[Illustration]

THE

BREATH OF LIFE

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

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BOSTON AND NEW YORKHOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANYThe 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 moreupon the mystery of its nature and origin, yet without the least hopethat I can find out the ways of the Eternal in this or in any otherworld. In these studies I fancy I am about as far from mastering themystery as the ant which I saw this morning industriously exploring asmall section of the garden walk is from getting a clear idea of thegeography of the North American Continent. But the ant was occupied andwas apparently happy, and she must have learned something about a smallfraction of that part of the earth's surface. 

I have passed many pleasant summer days in my hay-barn study, or underthe apple trees, exploring these questions, and though I have not solvedthem, I am satisfied with the clearer view I have given myself of themystery that envelops them. I have set down in these pages all thethoughts that have come to me on this subject. I have not aimed so muchat consistency as at clearness and definiteness of statement, letting mymind drift as upon a shoreless sea. Indeed, what are such questions, andall other ultimate questions, but shoreless seas whereon the chiefreward of the navigator is the joy of the adventure?

Sir Thomas Browne said, over two hundred years ago, that in philosophytruth seemed double-faced, by which I fancy he meant that there wasalways more than one point of view of all great problems, oftencontradictory points of view, from which truth is revealed. In thefollowing pages I am aware that two ideas, or principles, struggle in mymind for mastery. One is the idea of the super-mechanical and thesuper-chemical character of living things; the other is the idea of thesupremacy and universality of what we call natural law. The firstprobably springs from my inborn idealism and literary habit of mind; thesecond from my love of nature and my scientific bent. It is hard for meto reduce the life impulse to a level with common material forces thatshape and control the world of inert matter, and it is equally hard forme to reconcile my reason to the introduction of a new principle, or tosee anything in natural processes that savors of the _ab-extra_. It isthe working of these two different ideas in my mind that seems to giverise to the obvious contradictions that crop out here and therethroughout this volume. An explanation of life phenomena that savors ofthe laboratory and chemism repels me, and an explanation that savors ofthe theological point of view is equally distasteful to me. I crave andseek a natural explanation of all phenomena upon this earth, but theword "natural" to me implies more than mere chemistry and physics. Thebirth of a baby, and the blooming of a flower, are natural events, butthe laboratory methods forever fail to give us the key to the secret ofeither. 

I am forced to conclude that my passion for nature and for all open-airlife, though tinged and stimulated by science, is not a passion for purescience, but for literature and philosophy. My imagination and ingrainedhumanism are appealed to by the facts and methods of natural history. Ifind something akin to poetry and religion (using the latter word in itsnon-mythological sense, as indicating the sum of mystery and reverencewe feel in the presence of the great facts of life and death) in theshows of day and night, and in my excursions to fields and woods. Thelove of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though thetwo may go together. The Wordsworthian sense in nature, of "somethingfar more deeply interfused" than the principles of exact science, isprobably 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 senseof the unknown and unknowable, life is flat and barren. Without theemotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature. How to get from the clod underfoot to thebrain and consciousness of man without invoking something outside of, and superior to, natural laws, is the question. For my own part Icontent myself with the thought of some unknown and doubtless unknowabletendency or power in the elements themselves--a kind of universal mindpervading living matter and the reason of its living, through which thewhole drama of evolution is brought about. 

This is getting very near to the old teleological conception, as it isalso near to that of Henri Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge. Our mindseasily slide into the groove of supernaturalism and spiritualism becausethey have long moved therein. We have the words and they mould ourthoughts. But science is fast teaching us that the universe is completein itself; that whatever takes place in matter is by virtue of the forceof 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 itsinterior 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 ismatter in its fourth or non-material state--the point where it touchesthe super-material. The transformation of physical energy into vital, and of vital into mental, doubtless takes place in this invisible innerworld of atoms and electrons. The electric constitution of matter is adeduction of physics. It seems in some degree to bridge over the chasmbetween what we call the material and the spiritual. If we are notwithin hailing distance of life and mind, we seem assuredly on the roadthither. The mystery of the transformation of the ethereal, imponderableforces into the vital and the mental seems quite beyond the power of themind to solve. The explanation of it in the bald terms of chemistry andphysics can never satisfy a mind with a trace of idealism in it. 

The greater number of the chapters of this volume are variations upon asingle theme, --what Tyndall called "the mystery and the miracle ofvitality, "--and I can only hope that the variations are of sufficientinterest to justify the inevitable repetitions which occur. I am no moreinclined than Tyndall was to believe in miracles unless we nameeverything a miracle, while at the same time I am deeply impressed withthe inadequacy of all known material forces to account for the phenomenaof living things. 

That word of evil repute, materialism, is no longer the black sheep inthe flock that it was before the advent of modern transcendentalphysics. The spiritualized materialism of men like Huxley and Tyndallneed not trouble us. It springs from the new conception of matter. Itstands on the threshold of idealism or mysticism with the door ajar. After Tyndall had cast out the term "vital force, " and reduced allvisible phenomena of life to mechanical attraction and repulsion, afterhe had exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty mysterystill hovered beyond him. He recognized that he had made no step towardits solution, and was forced to confess with the philosophers of allages 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 thefrontispiece 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 myhoe and go out and cut off the heads of the lusty burdocks that send outtheir broad leaves along the edge of my garden or lawn, I often askmyself, "What is this thing that is so hard to scotch here in thegrass?" I decapitate it time after time and yet it forthwith gets itselfanother head. We call it burdock, but what is burdock, and why does itnot change into yellow dock, or into a cabbage? What is it that is soconstant and so irrepressible, and before the summer is ended will belying in wait here with its ten thousand little hooks to attach itselfto 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 greenfields and pastures new?

It is some living thing; but what is a living thing, and how does itdiffer from a mechanical and non-living thing? If I smash or overturnthe sundial with my hoe, or break the hoe itself, these things staysmashed and broken, but the burdock mends itself, renews itself, and, ifI am not on my guard, will surreptitiously mature some of the bursbefore 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 anotherkind of machine, and manifests nothing but the activity of themechanical and chemical principles that we see in operation all about usin dead matter; and that a little different mechanical arrangement ofits 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 aforce exterior to itself--the warmth of the sun acting upon it, and uponthe moisture in the soil; but it is unmechanical in that it repairsitself and grows and reproduces itself, and after it has ceased runningcan never be made to run again. After I have reduced all its activitiesto mechanical and chemical principles, my mind seems to see somethingthat chemistry and mechanics do not explain--something that availsitself of these forces, but is not of them. This may be only myanthropomorphic way of looking at things, but are not all our ways oflooking at things anthropomorphic? How can they be any other? Theycannot be deific since we are not gods. They may be scientific. But whatis science but a kind of anthropomorphism? Kant wisely said, "It soundsat first singular, but is none the less certain, that the understandingdoes 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, amI any more unscientific than I am when I give a local habitation and aname to any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, cohesion, osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These terms stand for certainspecial activities in nature and are as much the inventions of our ownminds as are any of the rest of our ideas. 

We can help ourselves out, as Haeckel does, by calling the physicalforces--such as the magnet that attracts the iron filings, the powderthat explodes, the steam that drives the locomotive, and thelike--"living inorganics, " and looking upon them as acting by "livingforce as much as the sensitive mimosa does when it contracts its leavesat touch. " But living force is what we are trying to differentiate frommechanical force, and what do we gain by confounding the two? We canonly look upon a living body as a machine by forming new conceptions ofa machine--a machine utterly unmechanical, which is a contradiction ofterms. 

A man may expend the same kind of force in thinking that he expends inchopping his wood, but that fact does not put the two kinds of activityon the same level. There is no question but that the food consumed isthe source of the energy in both cases, but in the one the energy ismuscular, and in the other it is nervous. When we speak of mental orspiritual force, we have as distinct a conception as when we speak ofphysical force. It requires physical force to produce the effect that wecall mental force, though how the one can result in the other is pastunderstanding. The law of the correlation and conservation of energyrequires that what goes into the body as physical force must come out insome form of physical force--heat, light, electricity, and so forth. 

Science cannot trace force into the mental realm and connect it with ourstates of consciousness. It loses track of it so completely that menlike Tyndall and Huxley and Spencer pause before it as an inscrutablemystery, while John Fiske helps himself out with the conception of thesoul as quite independent of the body, standing related to it as themusician is related to his instrument. This idea is the key to Fiske'sproof of the immortality of the soul. Finding himself face to face withan insoluble mystery, he cuts the knot, or rather, clears the chasm, bythis extra-scientific leap. Since the soul, as we know it, isinseparably bound up with physical conditions, it seems to me that amore rational explanation of the phenomenon of mentality is theconception that the physical force and substance that we use up in amental effort or emotional experience gives rise, through some unknownkind of molecular activity, to something which is analogous to theelectric current in a live wire, and which traverses the nerves andresults in our changing states of consciousness. This is the mechanisticexplanation of mind, consciousness, etc. , but it is the only one, orkind of one, that lends itself to scientific interpretation. Life, spirit, consciousness, may be a mode of motion as distinct from allother modes of motion, such as heat, light, electricity, as these aredistinct from each other. 

When we speak of force of mind, force of character, we of course speakin parables, since the force here alluded to is an experience of our ownminds entirely and would not suffice to move the finest dust-particle inthe air. 

There could be no vegetable or animal life without the sunbeam, yet whenwe have explained or accounted for the growth of a tree in terms of thechemistry and physics of the sunbeam, do we not have to figure toourselves something in the tree that avails itself of this chemistry, that uses it and profits by it? After this mysterious something hasceased to operate, or play its part, the chemistry of the sunbeam is nolonger 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 thatmakes the eye; it is light meeting an indwelling need in the organism, which amounts to an active creative principle, that begets the eye. Withfish in underground waters this need does not arise; hence they have nosight. Fins and wings and legs are developed to meet some end of theorganism, but if the organism were not charged with an expansive ordeveloping force or impulse, would those needs arise?

Why should the vertebrate series have risen through the fish, thereptile, the mammal, to man, unless the manward impulse was inherent inthe first vertebrate; something that struggled, that pushed on and upfrom the more simple to the more complex forms? Why did not unicellularlife always remain unicellular? Could not the environment have actedupon it endlessly without causing it to change toward higher and morecomplex forms, had there not been some indwelling aboriginal tendencytoward these forms? How could natural selection, or any other process ofselection, work upon species to modify them, if there were not somethingin species pushing out and on, seeking new ways, new forms, in fact someactive principle that is modifiable?

Life has risen by stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things. Whyhas it risen? Why did it not keep on the same level, and go through thecycle of change, as the inorganic does, without attaining to higherforms? Because, it may be replied, it was life, and not mere matter andmotion--something that lifts matter and motion to a new plane. 

