjects, are still barbarous. Men become christianized, but
+man is still a heathen, the victim of savage instincts. In this struggle
+one of the most admirable and efficient of nations, and one of the most
+solicitous for the lives and well-being of its citizens, is suddenly
+seized with a fury of destruction, hurling its soldiers to death as if
+they were only the waste of the fields, and trampling down other peoples
+whose geographic position placed them in their way as if they were
+merely vermin, throwing international morality to the winds, looking
+upon treaties as "scraps of paper," regarding themselves as the salt of
+the earth, the chosen of the Lord, appropriating the Supreme Being as
+did the colossal egotism of old Israel, and quickly getting down to the
+basic principle of savage life--that might makes right.
+
+Little wonder that the good people are asking, Have we lost faith? We
+may or we may not have lost faith, but can we not see that our faith
+does not give us a key to the problem? Our faith is founded on the old
+prescientific conception of a universe in which good and evil are
+struggling with each other, with a Supreme Being aiding and abetting the
+good. We fail to appreciate that the cosmic laws are no respecters of
+persons. Emerson says there is no god dare wrong a worm, but worms dare
+wrong one another, and there is no god dare take sides with either. The
+tides in the affairs of men are as little subject to human control as
+the tides of the sea and the air. We may fix the blame of the European
+war upon this government or upon that, but race antagonisms and
+geographical position are not matters of choice. An island empire, like
+England, is bound to be jealous of all rivals upon the sea, because her
+very life, when nations clash, depends upon her control of it; and an
+inland empire, like Germany, is bound to grow restless under the
+pressure of contiguous states of other races. A vast empire, like
+Russia, is always in danger of falling apart by its own weight. It is
+fused and consolidated by a turn of events that arouse the patriotic
+emotions of the whole people and unite them in a common enthusiasm.
+
+The evolution of nations is attended by the same contingencies, the same
+law of probability, the same law of the survival of the fit, as are
+organic bodies. I say the survival of the fit; there are degrees of
+fitness in the scale of life; the fit survive, and the fittest lead and
+dominate, as did the reptiles in Mesozoic time, and the mammals in
+Tertiary time. Among the mammals man is dominant because he is the
+fittest. Nations break up or become extinct when they are no longer fit,
+or equal to the exigencies of the struggles of life. The Roman Empire
+would still exist if it had been entirely fit. The causes of its
+unfitness form a long and intricate problem. Germany of to-day evidently
+looks upon herself as the dominant nation, the one fittest to survive,
+and she has committed herself to the desperate struggle of justifying
+her self-estimate. She tramples down weaker nations as we do the stubble
+of the fields. She would plough and harrow the world to plant her
+Prussian _Kultur_. This _Kultur_ is a mighty good product, but we
+outside of its pale think that French _Kultur_, and English _Kultur_,
+and American _Kultur_ are good products also, and equally fit to
+survive. We naturally object to being ploughed under. That Russian
+_Kultur_ has so far proved itself a vastly inferior product cannot be
+doubted, but the evolutionary processes will in time bring a finer and
+higher Russia out of this vast weltering and fermenting mass of
+humanity. In all these things impersonal laws and forces are at work,
+and the balance of power, if temporarily disturbed, is bound, sooner or
+later, to be restored just as it is in the inorganic realm.
+
+Evolution is creative, as Bergson contends. The wonder is that,
+notwithstanding the indifference of the elemental forces and the blind
+clashing of opposing tendencies among living forms,--a universe that
+seems run entirely on the trial-and-error principle,--evolution has gone
+steadily forward, a certain order and stability has been reached in the
+world of inert bodies and forces, and myriads of forms of wonderful
+fitness and beauty have been reached in the organic realm. Just as the
+water-system and the weather-system of the globe have worked themselves
+out on the hit-and-miss plan, but not without serious defects,--much too
+much water and heat at a few places, and much too little at a few
+others,--so the organic impulse, warred upon by the blind inorganic
+elements and preyed upon by the forms it gave rise to, has worked itself
+out and peopled the world as we see it peopled to-day--not with forms
+altogether admirable and lovely from our point of view, but so from the
+point of view of the whole. The forests get themselves planted by the
+go-as-you-please winds and currents, the pines in one place, the spruce,
+the oaks, the elms, the beeches, in another, all with a certain fitness
+and system. The waters gather themselves together in great bodies and
+breathe salubrity and fertility upon the land.
+
+A certain order and reasonableness emerges from the chaos and
+cross-purposes. There are harmony and cooeperation among the elemental
+forces, as well as strife and antagonism. Life gets on, for all groping
+and blundering. There is the inherent variability of living forms to
+begin with--the primordial push toward the development from within
+which, so far as we can see, is not fortuitous, but predestined; and
+there is the stream of influences from without, constantly playing upon
+and modifying the organism and taken advantage of by it.
+
+The essence of life is in adaptability; it goes into partnership with
+the forces and conditions that surround it. It is this trait which leads
+the teleological philosopher to celebrate the fitness of the environment
+when its fitness is a foregone conclusion. Shall we praise the fitness
+of the air for breathing, or of the water for drinking, or of the winds
+for filling our sails? If we cannot say explicitly, without speaking
+from our anthropomorphism, that there is a guiding intelligence in the
+evolution of living forms, we can at least say, I think, that the
+struggle for life is favored by the very constitution of the universe
+and that man in some inscrutable way was potential in the fiery nebula
+itself.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE NATURALIST'S VIEW OF LIFE
+
+
+I
+
+William James said that one of the privileges of a philosopher was to
+contradict other philosophers. I may add in the same spirit that one of
+the fatalities of many philosophers is, sooner or later, to contradict
+themselves. I do not know that James ever contradicted himself, but I
+have little doubt that a critical examination of his works would show
+that he sometimes did so; I remember that he said he often had trouble
+to make both ends of his philosophy meet. Any man who seeks to compass
+any of the fundamental problems with the little span of his finite mind,
+is bound at times to have trouble to make both ends meet. The man of
+science seldom has any such trouble with his problems; he usually knows
+what is the matter and forthwith seeks to remedy it. But the philosopher
+works with a much more intangible and elusive material, and is lucky if
+he is ever aware when both ends fail to meet.
+
+I have often wondered if Darwin, who was a great philosopher as well as
+a great man of science, saw or felt the contradiction between his theory
+of the origin of species through natural selection working upon
+fortuitous variations, and his statement, made in his old age, that he
+could not look upon man, with all his wonderful powers, as the result of
+mere chance. The result of chance man certainly is--is he not?--as are
+all other forms of life, if evolution is a mere mechanical process set
+going and kept going by the hit-and-miss action of the environment upon
+the organism, or by the struggle for existence. If evolution involves no
+intelligence in nature, no guiding or animating principle, then is not
+man an accidental outcome of the blind clashing and jolting of the
+material forces, as much so as the great stone face in the rocks which
+Hawthorne used so suggestively in one of his stories?
+
+I have wondered if Huxley was aware that both ends of his argument did
+not quite meet when he contended for the truth of determinism--that
+there is and can be no free or spontaneous volition; and at the same
+time set man apart from the cosmic order, and represented him as working
+his will upon it, crossing and reversing its processes. In one of his
+earlier essays, Huxley said that to the student of living things, as
+contrasted with the student of inert matter, the aspect of nature is
+reversed. "In living matter, incessant, and so far as we know,
+spontaneous, change is the rule, rest the exception, the anomaly, to be
+accounted for. Living things have no inertia, and tend to no
+equilibrium," except the equilibrium of death. This is good vitalistic
+doctrine, as far as it goes, yet Huxley saw no difference between the
+matter of life and other matter, except in the manner in which the atoms
+are aggregated. Probably the only difference between a diamond and a
+piece of charcoal, or between a pearl and an oyster-shell, is the manner
+in which the atoms are aggregated; but that the secret of life is in the
+peculiar compounding of the atoms or molecules--a spatial arrangement of
+them--is a harder proposition. It seems to me also that Haeckel involves
+himself in obvious contradictions when he ascribes will, sensation,
+inclination, dislike, though of a low order, to the atoms of matter; in
+fact, sees them as living beings with souls, and then denies soul, will,
+power of choice, and the like to their collective unity in the brain of
+man.