Under the influence of the life impulse, the old routine of matter--fromcompound to compound, from solid to fluid, from fluid to gaseous, fromrock to soil, the cycle always ending where it began--is broken into, and cycles of a new order are instituted. From the stable equilibriumwhich dead matter is always seeking, the same matter in the vitalcircuit is always seeking the state of unstable equilibrium, or ratheris forever passing between the two, and evolving the myriad forms oflife in the passage. It is hard to think of the process as the work ofthe physical and chemical forces of inorganic nature, withoutsupplementing them with a new and different force. 

The forces of life are constructive forces, and they are operative in aworld of destructive or disintegrating forces which oppose them andwhich they overcome. The physical and chemical forces of dead matter areat war with the forces of life, till life overcomes and uses them. 

The mechanical forces go on repeating or dividing through the samecycles forever and ever, seeking a stable condition, but the vital forceis inventive and creative and constantly breaks the repose that organicnature seeks to impose upon it. 

External forces may modify a body, but they cannot develop it unlessthere is something in the body waiting to be developed, cravingdevelopment, as it were. The warmth and moisture in the soil act alikeupon the grains of sand and upon the seed-germs; the germ changes intosomething else, the sand does not. These agents liberate a force in thegerm that is not in the grain of sand. The warmth of the brooding fowldoes not spend itself upon mere passive, inert matter (unless there is achina egg in the nest), but upon matter straining upon its leash, and ina state of expectancy. We do not know how the activity of the moleculesof the egg differs from the activity of the molecules of the pebble, under the influence of warmth, but we know there must be a differencebetween the interior movements of organized and unorganized matter. 

Life lifts inert matter up into a thousand varied and beautiful formsand holds it there for a season, --holds it against gravity and chemicalaffinity, though you may say, if you please, not without their aid, --andthen in due course lets go of it, or abandons it, and lets it fall backinto the great sea of the inorganic. Its constant tendency is to fallback; indeed, in animal life it does fall back every moment; it rises onthe one hand, serves its purpose of life, and falls back on the other. In going through the cycle of life the mineral elements experience somechange that chemical analysis does not disclose--they are the morereadily absorbed again by life. It is as if the elements had profitedin some way under the tutelage of life. Their experience has been aunique and exceptional one. Only a small fraction of the sum total ofthe inert matter of the globe can have this experience. It must first gothrough the vegetable cycle before it can be taken up by the animal. Theonly things we can take directly from the inorganic world are water andair; and the function of water is largely a mechanical one, and thefunction of air a chemical one. 

I think of the vital as flowing out of the physical, just as thepsychical flows out of the vital, and just as the higher forms of animallife 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 toinert 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-chemicalorigin, it is so by transformations and translations that physics cannotexplain. 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 childbecomes the man by its own efforts. 

The push of life, of the evolutionary process, is back of all and inall. We can account for it all by saying the Creative Energy is immanentin matter, and this gives the mind something to take hold of. 

II

According to the latest scientific views held on the question by suchmen as Professor Loeb, the appearance of life on the globe was a purelyaccidental circumstance. The proper elements just happened to cometogether at the right time in the right proportions and under the rightconditions, and life was the result. It was an accident in the thermalhistory of the globe. Professor Loeb has lately published a volume ofessays and addresses called "The Mechanistic Conception of Life, "enforcing and illustrating this view. He makes war on what he terms themetaphysical conception of a "life-principle" as the key to the problem, and urges the scientific conception of the adequacy ofmechanico-chemical forces. In his view, we are only chemical mechanisms;and all our activities, mental and physical alike, are only automaticresponses to the play of the blind, material forces of external nature. All forms of life, with all their wonderful adaptations, are only thechance happenings of the blind gropings and clashings of dead matter:"We eat, drink, and reproduce [and, of course, think and speculate andwrite books on the problems of life], not because mankind has reached anagreement that this is desirable, but because, machine-like, we arecompelled to do so!"

He reaches the conclusion that all our inner subjective life isamenable to physico-chemical analysis, because many cases of simpleanimal instinct and will can be explained on this basis--the basis ofanimal tropism. Certain animals creep or fly to the light, others to thedark, because they cannot help it. This is tropism. He believes that theorigin of life can be traced to the same physico-chemical activities, because, in his laboratory experiments, he has been able to dispensewith the male principle, and to fertilize the eggs of certain low formsof marine life by chemical compounds alone. "The problem of thebeginning and end of individual life is physico-chemically clear"--muchclearer than the first beginnings of life. All individual life beginswith the egg, but where did we get the egg? When chemical synthesis willgive us this, the problem is solved. We can analyze the materialelements of an organism, but we cannot synthesize them and produce theleast spark of living matter. That all forms of life have a mechanicaland chemical basis is beyond question, but when we apply our analysis tothem, life evaporates, vanishes, the vital processes cease. But applythe same analysis to inert matter, and only the form is changed. 

Professor Loeb's artificially fathered embryo and starfish andsea-urchins soon die. If his chemism could only give him themother-principle also! But it will not. The mother-principle is at thevery foundations of the organic world, and defies all attempts ofchemical synthesis to reproduce it. 

It would be presumptive in the extreme for me to question ProfessorLoeb's scientific conclusions; he is one of the most eminent of livingexperimental biologists. I would only dissent from some of hisphilosophical conclusions. I dissent from his statement that only themechanistic conception of life can throw light on the source of ethics. Is there any room for the moral law in a world of mechanicaldeterminism? There is no ethics in the physical order, and if humanityis entirely in the grip of that order, where do moral obligations comein? A gun, a steam-engine, knows no ethics, and to the extent that weare compelled to do things, are we in the same category. Freedom ofchoice alone gives any validity to ethical consideration. I dissent fromthe idea to which he apparently holds, that biology is only appliedphysics and chemistry. Is not geology also applied physics andchemistry? Is it any more or any less? Yet what a world of differencebetween the two--between a rock and a tree, between a man and the soilhe cultivates. Grant that the physical and the chemical forces are thesame in both, yet they work to such different ends in each. In one casethey are tending always to a deadlock, to the slumber of a staticequilibrium; in the other they are ceaselessly striving to reach a stateof dynamic activity--to build up a body that hangs forever between astate of integration and disintegration. What is it that determines thisnew mode and end of their activities?

In all his biological experimentation, Professor Loeb starts with livingmatter and, finding its processes capable of physico-chemical analysis, he hastens to the conclusion that its genesis is to be accounted for bythe action and interaction of these principles alone. 

In the inorganic world, everything is in its place through the operationof blind physical forces; because the place of a dead thing, itsrelation to the whole, is a matter of indifference. The rocks, thehills, the streams are in their place, but any other place would do aswell. But in the organic world we strike another order--an order wherethe relation and subordination of parts is everything, and to speak ofhuman existence as a "matter of chance" in the sense, let us say, thatthe forms and positions of inanimate bodies are matters of chance, is toconfuse terms. 

Organic evolution upon the earth shows steady and regular progression;as much so as the growth and development of a tree. If the evolutionaryimpulse fails on one line, it picks itself up and tries on another, itexperiments endlessly like an inventor, but always improves on its lastattempts. Chance would have kept things at a standstill; the principleof chance, give it time enough, must end where it began. Chance is aman lost in the woods; he never arrives; he wanders aimlessly. Ifevolution pursued a course equally fortuitous, would it not still bewandering in the wilderness of the chaotic nebulæ?

III

A vastly different and much more stimulating view of life is given byHenri Bergson in his "Creative Evolution. " Though based upon biologicalscience, it is a philosophical rather than a scientific view, andappeals to our intuitional and imaginative nature more than to ourconstructive reason. M. Bergson interprets the phenomena of life interms 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 creativeimpulse 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 isincessant creation; the whole organic world is filled, from bottom totop, with one tremendous effort. It was long ago felicitously stated byWhitman in his "Leaves of Grass, " "Urge and urge, always the procreanturge of the world. "

This conception of the nature and genesis of life is bound to bechallenged by modern physical science, which, for the most part, sees inbiology only a phase of physics; but the philosophic mind and thetrained literary mind will find in "Creative Evolution" a treasure-houseof inspiring ideas, and engaging forms of original artistic expression. As Mr. Balfour says, "M. Bergson's 'Evolution Créatrice' is not merely aphilosophical treatise, it has all the charm and all the audacities of awork of art, and as such defies adequate reproduction. "

It delivers us from the hard mechanical conception of determinism, or ofa closed universe which, like a huge manufacturing plant, grinds outvegetables and animals, minds and spirits, as it grinds out rocks andsoils, gases and fluids, and the inorganic compounds. 

With M. Bergson, life is the flowing metamorphosis of the poets, --anunceasing becoming, --and evolution is a wave of creative energyoverflowing through matter "upon which each visible organism ridesduring the short interval of time given it to live. " In his view, matteris held in the iron grip of necessity, but life is freedom itself. "Before the evolution of life . . . The portals of the future remain wideopen. It is a creation that goes on forever in virtue of an initialmovement. This movement constitutes the unity of the organized world--aprolific unity, of an infinite richness, superior to any that theintellect could dream of, for the intellect is only one of its aspectsor products. "

What a contrast to Herbert Spencer's view of life and evolution!"Life, " says Spencer, "consists of inner action so adjusted as tobalance outer action. " True enough, no doubt, but not interesting. Ifthe philosopher could tell us what it is that brings about theadjustment, 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 adjustedas 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-chemicaltheory of the nature and origin of life, what a complete machine acabbage is for converting solar energy into chemical and vitalenergy--how it takes up the raw material from the soil by a chemical andmechanical process, how these are brought into contact with the lightand air through the leaves, and thus the cabbage is built up. In likemanner, a man is a machine for converting chemical energy derived fromthe food he eats into motion, and the like. As if M. Bergson, or any oneelse, would dispute these things! In the same way, a steam-engine is amachine for converting the energy latent in coal into motion and power;but what force lies back of the engine, and was active in theconstruction?

The final question of the cabbage and the man still remains--Where didyou get them?

You assume vitality to start with--how did you get it? Did it arisespontaneously out of dead matter? Mechanical and chemical forces do allthe work of the living body, but who or what controls and directs them, so that one compounding of the elements begets a cabbage, and anothercompounding of the same elements begets an oak--one mixture of them andwe have a frog, another and we have a man? Is there not room here forsomething besides blind, indifferent forces? If we make the moleculesthemselves creative, then we are begging the question. The creativeenergy by any other name remains the same. 