+
+A philosopher cannot well afford to assume the air of lofty indifference
+that the poet Whitman does when he asks, "Do I contradict myself? Very
+well, then, I contradict myself"; but he may take comfort in the thought
+that contradictions are often only apparent, and not real, as when two
+men standing on opposite sides of the earth seem to oppose each other,
+and yet their heads point to the same heavens, and their feet to the
+same terrestrial centre. The logic of the earth completely contradicts
+the ideas we draw from our experience with other globes, both our
+artificial globes and the globes in the forms of the sun and the moon
+that we see in the heavens. The earth has only one side, the outside,
+which is always the upper side; at the South Pole, as at the North, we
+are on the top side. I fancy the whole truth of any of the great
+problems, if we could see it, would reconcile all our half-truths, all
+the contradictions in our philosophy.
+
+In considering this problem of the mystery of living things, I have had
+a good deal of trouble in trying to make my inborn idealism go hand in
+hand with my inborn naturalism; but I am not certain that there is any
+real break or contradiction between them, only a surface one, and that
+deeper down the strata still unite them. Life seems beyond the capacity
+of inorganic nature to produce; and yet here is life in its myriad
+forms, here is the body and mind of man, and here is the world of
+inanimate matter out of which all living beings arise, and into which
+they sooner or later return; and we must either introduce a new
+principle to account for it all, or else hold to the idea that what is
+is natural--a legitimate outcome of the universal laws and processes
+that have been operating through all time. This last is the point of
+view of the present chapter,--the point of view of naturalism; not
+strictly the scientific view which aims to explain all life phenomena in
+terms of exact experimental science, but the larger, freer view of the
+open-air naturalist and literary philosopher. I cannot get rid of, or
+hold in abeyance, my inevitable idealism, if I would; neither can I do
+violence to my equally inevitable naturalism, but may I not hope to make
+the face of my naturalism beam with the light of the ideal--the light
+that never was in the physico-chemical order, and never can be there?
+
+
+II
+
+The naturalist cannot get away from the natural order, and he sees man,
+and all other forms of life, as an integral part of it--the order, which
+in inert matter is automatic and fateful, and which in living matter is
+prophetic and indeterminate; the course of one down the geologic ages,
+seeking only a mechanical repose, being marked by collisions and
+disruptions; the other in its course down the biologic ages seeking a
+vital and unstable repose, being marked by pain, failure, carnage,
+extinction, and ceaseless struggle with the physical order upon which it
+depends. Man has taken his chances in the clash of blind matter, and in
+the warfare of living forms. He has been the pet of no god, the favorite
+of no power on earth or in heaven. He is one of the fruits of the great
+cosmic tree, and is subject to the same hazards and failures as the
+fruit of all other trees. The frosts may nip him in the bud, the storms
+beat him down, foes of earth and air prey upon him, and hostile
+influences from all sides impede or mar him. The very forces that
+uphold him and furnish him his armory of tools and of power, will
+destroy him the moment he is off his guard. He is like the trainer of
+wild beasts who, at his peril, for one instant relaxes his mastery over
+them. Gravity, electricity, fire, flood, hurricane, will crush or
+consume him if his hand is unsteady or his wits tardy. Nature has dealt
+with him upon the same terms as with all other forms of life. She has
+shown him no favor. The same elements--the same water, air, lime, iron,
+sulphur, oxygen, carbon, and so on--make up his body and his brain as
+make up theirs, and the same make up theirs as are the constituents of
+the insensate rocks, soils, and clouds. The same elements, the same
+atoms and molecules, but a different order; the same solar energy, but
+working to other ends; the same life principle but lifted to a higher
+plane. How can we separate man from the total system of things, setting
+him upon one side and them upon another, making the relation of the two
+mechanical or accidental? It is only in thought, or in obedience to some
+creed or philosophy, that we do it. In life, in action, we unconsciously
+recognize ourselves as a part of Nature. Our success and well-being
+depend upon the closeness and spontaneousness of the relation.
+
+If all this is interpreted to mean that life, that the mind and soul of
+man, are of material origin, science does not shrink from the inference.
+Only the inference demands a newer and higher conception of matter--the
+conception that Tyndall expressed when he wrote the word with a capital
+M, and declared that Matter was "at bottom essentially mystical and
+transcendental"; that Goethe expressed when he called matter "the living
+garment of God"; and that Whitman expressed when he said that the soul
+and the body were one. The materialism of the great seers and prophets
+of science who penetrate into the true inwardness of matter, who see
+through the veil of its gross obstructive forms and behold it translated
+into pure energy, need disturb no one.
+
+In our religious culture we have beggared matter that we might exalt
+spirit; we have bankrupted earth that we might enrich heaven; we have
+debased the body that we might glorify the soul. But science has changed
+all this. Mankind can never again rest in the old crude dualism. The
+Devil has had his day, and the terrible Hebrew Jehovah has had his day;
+the divinities of this world are now having their day.
+
+The puzzle or the contradiction in the naturalistic view of life appears
+when we try to think of a being as a part of Nature, having his genesis
+in her material forces, who is yet able to master and direct Nature,
+reversing her processes and defeating her ends, opposing his will to her
+fatalism, his mercy to her cruelty--in short, a being who thinks,
+dreams, aspires, loves truth, justice, goodness, and sits in judgment
+upon the very gods he worships. Must he not bring a new force, an alien
+power? Can a part be greater than the whole? Can the psychic dominate
+the physical out of which it came? Again we have only to enlarge our
+conception of the physical--the natural--or make our faith measure up to
+the demands of reason. Our reason demands that the natural order be
+all-inclusive. Can our faith in the divinity of matter measure up to
+this standard? Not till we free ourselves from the inherited prejudices
+which have grown up from our everyday struggles with gross matter. We
+must follow the guidance of science till we penetrate this husk and see
+its real mystical and transcendental character, as Tyndall did.
+
+When we have followed matter from mass to molecule, from molecule to
+atom, from atom to electron, and seen it in effect dematerialized,--seen
+it in its fourth or ethereal, I had almost said spiritual, state,--when
+we have grasped the wonder of radio-activity, and the atomic
+transformations that attend it, we shall have a conception of the
+potencies and possibilities of matter that robs scientific materialism
+of most of its ugliness. Of course, no deductions of science can satisfy
+our longings for something kindred to our own spirits in the universe.
+But neither our telescopes nor our microscopes reveal such a reality. Is
+this longing only the result of our inevitable anthropomorphism, or is
+it the evidence of things unseen, the substance of things hoped for, the
+prophecy of our kinship with the farthest star? Can soul arise out of a
+soulless universe?
+
+Though the secret of life is under our feet, yet how strange and
+mysterious it seems! It draws our attention away from matter. It arises
+among the inorganic elements like a visitant from another sphere. It is
+a new thing in the world. Consciousness is a new thing, yet Huxley makes
+it one of his trinity of realities--matter, energy, and consciousness.
+We are so immersed in these realities that we do not see the divinity
+they embody. We call that sacred and divine which is far off and
+unattainable. Life and mind are so impossible of explanation in terms of
+matter and energy, that it is not to be wondered at that mankind has so
+long looked upon their appearance upon this earth as a miraculous event.
+But until science opened our eyes we did not know that the celestial and
+the terrestrial are one, and that we are already in the heavens among
+the stars. When we emancipate ourselves from the bondage of wont and
+use, and see with clear vision our relations to the Cosmos, all our
+ideas of materialism and spiritualism are made over, and we see how the
+two are one; how life and death play into each other's hands, and how
+the whole truth of things cannot be compassed by any number of finite
+minds.
+
+
+III
+
+When we are bold enough to ask the question, Is life an addition to
+matter or an evolution from matter? how all these extra-scientific
+theories about life as a separate entity wilt and fade away! If we know
+anything about the ways of creative energy, we know that they are not as
+our ways; we know its processes bear no analogy to the linear and
+external doings of man. Creative energy works from within; it identifies
+itself with, and is inseparable from, the element in which it works. I
+know that in this very statement I am idealizing the creative energy,
+but my reader will, I trust, excuse this inevitable anthropomorphism.
+The way of the creative energy is the way of evolution. When we begin to
+introduce things, when we begin to separate the two orders, the vital
+and the material, or, as Bergson says, when we begin to think of things
+created, and of a thing that creates, we are not far from the state of
+mind of our childhood, and of the childhood of the race. We are not far
+from the Mosaic account of creation. Life appears as an introduction,
+man and his soul as introductions.
+
+Our reason, our knowledge of the method of Nature, declare for
+evolution; because here we are, here is this amazing world of life about
+us, and here it goes on through the action and interaction of purely
+physical and chemical forces. Life seems as natural as day and night,
+as the dews and the rain. Our studies of the past history of the globe
+reveal the fact that life appeared upon a cooling planet when the
+temperature was suitable, and when its basic elements, water and carbon
+dioxide, were at hand. How it began, whether through insensible changes
+in the activities of inert matter, lasting whole geologic ages, or by a
+sudden transformation at many points on the earth's surface, we can
+never know. But science can see no reason for believing that its
+beginning was other than natural; it was inevitable from the
+constitution of matter itself. Moreover, since the law of evolution
+seems of universal application, and affords the key to more great
+problems than any other generalization of the human mind, one would say
+on _a priori_ grounds that life is an evolution, that its genesis is to
+be sought in the inherent capacities and potentialities of matter
+itself. How else could it come? Science cannot go outside of matter and
+its laws for an explanation of any phenomena that appear in matter. It
+goes inside of matter instead, and in its mysterious molecular
+attractions and repulsions, in the whirl and dance of the atoms and
+electrons, in their emanations and transformations, in their amazing
+potencies and activities, sees, or seems to see, the secret of the
+origin of life itself. But this view is distasteful to a large number of
+thinking persons. Many would call it frank materialism, and declare
+that it is utterly inadequate to supply the spiritual and ideal
+background which is the strength and solace of our human life.
+
+
+IV
+
+The lay mind can hardly appreciate the necessity under which the man of
+science feels to account for all the phenomena of life in terms of the
+natural order. To the scientist the universe is complete in itself. He
+can admit of no break or discontinuity anywhere. Threads of relation,
+visible and invisible,--chemical, mechanical, electric, magnetic, solar,
+lunar, stellar, geologic, biologic,--forming an intricate web of subtle
+forces and influences, bind all things, living and dead, into a cosmic
+unity. Creation is one, and that one is symbolized by the sphere which
+rests forever on itself, which is whole at every point, which holds all
+forms, which reconciles all contradictions, which has no beginning and
+no ending, which has no upper and no under, and all of whose lines are
+fluid and continuous. The disruptions and antagonisms which we fancy we
+see are only the result of our limited vision; nature is not at war with
+itself; there is no room or need for miracle; there is no outside to the
+universe, because there are no bounds to matter or spirit; all is
+inside; deep beneath deep, height above height, and this mystery and
+miracle that we call life must arise out of the natural order in the
+course of time as inevitably as the dew forms and the rain falls. When
+the rains and the dews and the snows cease to fall,--a time which
+science predicts,--then life, as we know it, must inevitably vanish from
+the earth. Human life is a physical phenomenon, and though it involves,
+as we believe, a psychic or non-physical principle, it is still not
+exempt from the operation of the universal physical laws. It came by
+them or through them, and it must go by them or through them.
+
+The rigidly scientific mind, impressed with all these things as the lay
+mind cannot be, used to the searching laboratory methods, and familiar
+with the phenomenon of life in its very roots, as it were, dealing with
+the wonders of chemical compounds, and the forces that lurk in molecules
+and atoms, seeing in the cosmic universe, and in the evolution of the
+earth, only the operation of mechanical and chemical principles; seeing
+the irrefragable law of the correlation and the conservation of forces;
+tracing consciousness and all our changes in mental states to changes in
+the brain substance; drilled in methods of proof by experimentation;
+knowing that the same number of ultimate atoms may be so combined or
+married as to produce compounds that differ as radically as alcohol and
+ether,--conversant with all these things, and more, I say,--the strictly
+scientific mind falls naturally and inevitably into the mechanistic
+conception of all life phenomena.
+
+Science traces the chain of cause and effect everywhere and finds no
+break. It follows down animal life till it merges in the vegetable,
+though it cannot put its finger or its microscope on the point where one
+ends and the other begins. It finds forms that partake of the
+characteristics of both. It is reasonable to expect that the vegetable
+merges into the mineral by the same insensible degrees, and that the one
+becomes the other without any real discontinuity. The change, if we may
+call it such, probably takes place in the interior world of matter among
+the primordial atoms, where only the imagination can penetrate. In that
+sleep of the ultimate corpuscle, what dreams may come, what miracles may
+be wrought, what transformations take place! When I try to think of life
+as a mode of motion in matter, I seem to see the particles in a mystic
+dance, a whirling maze of motions, the infinitely little people taking
+hold of hands, changing partners, facing this way and that, doing all
+sorts of impossible things, like jumping down one another's throats, or
+occupying one another's bodies, thrilled and vibrating at an
+inconceivable rate.
+
+The theological solution of this problem of life fails more and more to
+satisfy thinking men of to-day. Living things are natural phenomena, and
+we feel that they must in some way be an outcome of the natural order.
+Science is more and more familiarizing our minds with the idea that the
+universe is a universe, a oneness; that its laws are continuous. We
+follow the chemistry of it to the farthest stars and there is no serious
+break or exception; it is all of one stuff. We follow the mechanics of
+it into the same abysmal depths, and there are no breaks or exceptions.
+The biology of it we cannot follow beyond our own little corner of the
+universe; indeed, we have no proof that there is any biology anywhere
+else. But if there is, it must be similar to our own. There is only one
+kind of electricity (though two phases of it), only one kind of light
+and heat, one kind of chemical affinity, in the universe; and hence only
+one kind of life. Looked at in its relation to the whole, life appears
+like a transient phenomenon of matter. I will not say accidental; it
+seems inseparably bound up with the cosmic processes, but, I may say,
+fugitive, superficial, circumscribed. Life comes and goes; it penetrates
+but a little way into the earth; it is confined to a certain range of
+temperature. Beyond a certain degree of cold, on the one hand, it does
+not appear; and beyond a certain degree of heat, on the other, it is cut
+off. Without water or moisture, it ceases; and without air, it is not.
+It has evidently disappeared from the moon, and probably from the
+inferior planets, and it is doubtful if it has yet appeared on any of
+the superior planets, save Mars.
+
+Life comes to matter as the flowers come in the spring,--when the time
+is ripe for it,--and it disappears when the time is over-ripe. Man
+appears in due course and has his little day upon the earth, but that
+day must as surely come to an end. Yet can we conceive of the end of the
+physical order? the end of gravity? or of cohesion? The air may
+disappear, the water may disappear, combustion may cease; but oxygen,
+hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon will continue somewhere.
+
+
+V
+
+Science is the redeemer of the physical world. It opens our eyes to its
+true inwardness, and purges it of the coarse and brutal qualities with
+which, in our practical lives, it is associated. It has its inner world
+of activities and possibilities of which our senses give us no hint.
+This inner world of molecules and atoms and electrons, thrilled and
+vibrating with energy, the infinitely little, the almost infinitely
+rapid, in the bosom of the infinitely vast and distant and
+automatic--what a revelation it all is! what a glimpse into "Nature's
+infinite book of secrecy"!
+
+Our senses reveal to us but one kind of motion--mass motion--the change
+of place of visible bodies. But there is another motion in all matter
+which our senses do not reveal to us as motion--molecular vibration, or
+the thrill of the atoms. At the heart of the most massive rock this
+whirl of the atoms or corpuscles is going on. If our ears were fine
+enough to hear it, probably every rock and granite monument would sing,
+as did Memnon, when the sun shone upon it. This molecular vibration is
+revealed to us as heat, light, sound, electricity. Heat is only a mode
+of this invisible motion of the particles of matter. Mass motion is
+quickly converted into this molecular motion when two bodies strike each
+other. May not life itself be the outcome of a peculiar whirl of the
+ultimate atoms of matter?