IV

If life itself is not a force or a form of energy, yet behold whatenergy it is capable of exerting! It seems to me that Sir Oliver Lodgeis a little confusing when he says in a recent essay that "life does notexert force--not even the most microscopical force--and certainly doesnot supply energy. " Sir Oliver is thinking of life as a distinctentity--something apart from the matter which it animates. But even inthis case can we not say that the mainspring of the energy of livingbodies is the life that is in them?

Apart from the force exerted by living animal bodies, see the forceexerted by living plant bodies. I thought of the remark of Sir Oliverone day not long after reading it, while I was walking in a beech woodand noted how the sprouting beechnuts had sent their pale radicles downthrough the dry leaves upon which they were lying, often piercing twoor three of them, and forcing their way down into the mingled soil andleaf-mould a couple of inches. Force was certainly expended in doingthis, and if the life in the sprouting nut did not exert it or expendit, what did?

When I drive a peg into the ground with my axe or mallet, is the life inmy arm any more strictly the source (the secondary source) of the energyexpended than is the nut in this case? Of course, the sun is the primalsource of the energy in both cases, and in all cases, but does not lifeexert the force, use it, bring it to bear, which it receives from theuniversal 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 earthfloats as in a sea. When this energy or force is manifest through aliving body, we call it vital force; when it is manifest through amechanical contrivance, we call it mechanical force; when it isdeveloped by the action and reaction of chemical compounds, we call itchemical force; the same force in each case, but behaving so differentlyin the one case from what it does in the other that we come to think ofit as a new and distinct entity. Now if Sir Oliver or any one else couldtell us what force is, this difference between the vitalists and themechanists might be reconciled. 

Darwin measured the force of the downward growth of the radicle, such asI have alluded to, as one quarter of a pound, and its lateral pressureas much greater. We know that the roots of trees insert themselves intoseams in the rocks, and force the parts asunder. This force ismeasurable and is often very great. Its seat seems to be in the soft, milky substance called the cambium layer under the bark. These minutecells when their force is combined may become regular rock-splitters. 

One of the most remarkable exhibitions of plant force I ever saw was ina Western city where I observed a species of wild sunflower forcing itsway up through the asphalt pavement; the folded and compressed leaves ofthe plant, like a man's fist, had pushed against the hard but flexibleconcrete till it had bulged up and then split, and let the irrepressibleplant through. The force exerted must have been many pounds. I think itdoubtful if the strongest man could have pushed his fist through such aresisting medium. If it was not life which exerted this force, what wasit? Life activities are a kind of explosion, and the slow continuedexplosions of this growing plant rent the pavement as surely as powderwould have done. It is doubtful if any cultivated plant could haveovercome such odds. It required the force of the untamed hairy plant ofthe plains to accomplish this feat. 

That life does not supply energy, that is, is not an independent sourceof energy, seems to me obvious enough, but that it does not manifestenergy, use energy, or "exert force, " is far from obvious. If a growingplant or tree does not exert force by reason of its growing, or byvirtue of a specific kind of activity among its particles, which we namelife, and which does not take place in a stone or in a bar of iron or indead timber, then how can we say that any mechanical device or explosivecompound exerts force? The steam-engine does not create force, neitherdoes the exploding dynamite, but these things exert force. We have tothink of the sum total of the force of the universe, as of matteritself, as a constant factor, that can neither be increased nordiminished. 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 oneforce, but of any number of manifestations of force, and of two distinctkinds of manifestations, the organic and the inorganic, or the vital andthe physical, --the latter divisible into the chemical and themechanical, the former made up of these two working in infinitecomplexity because drawn into new relations, and lifted to higher endsby this something we call life. 

We think of something in the organic that lifts and moves andredistributes dead matter, and builds it up into the ten thousand newforms which it would never assume without this something; it lifts limeand iron and silica and potash and carbon, against gravity, up intotrees and animal forms, not by a new force, but by an old force in thehands of a new agent. 

The cattle move about the field, the drift boulders slowly creep downthe slopes; there is no doubt that the final source of the force is inboth cases the same; what we call gravity, a name for a mystery, is theform 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 thecattle; without the solar and stellar energy, could there be any motionof either rock or beast?

Force is universal, it pervades all nature, one manifestation of it wecall heat, another light, another electricity, another cohesion, chemical affinity, and so on. May not another manifestation of it becalled life, differing from all the rest more radically than they differfrom one another; bound up with all the rest and inseparable from themand identical with them only in its ultimate source in the CreativeEnergy that is immanent in the universe? I have to think of the CreativeEnergy as immanent in all matter, and the final source of all thetransformations and transmutations we see in the organic and theinorganic worlds. The very nature of our minds compels us to postulatesome 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 andcause. 

The mind is satisfied when it finds a word that gives it a hold of athing or a process, or when it can picture to itself just how the thingoccurs. Thus, for instance, to account for the power generated by therushing together of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water, we have toconceive of space between the atoms of these elements, and that theforce generated comes from the immense velocity with which theinfinitesimal atoms rush together across this infinitesimal space. It isquite possible that this is not the true explanation at all, but itsatisfies the mind because it is an explanation in terms of mechanicalforces that we know. 

The solar energy goes into the atoms or corpuscles one thing, and itcomes out another; it goes in as inorganic force, and it comes out asorganic and psychic. The change or transformation takes place in thoseinvisible laboratories of the infinitesimal atoms. It helps my mentalprocesses to give that change a name--vitality--and to recognize it as asupra-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 andwoman, dog and donkey, and the secret of the difference between us, andof the passing along of the difference from generation to generationwith but slight variations, may be, so to speak, in the way themolecules and atoms of our bodies take hold of hands and perform theirmystic dances in the inner temple of life. But one would like to knowwho 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 thesubstance of the nuts and becomes alive, under the influence of thewarmth and moisture of spring, and puts out a radicle that pierces thedry leaves like an awl? The pebbles, though they contain the samechemical 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 thatprocess, nor its prime cause. Start the flame of life going, and therest may be explained in terms of chemistry; start the human bodydeveloping, and physiological processes explain its growth; but why itbecomes 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 thenature and origin of life on this planet, he soon finds himself in closequarters with two difficulties. He must either admit of a break in thecourse of nature and the introduction of a new principle, the vitalprinciple, which, if he is a man of science, he finds it hard to do; orhe 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 theorganic when he knows that drawing arbitrary lines in nature, andfencing off one part from another, is an unscientific procedure, and onethat often leads to bewildering contradictions; or he must look uponhimself with all his high thoughts and aspirations, and upon all othermanifestations of life, as merely a chance product of the blindmechanical and chemical action and interaction of the inorganic forces. 

Either conclusion is distasteful. One does not like to think of himselfas a chance hit of the irrational physical elements; neither does hefeel at ease with the thought that he is the result of any break ordiscontinuity in natural law. He likes to see himself as vitally andinevitably related to the physical order as is the fruit to the treethat bore it, or the child to the mother that carried it in her womb, and yet, if only mechanical and chemical forces entered into hisgenesis, he does not feel himself well fathered and mothered. 

One may evade the difficulty, as Helmholtz did, by regarding life aseternal--that it had no beginning in time; or, as some other Germanbiologists have done, that the entire cosmos is alive and the earth aliving organism. 

If biogenesis is true, and always has been true, --no life withoutantecedent life, --then the question of a beginning is unthinkable. It isjust as easy to think of a stick with only one end. 

Such stanch materialists and mechanists as Haeckel and Verworn seem tohave felt compelled, as a last resort, to postulate a psychic principlein nature, though of a low order. Haeckel says that most chemists andphysicists will not hear a word about a "soul" in the atom. "In myopinion, however, " he says, "in order to explain the simplest physicaland chemical processes, we must necessarily assume a low order ofpsychical activity among the homogeneous particles of plasm, rising avery little above that of the crystal. " In crystallization he sees alow degree of sensation and a little higher degree in the plasm. 

Have we not in this rudimentary psychic principle which Haeckel ascribesto the atom a germ to start with that will ultimately give us the mindof man? With this spark, it seems to me, we can kindle a flame that willconsume Haeckel's whole mechanical theory of creation. Physical scienceis clear that the non-living or inorganic world was before the living ororganic world, but that the latter in some mysterious way lay folded inthe former. Science has for many years been making desperate efforts toawaken this slumbering life in its laboratories, but has not yetsucceeded, and probably never will succeed. Life without antecedent lifeseems a biological impossibility. The theory of spontaneous generationis rejected by the philosophical mind, because our experience tells usthat everything has its antecedent, and that there is and can be no endto the causal sequences. 

Spencer believes that the organic and inorganic fade into each other byinsensible gradations--that no line can be drawn between them so thatone can say, on this side is the organic, on that the inorganic. Inother words, he says it is not necessary for us to think of an absolutecommencement of organic life, or of a first organism--organic matter wasnot produced all at once, but was reached through steps or gradations. Yet it puzzles one to see how there can be any gradations or degreesbetween being and not being. Can there be any halfway house betweensomething and nothing?

II

There is another way out of the difficulty that besets our rationalfaculties in their efforts to solve this question, and that is theaudacious way of Henri Bergson in his "Creative Evolution. " It is todeny any validity to the conclusion of our logical faculties upon thissubject. Our intellect, Bergson says, cannot grasp the true nature oflife, nor the meaning of the evolutionary movement. With the emphasis ofitalics he repeats that "_the intellect is characterized by a naturalinability to comprehend life_. " He says this in a good many pages and ina good many different ways; the idea is one of the main conclusions ofhis book. Our intuitions, our spiritual nature, according to thisphilosopher, are more _en rapport_ with the secrets of the creativeenergy than are our intellectual faculties; the key to the problem is tobe found here, rather than in the mechanics and chemistry of the latter. Our intellectual faculties can grasp the physical order because they areformed by a world of solids and fluids and give us the power to dealwith them and act upon them. But they cannot grasp the nature and themeaning of the vital order. 

"We treat the living like the lifeless, and think all reality, howeverfluid, under the form of the sharply defined solid. We are at ease onlyin the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. Perceiving in anorganism only parts external to parts, the understanding has the choicebetween two systems of explanation only: either to regard the infinitelycomplex (and thereby infinitely well contrived) organization as afortuitous concatenation of atoms, or to relate it to theincomprehensible influence of an external force that has grouped itselements together. "

"Everything is obscure in the idea of creation, if we think of thingswhich are created and a thing which creates. " If we follow the lead ofour logical, scientific faculties, then, we shall all be mechanists andmaterialists. Science can make no other solution of the problem becauseit sees from the outside. But if we look from the inside, with thespirit or "with that faculty of seeing which is immanent in the facultyof acting, " we shall escape from the bondage of the mechanistic viewinto the freedom of the larger truth of the ceaseless creative view; weshall see the unity of the creative impulse which is immanent in lifeand which, "passing through generations, links individuals withindividuals, species with species, and makes of the whole series of theliving one single immense wave flowing over matter. "

I recall that Tyndall, who was as much poet as scientist, speaks oflife as a wave "which at no two consecutive moments of its existence iscomposed of the same particles. " In his more sober scientific moodTyndall would doubtless have rejected M. Bergson's view of life, yet hisimage of the wave is very Bergsonian. But what different meanings thetwo writers aim to convey: Tyndall is thinking of the fact that a livingbody is constantly taking up new material on the one side and droppingdead or outworn material on the other. M. Bergson's mind is occupiedwith the thought of the primal push or impulsion of matter which travelsthrough it as the force in the wave traverses the water. The waveembodies a force which lifts the water up in opposition to its tendencyto seek and keep a level, and travels on, leaving the water behind. Sodoes this something we call life break the deadlock of inert matter andlift it into a thousand curious and beautiful forms, and then, passingon, lets it fall back again into a state of dead equilibrium. 

Tyndall was one of the most eloquent exponents of the materialistictheory of the origin of life, and were he living now would probably feellittle or no sympathy with the Bergsonian view of a primordial lifeimpulse. He found the key to all life phenomena in the hidden world ofmolecular attraction and repulsion. He says: "Molecular forces determinethe form which the solar energy will assume. [What a world of mysterylies in that determinism of the hidden molecular forces!] In theseparation of the carbon and oxygen this energy may be so conditioned asto result in one case in the formation of a cabbage and in another casein the formation of an oak. So also as regards the reunion of the carbonand the oxygen [in the animal organism] the molecular machinery throughwhich the combining energy acts may in one case weave the texture of afrog, while in another it may weave the texture of a man. "

But is not this molecular force itself a form of solar energy, and canit differ in kind from any other form of physical force? If molecularforces determine whether the solar energy shall weave a head of acabbage or a head of a Plato or a Shakespeare, does it not meet all therequirements of our conception of creative will?

Tyndall thinks that a living man--Socrates, Aristotle, Goethe, Darwin, Isuppose--could be produced directly from inorganic nature in thelaboratory if (and note what a momentous "if" this is) we could puttogether the elements of such a man in the same relative positions asthose which they occupy in his body, "with the selfsame forces anddistribution of forces, the selfsame motions and distribution ofmotions. " 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 ourcolleges while in this country a few years ago--easy enough tomanufacture a living being of any order of intellect if you canreproduce in the laboratory his "internal and external _vitalconditions_. " (The italics are mine. ) To produce those vital conditionsis where the rub comes. Those vital conditions, as regards the minutestbit of protoplasm, science, with all her tremendous resources, has notyet been able to produce. The raising of Lazarus from the dead seems nomore a miracle than evoking vital conditions in dead matter. Externaland internal vital conditions are no doubt inseparably correlated, andwhen we can produce them we shall have life. Life, says Verworn, is likefire, and "is a phenomenon of nature which appears as soon as thecomplex of its conditions is fulfilled. " We can easily produce fire bymechanical and chemical means, but not life. Fire is a chemical process, it is rapid oxidation, and oxidation is a disintegrating process, whilelife is an integrating process, or a balance maintained between the twoby what we call the vital force. Life is evidently a much higher form ofmolecular activity than combustion. The old Greek Heraclitus saw, andthe modern scientist sees, very superficially in comparing the two. 

I have no doubt that Huxley was right in his inference "that if theproperties of matter result from the nature and disposition of itscomponent molecules, then there is no intelligible ground for refusingto say that the properties of protoplasm result from the nature anddisposition of its molecules. " It is undoubtedly in that nature anddisposition of the biological molecules that Tyndall's whole "mysteryand miracle of vitality" is wrapped up. If we could only grasp what itis that transforms the molecule of dead matter into the living molecule!Pasteur called it "dissymmetric force, " which is only a new name for themystery. He believed there was an "irrefragable physical barrier betweenorganic and inorganic nature"--that the molecules of an organismdiffered from those of a mineral, and for this difference he found aname. 

III

There seems to have been of late years a marked reaction, even among menof science, from the mechanistic conception of life as held by the bandof scientists to which I have referred. Something like a new vitalism ismaking headway both on the Continent and in Great Britain. Its exponentsurge that biological problems "defy any attempt at a mechanicalexplanation. " These men stand for the idea "of the creativeindividuality of organisms" and that the main factors in organicevolution cannot be accounted for by the forces already operative in theinorganic world. 

There is, of course, a mathematical chance that in the endless changesand permutations of inert matter the four principal elements that makeup a living body may fall or run together in just that order and numberthat the kindling of the flame of life requires, but it is a disquietingproposition. One atom too much or too little of any of them, --three ofoxygen where two were required, or two of nitrogen where only one waswanted, --and the face of the world might have been vastly different. Notonly did much depend on their coming together, but upon the order oftheir coming; they must unite in just such an order. Insinuate an atomor corpuscle of hydrogen or carbon at the wrong point in the ranks, andthe trick is a failure. Is there any chance that they will hit upon acombination of things and forces that will make a machine--a watch, agun, or even a row of pins?

When we regard all the phenomena of life and the spell it seems to putupon inert matter, so that it behaves so differently from the samematter before it is drawn into the life circuit, when we see how itlifts up a world of dead particles out of the soil against gravity intotrees and animals; how it changes the face of the earth; how it comesand goes while matter stays; how it defies chemistry and physics toevoke it from the non-living; how its departure, or cessation, lets thematter fall back to the inorganic--when we consider these and otherslike them, we seem compelled to think of life as something, some forceor principle in itself, as M. Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge do, existingapart from the matter it animates. 

Sir Oliver Lodge, famous physicist that he is, yet has a vein ofmysticism and idealism in him which sometimes makes him recoil from thehard-and-fast interpretations of natural phenomena by physical science. Like M. Bergson, he sees in life some tendency or impetus which arose inmatter at a definite time and place, "and which has continued tointeract with and incarnate itself in matter ever since. "

If a living body is a machine, then we behold a new kind of machine withnew kinds of mechanical principles--a machine that repairs itself, thatreproduces itself, a clock that winds itself up, an engine that stokesitself, 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 atree--a machine that is nine tenths water, a machine that feeds on othermachines, a machine that grows stronger with use; in fact, a machinethat does all sorts of unmechanical things and that no known combinationof mechanical and chemical principles can reproduce--a vital machine. The idea of the vital as something different from and opposed to themechanical must come in. Something had to be added to the mechanical andchemical 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 theseanimals--what it is that makes an ox an ox or a sheep a sheep. Theseanimals are built up out of the same elements by the same processes, andthey may both have had the same stem form in remote biologic time. Ifso, what made them diverge and develop into such totally differentforms? After the living body is once launched many, if not all, of itsoperations and economies can be explained on principles of mechanics andchemistry, but the something that avails itself of these principles anddevelops 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. " Howmuch more of it some men, some animals, some plants have than others!What is it? What did Spencer mean by it? This capital augments fromyouth to manhood, and then after a short or long state of equilibriumslowly declines to the vanishing-point. 

Again, what a man does depends upon what he is, and what he is dependsupon what he does. Structure determines function, and function reactsupon structure. This interaction goes on throughout life; cause andeffect interchange or play into each other's hands. The more power wespend within limits the more power we have. This is another respect inwhich life is utterly unmechanical. A machine does not grow stronger byuse as our muscles do; it does not store up or conserve the energy itexpends. The gun is weaker by every ball it hurls; not so the baseballpitcher; he is made stronger up to the limit of his capacity forstrength. 

It is plain enough that all living beings are machines in thisrespect--they are kept going by the reactions between their interior andtheir exterior; these reactions are either mechanical, as in flying, swimming, walking, and involve gravitation, or they are chemical andassimilative, as in breathing and eating. To that extent all livingthings are machines--some force exterior to themselves must aid inkeeping them going; there is no spontaneous or uncaused movement inthem; 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 andenvironment is as radically different from that of the steam-engine asit is possible to express. His driving-wheel, the heart, acts inresponse to some stimulus as truly as does the piston of the engine, andthe principles involved in circulation are all mechanical; and yet themain thing is not mechanical, but vital. Analyze the vital activitiesinto principles of mechanics and of chemistry, if you will, yet there issomething involved that is neither mechanical nor chemical, though itmay be that only the imagination can grasp it. 

The type that prints the book is set up and again distributed by apurely mechanical process, but that which the printed page signifiesinvolves something not mechanical. The mechanical and chemicalprinciples operative in men's bodies are all the same; the cellstructure is the same, and yet behold the difference between men insize, in strength, in appearance, in temperament, in disposition, incapacities! All the processes of respiration, circulation, and nutritionin our bodies involve well-known mechanical principles, and the body isaccurately described as a machine; and yet if there were not somethingin it that transcends mechanics and chemistry would you and I be here? Amachine is the same whether it is in action or repose, but when a bodyceases to function, it is not the same. It cannot be set going like amachine; the motor power has ceased to be. But if the life of the bodywere no more than the sum of the reactions existing between the body andthe medium in which it lives, this were not so. A body lives as long asthere is a proper renewal of the interior medium through exchanges withits environment. 

Mechanical principles are operative in every part of the body--in theheart, in the arteries, in the limbs, in the joints, in the bowels, inthe muscles; and chemical principles are operative in the lungs, in thestomach, in the liver, in the kidneys; but to all these things do we nothave to add something that is not mechanical or chemical to make theman, to make the plant? A higher mechanics, a higher chemistry, if youprefer, a force, but a force differing in kind from the physical forces. 

The forces of life are constructive forces, and work in a world ofdisintegrating or destructive forces which oppose them and which theyovercome. The mechanical and the chemical forces of dead matter are theenemies of the forces of life till life overcomes and uses them; as muchso as gravity, fire, frost, water are man's enemies till he has learnedhow to subdue and use them. 

IV

It is a significant fact that the four chief elements which in variouscombinations make up living bodies are by their extreme mobility wellsuited to their purpose. Three of these are gaseous; only the carbon isa solid. This renders them facile and adaptive in the ever-changingconditions of organic evolution. The solid carbon forms the vessel inwhich the precious essence of life is carried. Without carbon we shouldevaporate or flow away and escape. Much of the oxygen and hydrogenenters into living bodies as water; nine tenths of the human body iswater; a little nitrogen and a few mineral salts make up the rest. Sothat our life in its final elements is little more than a stream ofwater holding in solution carbonaceous and other matter and flowing, forever flowing, a stream of fluid and solid matter plus something elsethat scientific analysis cannot reach--some force or principle thatcombines and organizes these elements into the living body. 