+
+Says Professor Gotch, as quoted by J. Arthur Thomson in his
+"Introduction to Science": "To the thought of a scientific mind the
+universe with all its suns and worlds is throughout one seething welter
+of modes of motion, playing in space, playing in ether, playing in all
+existing matter, playing in all living things, playing, therefore, in
+ourselves." Physical science, as Professor Thomson says, leads us from
+our static way of looking at things to the dynamic way. It teaches us to
+regard the atom, not as a fixed and motionless structure, like the
+bricks in a wall, but as a centre of ever-moving energy; it sees the
+whole universe is in a state of perpetual flux, a flowing stream of
+creative energy out of which life arises as one of the manifestations of
+this energy.
+
+When we have learned all that science can tell us about the earth, is it
+not more rather than less wonderful? When we know all it can tell us
+about the heavens above, or about the sea, or about our own bodies, or
+about a flower, or a bird, or a tree, or a cloud, are they less
+beautiful and wonderful? The mysteries of generation, of inheritance, of
+cell life, are rather enhanced by science.
+
+
+VI
+
+When the man of science seeks to understand and explain the world in
+which we live, he guards himself against seeing double, or seeing two
+worlds instead of one, as our unscientific fathers did--an immaterial or
+spiritual world surrounding and interpenetrating the physical world, or
+the supernatural enveloping and directing the natural. He sees but one
+world, and that a world complete in itself; surrounded, it is true, by
+invisible forces, and holding immeasured and immeasurable potencies; a
+vastly more complex and wonderful world than our fathers ever dreamed
+of; a fruit, as it were, of the great sidereal tree, bound by natal
+bonds to myriads of other worlds, of one stuff with them, ahead or
+behind them in its ripening, but still complete in itself, needing no
+miracle to explain it, no spirits or demons to account for its
+processes, not even its vital processes.
+
+In the light of what he knows of the past history of the earth, the man
+of science sees with his mind's eye the successive changes that have
+taken place in it; he sees the globe a mass of incandescent matter
+rolling through space; he sees the crust cooling and hardening; he sees
+the waters appear, the air and the soil appear, he sees the clouds begin
+to form and the rain to fall, he sees living things appear in the
+waters, then upon the land, and in the air; he sees the two forms of
+life arise, the vegetable and the animal, the latter standing upon the
+former; he sees more and more complex forms of both vegetable and animal
+arise and cover the earth. They all appear in the course of the geologic
+ages on the surface of the earth; they arise out of it; they are a part
+of it; they come naturally; no hand reaches down from heaven and places
+them there; they are not an addendum; they are not a sudden creation;
+they are an evolution; they were potential in the earth before they
+arose out of it. The earth ripened, her crust mellowed, and thickened,
+her airs softened and cleared, her waters were purified, and in due time
+her finer fruits were evolved, and, last of all, man arose. It was all
+one process. There was no miracle, no first day of creation; all were
+days of creation. Brooded by the sun, the earth hatched her offspring;
+the promise and the potency of all terrestrial life was in the earth
+herself; her womb was fertile from the first. All that we call the
+spiritual, the divine, the celestial, were hers, because man is hers.
+Our religions and our philosophies and our literatures are hers; man is
+a part of the whole system of things; he is not an alien, nor an
+accident, nor an interloper; he is here as the rains, the dews, the
+flowers, the rocks, the soil, the trees, are here. He appeared when the
+time was ripe, and he will disappear when the time is over-ripe. He is
+of the same stuff as the ground he walks upon; there is no better stuff
+in the heavens above him, nor in the depths below him, than sticks to
+his own ribs. The celestial and the terrestrial forces unite and work
+together in him, as in all other creatures. We cannot magnify man
+without magnifying the universe of which he is a part; and we cannot
+belittle it without belittling him.
+
+Now we can turn all this about and look upon it as mankind looked upon
+it in the prescientific ages, and as so many persons still look upon it,
+and think of it all as the work of external and higher powers. We can
+think of the earth as the footstool of some god, or the sport of some
+demon; we can people the earth and the air with innumerable spirits,
+high and low; we can think of life as something apart from matter. But
+science will not, cannot follow us; it cannot discredit the world it has
+disclosed--I had almost said, the world it has created. Science has made
+us at home in the universe. It has visited the farthest stars with its
+telescope and spectroscope, and finds we are all akin. It has sounded
+the depths of matter with its analysis, and it finds nothing alien to
+our own bodies. It sees motion everywhere, motion within motion,
+transformation, metamorphosis everywhere, energy everywhere, currents
+and counter-currents everywhere, ceaseless change everywhere; it finds
+nothing in the heavens more spiritual, more mysterious, more celestial,
+more godlike, than it finds upon this earth. This does not imply that
+evolution may not have progressed farther upon other worlds, and given
+rise to a higher order of intelligences than here; it only implies that
+creation is one, and that the same forces, the same elements and
+possibilities, exist everywhere.
+
+
+VII
+
+Give free rein to our anthropomorphic tendencies, and we fill the world
+with spirits, good and bad--bad in war, famine, pestilence, disease;
+good in all the events and fortunes that favor us. Early man did this on
+all occasions; he read his own hopes and fears and passions into all the
+operations of nature. Our fathers did it in many things; good people of
+our own time do it in exceptional instances, and credit any good fortune
+to Providence. Men high in the intellectual and philosophical world,
+still invoke something antithetical to matter, to account for the
+appearance of life on the planet.
+
+It may be justly urged that the effect upon our habits of thought of the
+long ages during which this process has been going on, leading us to
+differentiate matter and spirit and look upon them as two opposite
+entities, hindering or contending with each other,--one heavenly, the
+other earthly, one everlasting, the other perishable, one the supreme
+good, the other the seat and parent of all that is evil,--the cumulative
+effect of this habit of thought in the race-mind is, I say, not easily
+changed or overcome. We still think, and probably many of us always will
+think, of spirit as something alien to matter, something mystical,
+transcendental, and not of this world. We look upon matter as gross,
+obstructive, and the enemy of the spirit. We do not know how we are
+going to get along without it, but we solace ourselves with the thought
+that by and by, in some other, non-material world, we shall get along
+without it, and experience a great expansion of life by reason of our
+emancipation from it. Our practical life upon this planet is more or
+less a struggle with gross matter; our senses apprehend it coarsely; of
+its true inwardness they tell us nothing; of the perpetual change and
+transformation of energy going on in bodies about us they tell us
+nothing; of the wonders and potencies of matter as revealed in
+radio-activity, in the X-ray, in chemical affinity and polarity, they
+tell us nothing; of the all-pervasive ether, without which we could not
+see or live at all, they tell us nothing. In fact we live and move and
+have our being in a complex of forces and tendencies of which, even by
+the aid of science, we but see as through a glass darkly. Of the
+effluence of things, the emanations from the minds and bodies of our
+friends, and from other living forms about us, from the heavens above
+and from the earth below, our daily lives tell us nothing, any more than
+our eyes tell us of the invisible rays in the sun's spectrum, or than
+our ears tell us of the murmurs of the life-currents in growing things.
+Science alone unveils the hidden wonders and sleepless activities of the
+world forces that play through us and about us. It alone brings the
+heavens near, and reveals the brotherhood or sisterhood of worlds. It
+alone makes man at home in the universe, and shows us how many friendly
+powers wait upon him day and night. It alone shows him the glories and
+the wonders of the voyage we are making upon this ship in the stellar
+infinitude, and that, whatever the port, we shall still be on familiar
+ground--we cannot get away from home.