If a man could be reduced instantly into his constituent elements weshould see a pail or two of turbid fluid that would flow down the bankand soon be lost in the soil. That which gives us our form and stabilityand prevents us from slowly spilling down the slope at all times is themysterious vital principle or force which knits and marries theseunstable elements together and raises up a mobile but more or lessstable form out of the world of fluids. Venus rising from the sea is asymbol of the genesis of every living thing. 

Inorganic matter seeks only rest. "Let me alone, " it says; "do not breakmy 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 newforms are what I crave. " As soon as life enters matter, matter meetswith a change of heart. It is lifted to another plane, thesupermechanical plane; it behaves in a new way; its movements from beingcalculable become incalculable. A straight line has direction, that ismechanics; what direction has the circle? That is life, a change ofdirection every instant. An aeroplane is built entirely on mechanicalprinciples, but something not so built has to sit in it and guide it; infact, had to build it and adjust it to its end. 

Mechanical forces seek an equilibrium or a state of rest. The wholeinorganic world under the influence of gravity would flow as waterflows, if it could, till it reached a state of absolute repose. Butvital forces struggle against a state of repose, which to them meansdeath. They are vital by virtue of their tendency to resist the reposeof inert matter; chemical activity disintegrates a stone or other metal, but the decay of organized matter is different in kind; living organismsdecompose it and resolve it into its original compounds. 

Vital connections and mechanical connections differ in kind. You cantreat mechanical principles mathematically, but can you treat lifemathematically? Will your formulas and equations apply here? You canfigure out the eclipses of the sun and moon for centuries to come, butwho can figure out the eclipses of nations or the overthrow of partiesor the failures of great men? And it is not simply because the problemis so vastly more complex; it is because you are in a world wheremathematical principles do not apply. Mechanical forces will determinethe place and shape of every particle of inert matter any number ofyears or centuries hence, but they will not determine the place andcondition of matter imbued with the principle of life. 

We can graft living matter, we can even graft a part of one animal'sbody into another animal's body, but the mechanical union which webring about must be changed into vital union to be a success, thespirit of the body has to second our efforts. The same in grafting atree or anything else: the mechanical union which we effect must becomea vital union; and this will not take place without some degree ofconsanguinity, the live scion must be recognized and adapted by thestock in which we introduce it. 

Living matter may be symbolized by a stream; it is ever and never thesame; life is a constant becoming; our minds and our bodies are neverthe same at any two moments of time; life is ceaseless change. 

No doubt it is between the stable and the unstable condition of themolecules of matter that life is born. The static condition to which allthings tend is death. Matter in an unstable condition tends either toexplode or to grow or to disintegrate. So that an explosion bears someanalogy to life, only it is quickly over and the static state of theelements is restored. Life is an infinitely slower explosion, or aprolonged explosion, during which some matter of the organism is beingconstantly burned up, and thus returned to a state of inorganic repose, while new matter is taken in and kindled and consumed by the fires oflife. 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 isthe rub. Get your explosive compound, and something must break thedeadlock of the elements before it will explode. So in life, what is itthat sets up this slow gentle explosion that makes the machinery of ourvital economies go--that draws new matter into the vortex and casts theused-up material out--in short, that creates and keeps up the unstablecondition, the seesaw upon which life depends? To enable the mind tograsp it we have to invent or posit some principle, call it the vitalforce, as so many have done and still do, or call it molecular force, asTyndall does, or the power of God, as our orthodox brethren do, itmatters not. We are on the border-land between the knowable and theunknowable, where the mind can take no further step. There is no lifewithout carbon and oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, but there is a worldof these elements without life. What must be added to them to set up thereaction we call life? Nothing that chemistry can disclose. 

New tendencies and activities are set up among these elements, but theelements themselves are not changed; oxygen is still oxygen and carbonstill carbon, yet behold the wonder of their new workmanship under thetutelage of life!

Life only appears when the stable passes into the unstable, yet thischange takes place all about us in our laboratories, and no lifeappears. We can send an electric spark through a room full of oxygen andhydrogen gas, and with a tremendous explosion we have water--an elementof 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 arenearer life than the same minerals in the rocks and soil; but none ofthese things is life. 

The chemical mixture of some of the elements gives us our highexplosives--gunpowder, guncotton, and the like; their organic mixturegives a slower kind of explosive--bread, meat, milk, fruit, which, whenacted upon by the vital forces of the body, yield the force that is theequivalent of the work the body does. But to combine them in thelaboratory so as to produce the compounds out of which the body canextract force is impossible. We can make an unstable compound that willhurl a ton of iron ten miles, but not one that when exploded in thedigestive tract of the human body will lift a hair. 

We may follow life down to the ground, yes, under the ground, into thevery roots of matter and motion, yea, beyond the roots, into theimaginary world of molecules and atoms, and their attractions andrepulsions and not find its secret. Indeed, science--the newscience--pursues matter to the vanishing-point, where it ceases tobecome matter and becomes pure force or spirit. What takes place in thatimaginary world where ponderable matter ends and becomes disembodiedforce, and where the hypothetical atoms are no longer divisible, we mayconjecture but may never know. We may fancy the infinitely little goingthrough a cycle of evolution like that of the infinitely great, andsolar systems developing and revolving inside of the ultimate atoms, butthe Copernicus or the Laplace of the atomic astronomy has not yetappeared. The atom itself is an invention of science. To get the mysteryof 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. Itis not the volume of the change; it is the quality or kind. Chemistryand mechanics we have always known, and they always remain chemistry andmechanics. They go into our laboratories and through our deviceschemistry and mechanics, and they come out chemistry and mechanics. Theywill never come out life, conjure with them as we will, and we can getno other result. We cannot inaugurate the mystic dance among the atomsthat will give us the least throb of life. 

The psychic arises out of the organic and the organic arises out of theinorganic, and the inorganic arises out of--what? The relation of eachto the other is as intimate as that of the soul to the body; we cannotget between them even in thought, but the difference is one of kind andnot of degree. The vital transcends the mechanical, and the psychictranscends the vital--is on another plane, and yet without the sun'senergy there could be neither. Thus are things knit together; thus doesone thing flow out of or bloom out of another. We date from the rocks, and the rocks date from the fiery nebulæ, and the loom in which thetexture of our lives was woven is the great loom of vital energy aboutus and in us; but what hand guided the shuttle and invented thepattern--who knows?

III

A WONDERFUL WORLD

I

Science recognizes a more fundamental world than that of matter. This isthe electro-magnetic world which underlies the material world and which, as Professor Soddy says, probably completely embraces it, and has nomechanical analogy. To those accustomed only to the grosser ideas ofmatter and its motions, says the British scientist, thiselectro-magnetic world is as difficult to conceive of as it would be forus to walk upon air. Yet many times in our lives is this world inoverwhelming evidence before us. During a thunderstorm we get an inklingof how fearfully and wonderfully the universe in which we live is made, and what energy and activity its apparent passivity and opacity mark. Aflash of lightning out of a storm-cloud seems instantly to transform thewhole passive universe into a terrible living power. This slow, opaque, indifferent matter about us and above us, going its silent or noisyround of mechanical and chemical change, ponderable, insensate, obstructive, slumbering in the rocks, quietly active in the soil, gentlyrustling in the trees, sweetly purling in the brooks, slowly, invisiblybuilding and shaping our bodies--how could we ever dream that it held inleash such a terrible, ubiquitous, spectacular thing as this of theforked 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 thegreat seals of the Book of Fate were being broken?

What an awakening it is! what a revelation! what a fearfully dramaticactor suddenly leaps upon the stage! Had we been permitted to lookbehind the scenes, we could not have found him; he was not there, exceptpotentially; he was born and equipped in a twinkling. One stride, andone word which shakes the house, and he is gone; gone as quickly as hecame. Look behind the curtain and he is not there. He has vanished morecompletely than any stage ghost ever vanished--he has withdrawn into theinnermost recesses of the atomic structure of matter, and is diffusedthrough the clouds, to be called back again, as the elemental dramaproceeds, as suddenly as before. 

All matter is charged with electricity, either actual or potential; thesun is hot with it, and doubtless our own heart-beats, our own thinkingbrains, are intimately related to it; yet it is palpable and visibleonly in this sudden and extraordinary way. It defies our analysis, itdefies our definitions; it is inscrutable and incomprehensible, yet itwill do our errands, light our houses, cook our dinners, and pull ourloads. 

How humdrum and constant and prosaic the other forces--gravity, cohesion, chemical affinity, and capillary attraction--seem whencompared with this force of forces, electricity! How deep and prolongedit slumbers at one time, how terribly active and threatening at another, bellowing through the heavens like an infuriated god seeking whom he maydestroy!

The warring of the elements at such times is no figure of speech. Whathas so disturbed the peace in the electric equilibrium, as to makepossible this sudden outburst, this steep incline in the stream ofenergy, this ethereal Niagara pouring from heaven to earth? Is athunderstorm a display of the atomic energy of which the physicistsspeak, and which, were it available for our use, would do all the workof the world many times over?

How marvelous that the softest summer breeze, or the impalpable currentsof the calmest day, can be torn asunder with such suddenness andviolence, by the accumulated energy that slumbers in the imaginaryatoms, as to give forth a sound like the rending of mountains or thedetonations of earthquakes!

Electricity is the soul of matter. If Whitman's paradox is true, thatthe soul and body are one, in the same sense the scientific paradox istrue: that matter and electricity are one, and both are doubtless aphase of the universal ether--a reality which can be described only interms of the negation of matter. In a flash of lightning we see puredisembodied energy--probably that which is the main-spring of theuniverse. Modern science is more and more inclined to find theexplanation of all vital phenomena in electrical stress and change. Weknow that an electric current will bring about chemical changesotherwise impracticable. Nerve force, if not a form of electricity, isprobably inseparable from it. Chemical changes equivalent to thecombustion of fuel and the corresponding amount of available energyreleased have not yet been achieved outside of the living body withoutgreat loss. The living body makes a short cut from fuel to energy, andthis avoids the wasteful process of the engine. What part electricityplays in this process is, of course, only conjectural. 

II

Our daily lives go on for the most part in two worlds, the world ofmechanical transposition and the world of chemical transformations, butwe are usually conscious only of the former. This is the visible, palpable world of motion and change that rushes and roars around us inthe winds, the storms, the floods, the moving and falling bodies, andthe whole panorama of our material civilization; the latter is theworld of silent, invisible, unsleeping, and all-potent chemicalreactions that take place all about us and is confined to the atoms andmolecules of matter, as the former is confined to its visibleaggregates. 

Mechanical forces and chemical affinities rule our physical lives, andindirectly our psychic lives as well. When we come into the world anddraw our first breath, mechanics and chemistry start us on our career. Breathing is a mechanical, or a mechanico-vital, act; the mechanicalprinciple involved is the same as that involved in the working of abellows, but the oxidation of the blood when the air enters the lungs isa chemical act, or a chemico-vital act. The air gives up a part of itsoxygen, which goes into the arterial circulation, and its place is takenby carbonic-acid gas and watery vapor. The oxygen feeds and keeps goingthe flame of life, as literally as it feeds and keeps going the fires inour stoves and furnaces. 

Hence our most constant and vital relation to the world without is achemical one. We can go without food for some days, but we can existwithout breathing only a few moments. Through these spongy lungs of ourswe lay hold upon the outward world in the most intimate and constantway. Through them we are rooted to the air. The air is a mechanicalmixture of two very unlike gases--nitrogen and oxygen; one very inert, the other very active. Nitrogen is like a cold-blooded, lethargicperson--it combines with other substances very reluctantly and with butlittle energy. Oxygen is just its opposite in this respect: it givesitself freely; it is "Hail, fellow; well met!" with most substances, andit enters into co-partnership with them on such a large scale that itforms nearly one half of the material of the earth's crust. Thisinvisible gas, this breath of air, through the magic of chemicalcombination, forms nearly half the substance of the solid rocks. Depriveit of its affinity for carbon, or substitute nitrogen or hydrogen in itsplace, and the air would quickly suffocate us. That changing of the darkvenous blood in our lungs into the bright, red, arterial blood wouldinstantly cease. Fancy the sensation of inhaling an odorless, non-poisonous atmosphere that would make one gasp for breath! We shouldbe quickly poisoned by the waste of our own bodies. All things that livemust have oxygen, and all things that burn must have oxygen. Oxygen doesnot burn, but it supports combustion. 

And herein is one of the mysteries of chemistry again. This supportwhich the oxygen gives is utterly unlike any support we are acquaintedwith in the world of mechanical forces. Oxygen supports combustion bycombining chemically with carbon, and the evolution of heat and light isthe result. And this is another mystery--this chemical union which takesplace in the ultimate particles of matter and which is so radicallydifferent from a mechanical mixture. In a chemical union the atoms arenot simply in juxtaposition; they are, so to speak, inside of oneanother--each has swallowed another and lost its identity, an impossiblefeat, surely, viewed in the light of our experiences with tangiblebodies. In the visible, mechanical world no two bodies can occupy thesame place at the same time, but apparently in chemistry they can anddo. An atom of oxygen and one of carbon, or of hydrogen, unite and arelost in each other; it is a marriage wherein the two or three becomeone. In dealing with the molecules and atoms of matter we are in a worldwherein the laws of solid bodies do not apply; friction is abolished, elasticity is perfect, and place and form play no part. We have escapedfrom matter as we know it, the solid, fluid, or gaseous forms, and aredealing with it in its fourth or ethereal estate. In breathing, theoxygen goes into the blood, not to stay there, but to unite with andbring away the waste of the system in the shape of carbon, and re-enterthe air again as one of the elements of carbonic-acid gas, CO_{2}. Thenthe reverse process takes place in the vegetable world, the leavesbreathe this poisonous gas, release the oxygen under the chemistry ofthe sun's rays, and appropriate and store up the carbon. Thus do theanimal and vegetable worlds play into each other's hands. The animal isdependent upon the vegetable for its carbon, which it releases again, through the life processes, as carbonic-acid gas, to be again drawn intothe cycle of vegetable life. 

The act of breathing well illustrates our mysterious relations toNature--the cunning way in which she plays the principal part in ourlives without our knowledge. How certain we are that we draw the airinto our lungs--that we seize hold of it in some way as if it were acontinuous substance, and pull it into our bodies! Are we not alsocertain that the pump sucks the water up through the pipe, and that wesuck our iced drinks through a straw? We are quite unconscious of thefact that the weight of the superincumbent air does it all, thatbreathing is only to a very limited extent a voluntary act. It iscontrolled by muscular machinery, but that machinery would not act in avacuum. We contract the diaphragm, or the diaphragm contracts understimuli received through the medulla oblongata from those parts of thebody which constantly demand oxygen, and a vacuum tends to form in thechest, 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 tofill, just as it causes the bellows of the blacksmith to fill when heworks the lever, and the water to rise in the pump when we force out theair by working the handle. Another unconscious muscular effort under theinfluence of nerve stimulus, and the air is forced out of the lungs, charged with the bodily waste which it is the function to relieve. Butthe 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, butwhich we never think of as such, is fire. Here on our own hearthstonesgoes on this wonderful spectacular and beneficent transformation ofmatter and energy, and yet we are grown so familiar with it that itmoves us not. We can describe combustion in terms of chemistry, just aswe can describe the life-processes in similar terms, yet the mystery isno more cleared up in the one case than in the other. Indeed, it seemsto me that next to the mystery of life is the mystery of fire. Theoxidizing processes are identical, only one is a building up orintegrating process, and the other is a pulling down or disintegratingprocess. More than that, we can evoke fire any time, by both mechanicaland chemical means, from the combustible matter about us; but we cannotevoke life. The equivalents of life do not slumber in our tools as dothe equivalents of fire. Hence life is the deeper mystery. The ancientsthought of a spirit of fire as they did of a spirit of health and ofdisease, and of good and bad spirits all about them, and as we think ofa spirit of life, or of a creative life principle. Are we as wide ofthe 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 itin our laboratories, then this charge will assume a different aspect. 

III

Nature works with such simple means! A little more or a little less ofthis or that, and behold the difference! A little more or a little lessheat, 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 itis a visible vapor, at a still higher it is an invisible vapor thatburns like a flame. All possible shades of color lurk in a colorless rayof light. A little more or a little less heat makes all the differencebetween a nebula and a sun, and between a sun and a planet. At onedegree of heat the elements are dissociated; at a lower degree they areunited. At one point in the scale of temperatures life appears; atanother it disappears. With heat enough the earth would melt like asnowball in a furnace, with still more it would become a vapor and floataway like a cloud. More or less heat only makes the difference betweenthe fluidity of water and the solidity of the rocks that it beatsagainst, or of the banks that hold it. 

The physical history of the universe is written in terms of heat andmotion. Astronomy is the story of cooling suns and worlds. At a lowenough temperature all chemical activity ceases. In our own experiencewe find that frost will blister like flame. In the one case heat passesinto 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 alike effect is produced. In one sense, life is a thermal phenomenon; soare all conditions of fluids and solids thermal phenomena. 

Great wonders Nature seems to achieve by varying the arrangement of thesame particles. Arrange or unite the atoms of carbon in one way and youhave charcoal; assemble the same atoms in another order, and you havethe diamond. The difference between the pearl and the oyster-shell thatholds it is one of structure or arrangement of the same particles ofmatter. Arrange the atoms of silica in one way and you have a quartzpebble, in another way and you have a precious stone. The chemicalconstituents of alcohol and ether are the same; the difference in theirqualities and properties arises from the way the elements arecompounded--the way they take hold of hands, so to speak, in thatmarriage ceremony which constitutes a chemical compound. Compoundsidentical in composition and in molecular formulæ may yet differ widelyin physical properties; the elements are probably grouped in differentways, the atoms of carbon or of hydrogen probably carry differentamounts of potential energy, so that the order in which they standrelated to one another accounts for the different properties of the samechemical compounds. Different groupings of the same atoms of any of theelements result in a like difference of physical properties. 

The physicists tell us that what we call the qualities of things, andtheir structure and composition, are but the expressions of internalatomic movements. A complex substance simply means a whirl, an intricatedance, of which chemical composition, histological structure, and grossconfiguration are the figures. How the atoms take hold of hands, as itwere, the way they face, the poses they assume, the speed of theirgyrations, the partners they exchange, determine the kinds of phenomenawe are dealing with. 

There is a striking analogy between the letters of our alphabet andtheir relation to the language of the vast volume of printed books, andthe eighty or more primary elements and their relation to the vastuniverse of material things. The analogy may not be in all respects astrictly true one, but it is an illuminating one. Our twenty-six letterscombined and repeated in different orders give us the many thousandwords our language possesses, and these words combined and repeated indifferent orders give us the vast body of printed books in ourlibraries. The ultimate parts--the atoms and molecules of allliterature, so to speak--are the letters of the alphabet. How often bychanging a letter in a word, by reversing their order, or bysubstituting one letter for another, we get a word of an entirelydifferent meaning, as in umpire and empire, petrifaction andputrefaction, malt and salt, tool and fool. And by changing the order ofthe words in a sentence we express all the infinite variety of ideas andmeanings that the books of the world hold. 

The eighty or more primordial elements are Nature's alphabet with whichshe writes her "infinite book of secrecy. " Science shows prettyconclusively that the character of the different substances, theirdiverse qualities and properties, depend upon the order in which theatoms and molecules are combined. Change the order in which themolecules of the carbon and oxygen are combined in alcohol, and we getether--the chemical formula remaining the same. Or take ordinary spiritsof wine and add four more atoms of carbon to the carbon molecules, andwe have the poison, carbolic acid. Pure alcohol is turned into a deadlypoison by taking from it one atom of carbon and two of hydrogen. Withthe atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, by combining them indifferent proportions and in different orders, Nature produces suchdiverse bodies as acetic acid, alcohol, sugar, starch, animal fats, vegetable oils, glycerine, and the like. So with the long list ofhydrocarbons--gaseous, liquid, and solid--called paraffins, that areobtained from petroleum and that are all composed of hydrogen andcarbon, but with a different number of atoms of each, like a differentnumber of a's or b's or c's in a word. 

What an enormous number of bodies Nature forms out of oxygen by unitingit chemically with other primary elements! Thus by uniting it with theelement silica she forms half of the solid crust of the globe; byuniting it with hydrogen in the proportion of two to one she forms allthe water of the globe. With one atom of nitrogen united chemically withthree atoms of hydrogen she forms ammonia. With one atom of carbonunited with four atoms of hydrogen she spells marsh gas; and so on. Carbon occurs in inorganic nature in two crystalline forms, --the diamondand black lead, or graphite, --their physical differences evidently beingthe result of their different molecular structure. Graphite is a goodconductor of heat and electricity, and the diamond is not. Carbon in theorganic world, where it plays such an important part, isnon-crystalline. Under the influence of life its molecules aredifferently put together, as in sugar, starch, wood, charcoal, etc. There are also two forms of phosphorus, but not two kinds; the sameatoms are probably united differently in each. The yellow waxy varietyhas such an affinity for oxygen that it will burn in water, and it ispoisonous. Bring this variety to a high temperature away from the air, and its molecular structure seems to change, and we have the redvariety, which is tasteless, odorless, and non-poisonous, and is notaffected by contact with the air. Such is the mystery of chemicalchange. 