+
+There is always an activity in inert matter that we little suspect. See
+the processes going on in the stratified rocks that suggest or parody
+those of life. See the particles of silica that are diffused through the
+limestone, hunting out each other and coming together in concretions and
+forming flint or chert nodules; or see them in the process of
+petrifaction slowly building up a tree of chalcedony or onyx in place of
+a tree of wood, repeating every cell, every knot, every worm-hole--dead
+matter copying exactly a form of living matter; or see the phenomenon of
+crystallization everywhere; see the solution of salt mimicking, as
+Tyndall says, the architecture of Egypt, building up miniature
+pyramids, terrace upon terrace, from base to apex, forming a series of
+steps like those up which the traveler in Egypt is dragged by his
+guides! We can fancy, if we like, these infinitesimal structures built
+by an invisible population which swarms among the constituent molecules,
+controlled and coerced by some invisible matter, says Tyndall. This
+might be called literature, or poetry, or religion, but it would not be
+science; science says that these salt pyramids are the result of the
+play of attraction and repulsion among the salt molecules themselves;
+that they are self-poised and self-quarried; it goes further than that
+and says that the quality we call saltness is the result of a certain
+definite arrangement of their ultimate atoms of matter; that the
+qualities of things as they affect our senses--hardness, softness,
+sweetness, bitterness--are the result of molecular motion and
+combination among the ultimate atoms. All these things seem on the
+threshold of life, waiting in the antechamber, as it were; to-morrow
+they will be life, or, as Tyndall says, "Incipient life, as it were,
+manifests itself throughout the whole of what is called inorganic
+nature."
+
+
+VIII
+
+The question of the nature and origin of life is a kind of perpetual
+motion question in biology. Life without antecedent life, so far as
+human experience goes, is an impossibility, and motion without previous
+motion, is equally impossible. Yet, while science shows us that this
+last is true among ponderable bodies where friction occurs, it is not
+true among the finer particles of matter, where friction does not exist.
+Here perpetual or spontaneous motion is the rule. The motions of the
+molecules of gases and liquids, and their vibrations in solids, are
+beyond the reach of our unaided senses, yet they are unceasing. By
+analogy we may infer that while living bodies, as we know them, do not
+and cannot originate spontaneously, yet the movement that we call life
+may and probably does take place spontaneously in the ultimate particles
+of matter. But can atomic energy be translated into the motion of
+ponderable bodies, or mass energy? In like manner can, or does, this
+potential life of the world of atoms and electrons give rise to
+organized living beings?
+
+This distrust of the physical forces, or our disbelief in their ability
+to give rise to life, is like a survival in us of the Calvinistic creed
+of our fathers. The world of inert matter is dead in trespasses and sin
+and must be born again before it can enter the kingdom of the organic.
+We must supplement the natural forces with the spiritual, or the
+supernatural, to get life. The common or carnal nature, like the natural
+man, must be converted, breathed upon by the non-natural or divine,
+before it can rise to the plane of life--the doctrine of Paul carried
+into the processes of nature.
+
+The scientific mind sees in nature an infinitely complex mechanism
+directed to no special human ends, but working towards universal ends.
+It sees in the human body an infinite number of cell units building up
+tissues and organs,--muscles, nerves, bones, cartilage,--a living
+machine of infinite complexity; but what shapes and cooerdinates the
+parts, how the cells arose, how consciousness arose, how the mind is
+related to the body, how or why the body acts as a unit--on these
+questions science can throw no light. With all its mastery of the laws
+of heredity, of cytology, and of embryology, it cannot tell why a man is
+a man, and a dog is a dog. No cell-analysis will give the secret; no
+chemical conjuring with the elements will reveal why in the one case
+they build up a head of cabbage, and in the other a head of Plato.
+
+It must be admitted that the scientific conception of the universe robs
+us of something--it is hard to say just what--that we do not willingly
+part with; yet who can divest himself of this conception? And the
+scientific conception of the nature of life, hard and unfamiliar as it
+may seem in its mere terms, is difficult to get away from. Life must
+arise through the play and transformations of matter and energy that are
+taking place all around us; though it seems a long and impossible road
+from mere chemistry to the body and soul of man. But if life, with all
+that has come out of it, did not come by way of matter and energy, by
+what way did it come? Must we have recourse to the so-called
+supernatural?--as Emerson's line puts it,--
+
+    "When half-gods go, the gods arrive."
+
+When our traditional conception of matter as essentially vulgar and
+obstructive and the enemy of the spirit gives place to the new
+scientific conception of it as at bottom electrical and all-potent, we
+may find the poet's great line come true, and that for a thing to be
+natural, is to be divine. For my own part, I do not see how we can get
+intelligence out of matter unless we postulate intelligence in matter.
+Any system of philosophy that sees in the organic world only a
+fortuitous concourse of chemical atoms, repels me, though the
+contradiction here implied is not easily cleared up. The theory of life
+as a chemical reaction and nothing more does not interest me, but I am
+attracted by that conception of life which, while binding it to the
+material order, sees in the organic more than the physics and chemistry
+of the inorganic--call it whatever name you will--vitalism, idealism, or
+dualism.
+
+In our religious moods, we may speak, as Theodore Parker did, of the
+universe as a "handful of dust which God enchants," or we may speak of
+it, as Goethe did, as "the living garment of God"; but as men of
+science we can see it only as a vast complex of forces, out of which man
+has arisen, and of which he forms a part. We are not to forget that we
+are a part of it, and that the more we magnify ourselves, the more we
+magnify it; that its glory is our glory, and our glory its glory,
+because we are its children. In some way utterly beyond the reach of
+science to explain, or of philosophy to confirm, we have come out of it,
+and all we are or can be, is, or has been, potential in it.
+
+
+IX
+
+The evolution of life is, of course, bound up with the evolution of the
+world. As the globe has ripened and matured, life has matured; higher
+and higher forms--forms with larger and larger brains and more and more
+complex nerve mechanisms--have appeared.
+
+Physicists teach us that the evolution of the primary
+elements--hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and the
+like--takes place in a solar body as the body cools. As temperature
+decreases, one after another of the chemical elements makes its
+appearance, the simpler elements appearing first, and the more complex
+compounds appearing last, all apparently having their origin in some
+simple parent element. It appears as if the evolution of life upon the
+globe had followed the same law and had waited upon the secular cooling
+of the earth.
+
+Does not a man imply a cooler planet and a greater depth and refinement
+of soil than a dinosaur? Only after a certain housecleaning and
+purification of the elements do higher forms appear; the vast
+accumulation of Silurian limestone must have hastened the age of fishes.
+The age of reptiles waited for the clearing of the air of the burden of
+carbon dioxide. The age of mammals awaited the deepening and the
+enrichment of the soil and the stability of the earth's crust. Who knows
+upon what physical conditions of the earth's elements the brain of man
+was dependent? Its highest development has certainly taken place in a
+temperate climate. There can be little doubt that beyond a certain point
+the running-down of the earth-temperature will result in a running-down
+of life till it finally goes out. Life is confined to a very narrow
+range of temperature. If we were to translate degrees into miles and
+represent the temperature of the hottest stars, which is put at 30,000
+degrees, by a line 30,000 miles long, then the part of the line marking
+the limits of life would be approximately three hundred miles.
+
+Life does not appear in a hard, immobile, utterly inert world, but in a
+world thrilling with energy and activity, a world of ceaseless
+transformations of energy, of radio-activity, of electro-magnetic
+currents, of perpetual motion in its ultimate particles, a world whose
+heavens are at times hung with rainbows, curtained with tremulous
+shifting auroras, and veined and illumined with forked lightnings, a
+world of rolling rivers and heaving seas, activity, physical and
+chemical, everywhere. On such a world life appeared, bringing no new
+element or force, but setting up a new activity in matter, an activity
+that tends to check and control the natural tendency to the dissipation
+and degradation of energy. The question is, Did it arise through some
+transformation of the existing energy, or out of the preexisting
+conditions, or was it supplementary to them, an addition from some
+unknown source? Was it a miraculous or a natural event? We shall answer
+according to our temperaments.
+
+One sees with his mind's eye this stream of energy, which we name the
+material universe, flowing down the endless cycles of time; at a certain
+point in its course, a change comes over its surface; what we call life
+appears, and assumes many forms; at a point farther along in its course,
+life disappears, and the eternal river flows on regardless, till, at
+some other point, the same changes take place again. Life is inseparable
+from this river of energy, but it is not coextensive with it, either in
+time or in space.