IV

Science has developed methods and implements of incredible delicacy. Its"microbalance" can estimate "the difference of weight of the order ofthe millionth of a milligram. " Light travels at the speed of 186, 000miles a second, yet science can follow it with its methods, and findsthat it travels faster with the current of running water than againstit. Science has perfected a thermal instrument by which it can detectthe heat of a lighted candle six miles away, and the warmth of the humanface several miles distant. It has devised a method by which it cancount the particles in the alpha rays of radium that move at a velocityof twenty thousand kilometers a second, and a method by which, throughthe use of a screen of zinc-sulphide, it can see the flashes produced bythe alpha atoms when they strike this screen. It weighs and counts andcalculates the motions of particles of matter so infinitely small thatonly the imagination can grasp them. Its theories require it to treatthe ultimate particles into which it resolves matter, and which are sosmall that they are no longer divisible, as if they were solid bodieswith weight and form, with centre and circumference, colliding with oneanother like billiard-balls, or like cosmic bodies in the depths ofspace, striking one another squarely, and, for aught I know, each goingthrough another, or else grazing one another and glancing off. Toparticles of matter so small that they can no longer be divided or madesmaller, the impossible feat of each going through the centre ofanother, or of each enveloping the other, might be affirmed of themwithout adding to their unthinkableness. The theory is that if we dividea molecule of water the parts are no longer water, but atoms of hydrogenand 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 oursenses reveal to us, or to matter in a fourth estate. We know solids andfluids and gases; but emanations which are neither we know only as weknow spirits and ghosts--by dreams or hearsay. Yet this fourth orethereal estate of matter seems to be the final, real, and fundamentalcondition. 

How it differs from spirit is not easy to define. The beta ray of radiumwill penetrate solid iron a foot thick, a feat that would give a spiritpause. The ether of space, which science is coming more and more to lookupon as the mother-stuff of all things, has many of the attributes ofDeity. It is omnipresent and all-powerful. Neither time nor space hasdominion over it. It is the one immutable and immeasurable thing in theuniverse. From it all things arise and to it they return. It iseverywhere and nowhere. It has none of the finite properties ofmatter--neither parts, form, nor dimension; neither density nor tenuity;it cannot be compressed nor expanded nor moved; it has no inertia normass, and offers no resistance; it is subject to no mechanical laws, andno instrument or experiment that science has yet devised can detect itspresence; it has neither centre nor circumference, neither extension norboundary. And yet science is as convinced of its existence as of thesolid ground beneath our feet. It is the one final reality in theuniverse, if we may not say that it is the universe. Tremors orvibrations in it reach the eye and make an impression that we calllight; electrical oscillations in it are the source of other phenomena. It is the fountain-head of all potential energy. The ether is aninvention of the scientific imagination. We had to have it to accountfor light, gravity, and the action of one body upon another at adistance, as well as to account for other phenomena. The ether is not abody, it is a medium. All bodies are in motion; matter moves; the etheris in a state of absolute rest. Says Sir Oliver Lodge, "The ether isstrained, and has the property of exerting strain and recoil. " Anelectron 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 densethan anything else--a phenomenon that may be paralleled by a jet ofwater at such speed that it cannot be cut with a sword or severed by ahammer. It is so subtle or imponderable that solid bodies are as vacuumsto it, and so pervasive that all conceivable space is filled with it;"so full, " says Clerk Maxwell, "that no human power can remove it fromthe smallest portion of space, or produce the slightest flaw in itsinfinite continuity. "

The scientific imagination, in its attempts to master the workings ofthe material universe, has thus given us a creation which in many of itsattributes rivals Omnipotence. It is the sum of all contradictions, andthe source of all reality. The gross matter which we see and feel is onestate of it; electricity, which is without form and void, is anotherstate of it; and our minds and souls, Sir Oliver Lodge intimates, may bestill another state of it. But all these theories of physical scienceare justified by their fruits. The atomic theory of matter, and thekinetic theory of gases, are mathematically demonstrated. However unrealand fantastic they may appear to our practical faculties, conversantonly with ponderable bodies, they bear the test of the most rigid andexact experimentation. 

V

After we have marveled over all these hidden things, and been impressedby the world within world of the material universe, do we get any nearerto the mystery of life? Can we see where the tremendous change from thenon-living to the living takes place? Can we evoke life from theomnipotent ether, or see it arise in the whirling stream of atoms andelectrons? Molecular science opens up to us a world where the infinitelylittle matches the infinitely great, where matter is dematerialized andanswers to many of the conceptions of spirit; but does it bring us anynearer the origin of life? Is radio-active matter any nearer livingmatter than is the clod under foot? Are the darting electrons any morevital than the shooting-stars? Can a flash of radium emanations on azinc-sulphide plate kindle the precious spark? It is probably just aspossible to evoke vitality out of the clash of billiard-balls as out ofthe clash of atoms and electrons. This allusion to billiard-ballsrecalls to my mind a striking passage from Tyndall's famous BelfastAddress which he puts in the mouth of Bishop Butler in his imaginaryargument with Lucretius, and which shows how thoroughly Tyndallappreciated the difficulties of his own position in advocating thetheory of the physico-chemical origin of life. 

The atomic and electronic theory of matter admits one to a world thatdoes indeed seem unreal and fantastic. "If my bark sinks, " says thepoet, "'t is to another sea. " If the mind breaks through what we callgross matter, and explores its interior, it finds itself indeed in avast under or hidden world--a world almost as much a creation of theimagination as that visited by Alice in Wonderland, except that theexistence of this world is capable of demonstration. It is a world ofthe infinitely little which science interprets in terms of theinfinitely large. Sir Oliver Lodge sees the molecular spaces thatseparate the particles of any material body relatively like theinterstellar spaces that separate the heavenly bodies. Just as all theso-called solid matter revealed by our astronomy is almost infinitesimalcompared with the space through which it is distributed, so theelectrons which compose the matter with which we deal are comparable tothe bodies of the solar system moving in vast spaces. It is indeed afantastic world where science conceives of bodies a thousand timessmaller than the hydrogen atom--the smallest body known to science;where it conceives of vibrations in the ether millions of millions timesa second; where we are bombarded by a shower of corpuscles from aburning candle, or a gas-jet, or a red-hot iron surface, moving at thespeed of one hundred thousand miles a second! But this almost omnipotentether has, after all, some of the limitations of the finite. It takestime to transmit the waves of light from the sun and the stars. Thismeasurable speed, says Sir Oliver Lodge, gives the ether away, and showsits finite character. 

It seems as if the theory of the ether must be true, because it fits inso well with the enigmatic, contradictory, incomprehensible character ofthe universe as revealed to our minds. We can affirm and deny almostanything of the ether--that it is immaterial, and yet the source of allmaterial; that it is absolutely motionless, yet the cause of all motion;that it is the densest body in nature, and yet the most rarified; thatit is everywhere, but defies detection; that it is as undiscoverable asthe Infinite itself; that our physics cannot prove it, though theycannot get along without it. The ether inside a mass of iron or of leadis just as dense as the ether outside of it--which means that it is notdense at all, in our ordinary use of the term. 

VI

There are physical changes in matter, there are chemical changes, andthere is a third change, as unlike either of these as they are unlikeeach other. I refer to atomic change, as in radio-activity, which givesus lead from helium--a spontaneous change of the atoms. The energy thatkeeps the earth going, says Soddy, is to be sought for in the individualatoms; not in the great heaven-shaking voice of thunder, but in thestill small voice of the atoms. Radio-activity is the mainspring of theuniverse. The only elements so far known that undergo spontaneous changeare uranium and thorium. One pound of uranium contains and slowly givesout the same amount of energy that a hundred tons of coal evolves in itscombustion, but only one ten-billionth part of this amount is given outevery 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, thenatural gas, the petroleum of the rocks, the fertility of the soil. Butwe cannot exhaust the energy of the winds or the tides, or of fallingwater, because this energy is ever renewed by gravity and the sun. Therecan 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 poweris being developed on a large scale. A great column of water makes avertical fall of six hundred feet through a steel tube, and in the falldevelops two hundred and fifty thousand horse-power. The water comes outof the tunnel at the bottom, precisely the same water that went in atthe top; no change whatever has occurred in it, yet a vast amount ofpower 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 powerresulting each time, without effecting any change in the character ofthe water. The pull of gravity is the source of the power which isdistributed hundreds of miles across the country as electricity. Twohundred and fifty thousand invisible, immaterial, noiseless horses arestreaming along these wires with incredible speed to do the work of menand horses in widely separated parts of the country. A river of sandfalling down those tubes, if its particles moved among themselves withthe same freedom that those of the water do, would develop the samepower. 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 canbe developed from the action of matter without any alteration in itsparticles, suggests the question whether or not this something that wecall life, or life-force, may not slumber in matter in the same way; butthe secret of its development we have not yet learned, as we have thatof electricity. 

Radio-activity is uninfluenced by external conditions; hence we are thusfar unable to control it. Nothing that is known will effect thetransmutation of one element into another. It is spontaneous anduncontrollable. May not life be spontaneous in the same sense?

The release of the energy associated with the structure of the atoms isnot available by any of our mechanical appliances. The process ofradio-activity involves the expulsion of atoms of helium with a velocitythree hundred times greater than that ever previously known for anymaterial mass or particle, and this power we are incompetent to use. Theatoms remain unchanged amid the heat and pressure of the laboratory ofnature. Iron and oxygen and so forth remain the same in the sun as hereon 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 isreduced 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-raysees through this too too solid flesh. Bodies are ponderable only to ourdull senses; to a finer hand than this the door or the wall might offerno obstruction; a finer eye than this might see the emanations from theliving 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 andinfluences from out the heavens above, and from the earth beneath, thatare beyond our ken, play upon us constantly?

The final mystery of life is no doubt involved in conditions and forcesthat are quite outside of or beyond our conscious life activities, inforces 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. "Oureye takes in only an octave of the vibrations we call light, " because nomore is necessary for our action or our dealing with things. Theinvisible rays of the spectrum are potent, but they are beyond the kenof our senses. There are sounds or sound vibrations that we do not hear;our sense of touch cannot recognize a gossamer, or the gentler airmovements. 