+
+In midsummer what river-men call "the blossoming of the water" takes
+place in the Hudson River; the water is full of minute vegetable
+organisms; they are seasonal and temporary; they are born of the
+midsummer heats. By and by the water is clear again. Life in the
+universe seems as seasonal and fugitive as this blossoming of the
+water. More and more does science hold us to the view of the unity of
+nature--that the universe of life and matter and force is all natural or
+all supernatural, it matters little which you call it, but it is not
+both. One need not go away from his own doorstep to find mysteries
+enough to last him a lifetime, but he will find them in his own body, in
+the ground upon which he stands, not less than in his mind, and in the
+invisible forces that play around him. We may marvel how the delicate
+color and perfume of the flower could come by way of the root and stalk
+of the plant, or how the crude mussel could give birth to the
+rainbow-tinted pearl, or how the precious metals and stones arise from
+the flux of the baser elements, or how the ugly worm wakes up and finds
+itself a winged creature of the air; yet we do not invoke the
+supernatural to account for these things.
+
+It is certain that in the human scale of values the spirituality of man
+far transcends anything in the animal or physical world, but that even
+that came by the road of evolution, is, indeed, the flowering of ruder
+and cruder powers and attributes of the life below us, I cannot for a
+moment doubt. Call it a transmutation or a metamorphosis, if you will;
+it is still within the domain of the natural. The spiritual always has
+its root and genesis in the physical. We do not degrade the spiritual in
+such a conception; we open our eyes to the spirituality of the
+physical. And this is what science has always been doing and is doing
+more and more--making us familiar with marvelous and transcendent powers
+that hedge us about and enter into every act of our lives. The more we
+know matter, the more we know mind; the more we know nature, the more we
+know God; the more familiar we are with the earth forces, the more
+intimate will be our acquaintance with the celestial forces.
+
+
+X
+
+When we speak of the gulf that separates the living from the non-living,
+are we not thinking of the higher forms of life only? Are we not
+thinking of the far cry it is from man to inorganic nature? When we get
+down to the lowest organism, is the gulf so impressive? Under the
+scrutiny of biologic science the gulf that separates the animal from the
+vegetable all but vanishes, and the two seem to run together. The chasm
+between the lowest vegetable forms and unorganized matter is evidently a
+slight affair. The state of unorganized protoplasm which Haeckel named
+the Monera, that precedes the development of that architect of life, the
+cell, can hardly be more than one remove from inert matter. By
+insensible molecular changes and transformations of energy, the miracle
+of living matter takes place. We can conceive of life arising only
+through these minute avenues, or in the invisible, molecular
+constitution of matter itself. What part the atoms and electrons, and
+the energy they bear, play in it we shall never know. Even if we ever
+succeed in bringing the elements together in our laboratories so that
+there living matter appears, shall we then know the secret of life?
+
+After we have got the spark of life kindled, how are we going to get all
+the myriad forms of life that swarm upon the earth? How are we going to
+get man with physics and chemistry alone? How are we going to get this
+tremendous drama of evolution out of mere protoplasm from the bottom of
+the old geologic seas? Of course, only by making protoplasm creative,
+only by conceiving as potential in it all that we behold coming out of
+it. We imagine it equal to the task we set before it; the task is
+accomplished; therefore protoplasm was all-sufficient. I am not
+postulating any extra-mundane power or influence; I am only stating the
+difficulties which the idealist experiences when he tries to see life in
+its nature and origin as the scientific mind sees it. Animal life and
+vegetable life have a common physical basis in protoplasm, and all their
+different forms are mere aggregations of cells which are constituted
+alike and behave alike in each, and yet in the one case they give rise
+to trees, and in the other they give rise to man. Science is powerless
+to penetrate this mystery, and philosophy can only give its own elastic
+interpretation. Why consciousness should be born of cell structure in
+one form of life and not in another, who shall tell us? Why matter in
+the brain should think, and in the cabbage only grow, is a question.
+
+The naturalist has not the slightest doubt that the mind of man was
+evolved from some order of animals below him that had less mind, and
+that the mind of this order was evolved from that of a still lower
+order, and so on down the scale till we reach a point where the animal
+and vegetable meet and blend, and the vegetable mind, if we may call it
+such, passed into the animal, and still downward till the vegetable is
+evolved from the mineral. If to believe this is to be a monist, then
+science is monistic; it accepts the transformation or metamorphosis of
+the lower into the higher from the bottom of creation to the top, and
+without any break of the causal sequence. There has been no miracle,
+except in the sense that all life is a miracle. Of how the organic rose
+out of the inorganic, we can form no mental image; the intellect cannot
+bridge the chasm; but that such is the fact, there can be no doubt.
+There is no solution except that life is latent or potential in matter,
+but these again are only words that cover a mystery.
+
+I do not see why there may not be some force latent in matter that we
+may call the vital force, physical force transformed and heightened, as
+justifiably as we can postulate a chemical force latent in matter. The
+chemical force underlies and is the basis of the vital force. There is
+no life without chemism, but there is chemism without life.
+
+We have to have a name for the action and reaction of the primary
+elements upon one another and we call it chemical affinity; we have to
+have a name for their behavior in building up organic bodies, and we
+call it vitality or vitalism.
+
+The rigidly scientific man sees no need of the conception of a new form
+or kind of force; the physico-chemical forces as we see them in action
+all about us are adequate to do the work, so that it seems like a
+dispute about names. But my mind has to form a new conception of these
+forces to bridge the chasm between the organic and the inorganic; not a
+quantitative but a qualitative change is demanded, like the change in
+the animal mind to make it the human mind, an unfolding into a higher
+plane.
+
+Whether the evolution of the human mind from the animal was by
+insensible gradations, or by a few sudden leaps, who knows? The animal
+brain began to increase in size in Tertiary times, and seems to have
+done so suddenly, but the geologic ages were so long that a change in
+one hundred thousand years would seem sudden. "The brains of some
+species increase one hundred per cent." The mammal brain greatly
+outstripped the reptile brain. Was Nature getting ready for man?
+
+The air begins at once to act chemically upon the blood in the lungs of
+the newly born, and the gastric juices to act chemically upon the food
+as soon as there is any in the stomach of the newly born, and breathing
+and swallowing are both mechanical acts; but what is it that breathes
+and swallows, and profits by it? a machine?
+
+Maybe the development of life, and its upward tendency toward higher and
+higher forms, is in some way the result of the ripening of the earth,
+its long steeping in the sea of sidereal influences. The earth is not
+alone, it is not like a single apple on a tree; there are many apples on
+the tree, and there are many trees in the orchard.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Adaptation, 184, 215, 216.
+
+Alpha rays, 60, 199.
+
+Aquosity, 127, 128, 141-143.
+
+Aristotle, 240.
+
+Asphalt lake, 123.
+
+Atoms, different groupings of, 56-60;
+  weighed and counted, 60, 61;
+  indivisibility, 61;
+  the hydrogen atom, 65;
+  chemical affinity, 193-195;
+  photography of, 199, 200;
+  form, 203;
+  atomic energy, 204;
+  qualities and properties of bodies in their keeping, 204;
+  unchanging character, 205, 206;
+  rarity of free atoms, 209;
+  mystery of combination, 210.
+
+Autolysis, 169.
+
+
+Balfour, Arthur James, on Bergson's "Evolution Creatrice," 15.
+
+Bees, the spirit of the hive, 82.
+
+Benton, Joel, quoted, 70.
+
+Bergson, Henri, 129, 173, 263;
+  on light and the eye, 5;
+  his view of life, 14-16, 27-29, 221, 237, 238;
+  on the need of philosophy, 85, 86;
+  on life on other planets, 87;
+  his method, 109, 110;
+  the key to his "Creative Evolution," 132;
+  on life as a psychic principle, 162;
+  his book as literature, 238.
+
+Beta rays, 61, 199, 201.
+
+Biogenesis, 25. _See also_ Life.
+
+Biophores, 217.
+
+Body, the, elements of, 38, 39;
+  the chemist in, 152, 153;
+  intelligence of, 153, 154;
+  a community of cells, 157, 158;
+  viewed as a machine, 212-214, 224.
+
+Brain, evolution of, 288.
+
+Breathing, mechanics and chemistry of, 50-54, 213.
+
+Brooks, William Keith, quoted, 128, 236.
+
+Brown, Robert, 191;
+  the Brunonian movement, 167, 172, 191.
+
+Brunonian movement, 167, 172, 191.
+
+Butler, Bishop, imaginary debate with Lucretius, 219, 220.
+
+
+Carbon, 38, 56, 59;
+  importance, 208.
+
+Carbonic-acid gas, 52, 53.
+
+Carrel, Dr. Alexis, 98, 148.
+
+Catalysers, 135, 136.
+
+Cell, the, 83-85, 90, 96, 97, 180;
+  Wilson on, 95;
+  living after the death of the body, 98;
+  Prof. Benjamin Moore on, 107;
+  nature of, 113;
+  aimless multiplication, 148, 233;
+  the unit of life, 156;
+  communistic activity, 157, 158, 184;
+  a world in little, 170;
+  mystery of, 175;
+  different degrees of irritability, 216, 217.
+
+Changes in matter, 131, 133.
+
+Chemist, in the body, 152, 153.
+
+Chemistry, the silent world of, 49-54;
+  wonders worked by varying arrangement of atoms, 56-60;
+  leads up to life, 188;
+  a new world for the imagination, 189-192;
+  chemical affinity, 193-195;
+  various combinations of elements, 205-208;
+  organic compounds, 209;
+  mystery of chemical combinations, 210;
+  chemical changes, 210, 211;
+  powerless to trace relationships between different forms
+          of life, 231, 232;
+  cannot account for differences in organisms, 233, 234.
+
+Chlorophyll, 77, 113, 168, 169, 177, 235.
+
+Colloids, 76, 108, 135, 136.
+
+Conn, H. W., on mechanism, 91-94.
+
+Consciousness, Huxley on, 95, 181, 262.
+
+Corpuscles, speed in the ether, 65.
+
+Creative energy, immanent in matter, 9, 21;
+  its methods, 263.
+
+Crystallization, 276, 277.
+
+Czapek, Frederick, on vital forces, 133, 152;
+  on life, 164, 166, 169;
+  on enzymes in living bodies, 167.
+
+Darwin, Charles, quoted, 9;
+  on force of growing radicles, 19;
+  a contradiction in his philosophy, 254, 255.
+
+Electricity, in the constitution of matter, 46-49;
+  a state of the ether, 63;
+  power from, 67, 68;
+  the most mysterious thing in inorganic nature, 223.
+
+Electrons, knots in the ether, 63;
+  size and weight, 196;
+  speed, 197;
+  matter dematerialized, 197;
+  bombardment from, 201, 202;
+  revolving in the atom, 203;
+  surface, 203;
+  compared with atoms, 203;
+  properties of matter supplied by, 204.
+
+Elements, of living bodies, 38, 39, 77, 78;
+  analogy with the alphabet, 57-59, 206;
+  undergoing spontaneous change, 67;
+  various combinations, 205-208;
+  eagerness to combine, 209.
+  _See also_ Atoms.
+
+Eliot, George, on the development theory, 103.
+
+Elliot, Hugh S. R., on mechanism, 16.
+
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 250;
+  on physics and chemistry, 188;
+  quoted, 280.
+
+Energy, relation of life to, 177-183;
+  atomic, 204.
+  _See also_ Creative energy _and_ Force.
+
+Energy, biotic, 106-111, 145, 146.
+
+England, 250.
+
+Entities, 99, 100.
+
+Environment, 86-88.
+
+Enzymes, 167.
+
+Ether, the, omnipresent and all-powerful, 61, 62;
+  its nature, 62, 63;
+  its finite character, 65, 66;
+  paradoxes of, 66.
+
+Ethics, and the mechanistic conception, 12.
+
+Evolution, creative impulse in, 6, 111;
+  progression in, 13, 14;
+  and the arrival of the fit, 244-253;
+  creative, 251-253;
+  evolution of life bound up with the evolution of the world, 281-283;
+  creative protoplasm in, 286;
+  a cosmic view of, 289.
+
+Explosives, 43.
+
+
+Fire, chemistry of, 54.
+
+Fiske, John, on the soul and immortality, 4;
+  on the physical and the psychical, 75, 183.
+
+Fittest, arrival and survival of the, 244-253.
+
+Force, physical and mental, 3-5;
+  and life, 17-23;
+  dissymmetric force, 22;
+  the origin of matter, 43, 44.
+  _See also_ Energy.
+
+
+Galls, 147, 154-156.
+
+Ganong, William Francis, on life, 181.
+
+Germany, in the War of 1914, 249-251.
+
+Glaser, Otto C., quoted, 98.
+
+Goethe, quoted, 111, 221, 260, 280;
+  as a scientific man, 221.
+
+Gotch, Prof., quoted, 270.
+
+Grafting, 40, 41.
+
+Grand Canon of the Colorado, 225, 228, 229.
+
+Grape sugar, 208.
+
+Growth, of a germ, 217, 218.
+
+
+Haeckel, Ernst, 3, 285;
+  on physical activity in the atom, 25, 26;
+  his "living inorganics," 91;
+  on the origin of life, 161;
+  on inheritance and adaptation, 184;
+  his "plastidules," 217;
+  a contradiction in his philosophy, 256.
+
+Hartog, Marcus, 129.
+
+Heat, changes wrought by, 55, 56;
+  detection of, at a distance, 60.
+
+Helmholtz, Hermann von, on life, 25, 161.
+
+Henderson, Lawrence J., his "Fitness of the Environment," 73;
+  his concession to the vitalists, 83, 85;
+  on the environment, 86-88;
+  a thorough mechanist, 88, 89.
+
+Horse-power, 177, 178.
+
+Hudson River, "blossoming of the water," 283.
+
+Huxley, Thomas Henry, on the
+  properties of protoplasm, 31, 126, 127;
+  on consciousness, 95, 181, 262;
+  on the vital principle, 101, 126, 127, 140;
+  his three realities, 140;
+  a contradiction in his philosophy, 255, 256.
+
+Hydrogen, the atom of, 65.
+
+
+Idealist, view of life, 218-222.
+
+Inorganic world, beauty in decay in, 228, 229.
+
+Intelligence, characteristic of living matter, 134, 139, 151-154;
+  pervading organic nature, 223.
+
+Irritability, degrees of, 216, 217.
+
+
+James, William, 254.
+
+
+Kant, Immanuel, quoted, 221.
+
+Kelvin, Lord, 83.
+
+King, Starr, 244.
+
+
+Lankester, Sir Edwin Ray, quoted, 128, 141;
+  his "plasmogen," 145, 146.
+
+Le Dantec, Felix Alexandre, his "Nature and Origin of Life," 73, 79, 80;
+  on consciousness, 80;
+  on the artificial production of the cell, 83;
+  on the mechanism of the body, 224.
+
+Leduc, Stephane, his "osmotic growths," 167, 168.
+
+Liebig, Baron Justus von, quoted, 83.
+
+Life, may be a mode of motion, 5;
+  evolution of, 6;
+  its action on matter, 8, 9;
+  its physico-chemical origin, 9;
+  its appearance viewed as accidental, 10-14;
+  Bergson's view, 14-17, 27-29;
+  Sir Oliver Lodge's view, 17, 18;
+  and energy, 17-23;
+  theories as to its origin, 24-27;
+  Tyndall's view, 28-30;
+  Verworn's view, 30, 31;
+  the vitalistic view, 32-38;
+  matter as affected by, 39;
+  not to be treated mathematically, 40;
+  a slow explosion, 41, 42;
+  an insoluble mystery, 43, 44;
+  relations with the psychic and the inorganic, 44, 45;
+  compared with fire, 54, 55;
+  the final mystery of, 69, 70;
+  vitalistic and mechanistic views, 71-114;
+  Benjamin Moore's view, 106-113;
+  the theory of derivation from other spheres, 104;
+  spontaneous generation, 105;
+  plays a small part in the cosmic scheme, 115-119;
+  mystery of, 120;
+  nature merciless towards, 120-124;
+  as an entity, 124-130;
+  evanescent character, 131, 132;
+  Prof. Schaefer's view, 133-138;
+  intelligence the characteristic of, 134, 139, 151-154;
+  power of adaptation, 147-149;
+  versatility, 155, 156;
+  the fields of science and philosophy in dealing with, 161-166, 173-176;
+  simulation of, 167, 168;
+  and protoplasm, 169;
+  and the cell, 170;
+  variability, 171, 172;
+  the biogenetic law, 174;
+  relation to energy, 177-183;
+  an _x_-entity, 181, 182;
+  struggle with environment, 185, 186;
+  as a chemical phenomenon, 187;
+  inadequacy of the mechanistic view, 212-243;
+  degrees of, 216, 217;
+  arises, not comes, 230;
+  a metaphysical problem, 231;
+  as a wave, 231;
+  its adaptability, 253;
+  a vitalistic view, 254-289;
+  naturalness of, 263-268;
+  advent and disappearance, 268, 269;
+  the unscientific view, 274, 275;
+  analogy with the question of perpetual motion, 277, 278;
+  no great gulf between animate and inanimate, 285;
+  a cosmic view, 289.
+  _See also_ Living thing, Vital force, Vitalism, Vitality.
+
+Light, measuring its speed, 60.
+
+Liquids, molecular behavior, 200.
+
+Living thing, not a machine, 1-3, 212-214;
+  viewed as a machine, 34-37, 224-228;
+  a unit, 215;
+  adaptation, 215, 216;
+  contrasted and compared with a machine, 241, 242.
+
+Lodge, Sir Oliver, 183, 197;
+  his view of life, 17, 18, 34, 132, 161, 219, 237;
+  his vein of mysticism, 34;
+  on the ether, 62, 63, 66;
+  on molecular spaces, 65;
+  on radium, 201;
+  on the atom, 203;
+  on electrons, 203.
+
+Loeb, Jacques, on mechanism, 10-13, 73;
+  his experiments, 74, 76, 79, 147;
+  on variations, 148.
+
+
+Machines, Nature's and man's, 224-226;
+   contrasted and compared with living bodies, 241, 242.
+
+Maeterlinck, Maurice, on the Spirit of the Hive, 82.
+
+Man, evolution of, 246-251;
+  as the result of chance, 255;
+  as a part of the natural order, 258, 259;
+  his little day, 269.
+
+Matter, as acted upon by life, 8, 9;
+  creative energy immanent in, 9;
+  change upon entry of life, 39;
+  constitution of, 43, 44, 46-48;
+  a state of the ether, 63;
+  changes in, 131, 133;
+  Emerson on, 188;
+  discrete, 196;
+  emanations detected by smell and taste, 198, 199;
+  a hole in the ether, 203;
+  origin of its properties, 204-206;
+  a higher conception of, 259-261;
+  common view of grossness of, 274, 275.
+
+Maxwell, James Clerk, on the ether, 63;
+  on atoms, 198.
+
+Mechanism, the scientific explanation of mind, 5;
+  and ethics, 12;
+  reaction against, 32;
+  definition, 72;
+  Prof. Henderson's view, 88, 89;
+  _vs._ vitalism, 212-243.
+  _See also_ Life.
+
+Metaphysics, necessity of, 101.
+
+Micellar strings, 217.
+
+Microbalance, 60.
+
+Mind, evolution of, 287, 288.
+  _See also_ Intelligence.
+
+Molecules, spaces between, 65, 196;
+  speed, 192;
+  unchanging character, 205, 206.
+
+Monera, 285.
+
+Moore, Benjamin, a scientific vitalist, 106;
+  his "biotic energy," 106-113, 145, 146.
+
+Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 148.
+
+Motion, perpetual, 190, 191, 278;
+  mass and molecular, 269, 270.
+
+
+Naegeli, Karl Wilhelm von, 217.
+
+Nitrogen, 51.
+
+Nonentities, 99, 100.
+
+
+Odors, 198, 199.
+
+Osmotic growths, 167, 168.
+
+Oxygen, activities of, 51, 52, 59;
+  in the crust of the earth, 193;
+  chemical affinities, 193-195;
+  different forms of atoms, 200.
+
+
+Parker, Theodore, on the universe, 280.
+
+Parthenogenesis, artificial, 11, 74.
+
+Pasteur, Louis, his "dissymmetric force," 22, 32.
+
+Philosophy, supplements science, 94-96, 104, 109, 163, 164;
+  deals with fundamental problems, 242, 243;
+  contradictions in, 254-258.
+
+Phosphorus, 59, 60.
+
+Physics, staggering figures in, 192.
+
+Pitch lake, 123.
+
+Plants, force exerted by growing, 17-20.
+
+Plasmogen, 145, 146.
+
+Plastidules, 217.
+
+Protobion, 135.
+
+Protoplasm, vitality of, 169;
+  creative, 286.
+
+
+Radio-activity, 66-70, 132.
+
+Radium, 61, 201.
+  _See also_ Beta rays.
+
+Rainbow, 70.
+
+Ramsay, Sir William, 191, 192.
+
+Rand, Herbert W., on the mechanistic view of life, 89, 90.
+
+Russia, 250, 251.
+
+
+Salt, crystallization, 276, 277.
+
+Schaefer, Sir Edward Albert, 73;
+  his mechanistic view of life, 133-138.
+
+Science, delicacy of its methods and implements, 60, 61;
+  limitations of its field, 94-100, 104;
+  cannot deal with life except as a physical phenomenon, 161, 162;
+  does not embrace the whole of human life, 162, 163;
+  inadequacy, 163-166;
+  cannot grasp the mystery of life, 173, 175, 176, 234-236;
+  cannot deal with fundamental problems, 242, 243;
+  concerns itself with matter only, 264;
+  inevitably mechanistic, 265, 266;
+  views the universe as one, 267, 268, 271-274;
+  the redeemer of the physical world, 269-271, 276;
+  spiritual insight gained through, 278.
+
+Sea-urchins, Loeb's experiments, 147.
+
+Seed, growth of, 217, 218.
+
+Soddy, Frederick, 46, 66;
+  on vital force, 133;
+  on rainbows and rabbits, 174;
+  on the relation of life to energy, 177-180;
+  on the atom, 197, 198;
+  on atomic energy, 204.
+
+Spencer, Herbert, 218, 240;
+  quoted, 15, 16;
+  on the origin of life, 26;
+  on vital capital, 34, 35.
+
+Spirit, common view of, 274, 275.
+
+Spirituality, evolution of, 284.
+
+Sugar, grape, 208.
+
+Sunflower, wild, force exerted by, 19.
+
+
+Thomson, J. Arthur, 270.
+
+Thomson, Sir J. J., on electrons, 197;
+  photographing atoms, 199, 200.
+
+Tropisms, 11.
+
+Tyndall, John, his view of life, 28-30, 160, 162, 231;
+  his "molecular force," 42, 133;
+  his Belfast Address, 64, 219;
+  and the "miracle of vitality," 105;
+  on energy, 161;
+  on growth from the germ, 217;
+  an idealist, 219, 220;
+  on Goethe, 221;
+  on matter, 260;
+  on crystallisation of salt, 276, 277;
+  on incipient life in inorganic nature, 277.
+
+
+Universe, the, oneness of, 267, 268;
+  a view of, 289.
+
+Uranium, 67.
+
+
+Verworn, Max, 25, 79, 146;
+  his view of life, 30, 31, 73;
+  his term for vital force, 145.
+
+Vital force, constructive, 7, 38;
+  inventive and creative, 7;
+  resisting repose, 40;
+  as a postulate, 99-103;
+  its existence denied by science, 133;
+  convenience of the term, 144;
+  other names, 144-146.
+  _See also_ Life.
+
+Vitalism, making headway, 32;
+  reason for, 71, 72;
+  Moore's scientific vitalism, 106-112;
+  type of mind believing in, 218-223.
+  _See also_ Life.
+
+Vitality, the question of its reality, 140-143;
+  degrees of, 241, 242.
+  _See also_ Life.
+
+
+War of 1914, 248-251.
+
+Water-power, and electricity, 67, 68.
+
+Weismann, August, 217.
+
+Whitman, Walt, quoted, 14, 48, 110, 256, 260.
+
+Wilson, Edmund Beecher, on the cell, 95.
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Notes:
+
+1. The phrase 'To resolve the pyschic and the vital' was changed to
+'To resolve the psychic and the vital'.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Breath of Life, by John Burroughs
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BREATH OF LIFE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 18335.txt or 18335.zip *****
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