I began with the contemplation of the beauty and terror of thethunderbolt--"God's autograph, " as one of our poets (Joel Benton) said, "written upon the sky. " Let me end with an allusion to another aspect ofthe storm that has no terror in it--the bow in the clouds: a suddenapparition, a cosmic phenomenon no less wonderful and startling than thelightning's flash. The storm with terror and threatened destruction onone side of it, and peace and promise on the other! The bow appears likea miracle, but it is a commonplace of nature; unstable as life, andbeautiful as youth. The raindrops are not changed, the light is notchanged, the laws of the storms are not changed; and yet, behold thiswonder!

But all these strange and beautiful phenomena springing up in a world ofinert matter are but faint symbols of the mystery and the miracle of thechange of matter from the non-living to the living, from the elements inthe 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 myreader, will continue to haunt it throughout the greater part of thisvolume. The final truth about it refuses to be spoken. Every effort todo 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 withthat in matter, from the dead to the living?--a change so great thatmost minds feel compelled to go outside of matter and invoke somesuper-material force or agent to account for it. The least of livingthings is so wonderful, the phenomena it exhibits are so fundamentallyunlike 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 toexplain 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 withoutmaterial and chemical forces, but material and chemical forces do nothold the secret of life. This is vitalism as opposed to mechanism, orscientific materialism, which is the doctrine of the all-sufficiency ofthe physical forces operating in the inorganic world to give rise to allthe phenomena of the organic world--a doctrine coming more and more invogue with the progress of physical science. Without holding to anybelief in the supernatural or the teleological, and while adhering tothe idea that there has been, and can be, no break in the causalsequence in this world, may one still hold to some form of vitalism, andsee in life something more than applied physics and chemistry?

Is biology to be interpreted in the same physical and chemical terms asgeology? Are biophysics and geophysics one and the same? One may freelyadmit that there cannot be two kinds of physics, nor two kinds ofchemistry--not one kind for a rock, and another kind for a tree, or aman. There are not two species of oxygen, nor two of carbon, nor two ofhydrogen and nitrogen--one for living and one for dead matter. The waterin the human body is precisely the same as the water that flows by inthe creek or that comes down when it rains; and the sulphur and the limeand the iron and the phosphorus and the magnesium are identical, so faras chemical analysis can reveal, in the organic and the inorganicworlds. But are we not compelled to think of a kind of differencebetween a living and a non-living body that we cannot fit into any ofthe mechanical or chemical concepts that we apply to the latter?Professor Loeb, with his "Mechanistic Conception of Life"; ProfessorHenderson, of Harvard, with his "Fitness of the Environment"; ProfessorLe Dantec, of the Sorbonne in Paris, with his volume on "The Nature andOrigin of Life, " published a few years since; Professor Schäfer, President of the British Association, Professor Verworn of Bonn, andmany others find in the laws and properties of matter itself asufficient explanation of all the phenomena of life. They look upon theliving body as only the sum of its physical and chemical activities;they do not seem to feel the need of accounting for life itself--forthat something which confers vitality upon the heretofore non-vitalelements. That there is new behavior, that there are new chemicalcompounds called organic, --tens of thousands of them not found ininorganic nature, --that there are new processes set up in aggregates ofmatter, --growth, assimilation, metabolism, reproduction, thought, emotion, science, civilization, --no one denies. 

How are we going to get these things out of the old physics andchemistry without some new factor or agent or force? To help ourselvesout here with a "vital principle, " or with spirit, or a creativeimpulse, as Bergson does, seems to be the only course open to certaintypes of mind. Positive science cannot follow us in this step, becausescience is limited to the verifiable. The stream of forces with which itdeals is continuous; it must find the physical equivalents of all theforces that go into the body in the output of the body, and it cannotadmit of a life force which it cannot trace to the physical forces. 

What has science done to clear up this mystery of vitality? ProfessorLoeb, our most eminent experimental biologist, has succeeded infertilizing the eggs of some low forms of sea life by artificial means;and in one instance, at least, it is reported that the fatherless formgrew to maturity. This is certainly an interesting fact, but takes us nonearer the solution of the mystery of vitality than the fact thatcertain chemical compounds may stimulate the organs of reproductionhelps to clear up the mystery of generation; or the fact that certainother chemical compounds help the digestive and assimilative processesand further the metabolism of the body assists in clearing up themystery that attaches to these things. In all such cases we have theliving body to begin with. The egg of the sea-urchin and the egg of thejelly-fish are living beings that responded to certain chemicalsubstances, so that a process is set going in their cell life that isequivalent to fertilization. It seems to me that the result of allProfessor Loeb's valuable inquiries is only to give us a more intimatesense of how closely mechanical and chemical principles are associatedand identified with all the phenomena of life and with all animalbehavior. Given a living organism, mechanics and chemistry will thenexplain much of its behavior--practically all the behavior of the lowerorganisms, and much of that of the higher. Even when we reach man, ourreactions to the environment and to circumstances play a great part inour lives; but dare we say that will, liberty of choice, ideation, donot play a part also? How much reality there is in the so-called animalwill, is a problem; but that there is a foundation for our belief in thereality of the human will, I, for one, do not for a moment doubt. Thediscontinuity here is only apparent and not real. We meet with the samebreak when we try to get our mental states, our power of thought--apoem, 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. Ourphysical life forms a closed circle, science says, and what goes intoour bodies as physical force, must come out in physical force, or assome of its equivalents. Well, one of the equivalents, transformed bysome unknown chemism within us, is our psychic force, or states ofconsciousness. The two circles, the physical and the psychical, are notconcentric, as Fiske fancied, but are linked in some mysterious way. 

Professor Loeb is a master critic of the life processes; he and hiscompeers analyze them as they have never been analyzed before; but thesolution of the great problem of life that we are awaiting does notcome. A critic may resolve all of Shakespeare's plays into theirhistoric and other elements, but that will not account for Shakespeare. Nature's synthesis furnishes occasions for our analysis. Most assuredlyall psychic phenomena have a physical basis; we know the soul onlythrough the body; but that they are all of physico-chemical origin, isanother 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 themystery. It knows well the part played by carbon, oxygen, and hydrogenin organic chemistry, that without water and carbon dioxide there couldbe no life; it knows the part played by light, air, heat, gravity, osmosis, chemical affinity, and all the hundreds or thousands of organiccompounds; it knows the part played by what are called the enzymes, orferments, in all living bodies, but it does not know the secret of theseferments; it knows the part played by colloids, or jelly-like compounds, that there is no living body without colloids, though there are colloidbodies that are not living; it knows the part played by oxidation, thatwithout it a living body ceases to function, though everywhere all aboutus is oxidation without life; it knows the part played by chlorophyll inthe vegetable kingdom, and yet how chlorophyll works such magic upon thesun's rays, using the solar energy to fix the carbon of carbonic acid inthe air, and thereby storing this energy as it is stored in wood andcoal and in much of the food we consume, is a mystery. Chemistry cannotrepeat the process in its laboratories. The fungi do not possess thiswonderful chlorophyllian power, and hence cannot use the sunbeam tosnatch their carbon from the air; they must get it from decomposedvegetable matter; they feed, as the animals do, upon elements that havegone through the cycle of vegetable life. The secret of vegetable life, then, is in the green substance of the leaf where science is powerlessto unlock it. Conjure with the elements as it may, it cannot produce theleast speck of living matter. It can by synthesis produce many of theorganic compounds, but only from matter that has already been throughthe organic cycle. It has lately produced rubber, but from otherproducts of vegetable life. 

As soon as the four principal elements, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, andnitrogen, that make up the living body, have entered the world of livingmatter, their activities and possible combinations enormously increase;they enter into new relations with one another and form compounds ofgreat variety and complexity, characterized by the instability whichlife requires. The organic compounds are vastly more sensitive to lightand heat and air than are the same elements in the inorganic world. Whathas happened to them? Chemistry cannot tell us. Oxidation, which is onlyslow combustion, is the main source of energy in the body, as it is inthe steam-engine. The storing of the solar energy, which occurs only inthe vegetable, is by a process of reduction, that is, the separation ofthe carbon and oxygen in carbonic acid and water. The chemical reactionswhich liberate energy in the body are slow; in dead matter they arerapid and violent, or explosive and destructive. It is the chemistry inthe leaf of the plant that diverts or draws the solar energy into thestream 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-madeorganism and then reduce its activities and processes to their physicalequivalents. Vitality is given, and then the vital processes are fittedinto mechanical and chemical concepts, or into moulds derived from inertmatter--not a difficult thing to do, but no more an explanation of themystery of vitality than a painting or a marble bust of Tyndall would bean explanation of that great scientist. 

All Professor Loeb's experiments and criticisms throw light upon thelife processes, or upon the factors that take part in them, but not uponthe secret of the genesis of the processes themselves. Amid all theactivities of his mechanical and chemical factors, there is ever presenta 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 otherends. The water in the wave, and the laws that govern it, do not differat all from the water and its laws that surround it; but unless onetakes into account the force that makes the wave, an analysis of thephenomena will leave one where he began. 

Professor Le Dantec leaves the subject where he took it up, with theorigin of life and the life processes unaccounted for. His work is adescription, and not an explanation. All our ideas about vitality, or anunknown factor in the organic world, he calls "mystic" and unscientific. A sharp line of demarcation between living and non-living bodies is notpermissible. This, he says, is the anthropomorphic error which puts somemysterious quality or force in all bodies considered to be living. To LeDantec, the difference between the quick and the dead is of the sameorder as the difference which exists between two chemical compounds--forexample, as that which exists between alcohol and an aldehyde, a liquidthat has two less atoms of hydrogen in its composition. Modify yourchemistry a little, add or subtract an atom or two, more or less, ofthis or that gas, and dead matter thrills into life, or living mattersinks to the inert. In other words, life is the gift of chemistry, itsparticular essence is of the chemical order--a bold inference from thefact that there is no life without chemical reactions, no life withoutoxidation. Yet chemical reactions in the laboratory cannot produce life. With Le Dantec, biology, like geology and astronomy, is only appliedmechanics and chemistry. 

III

Such is the result of the rigidly objective study of life--the onlymethod analytical science can pursue. The conception of vitality as afactor in itself answers to nothing that the objective study of life candisclose; such a study reveals a closed circle of physical forces, chemical and mechanical, into which no immaterial force or principle canfind entrance. "The fact of being conscious, " Le Dantec says withemphasis, "does not intervene in the slightest degree in directing vitalmovements. " But common sense and everyday observation tell us thatstates of consciousness do influence the bodily processes--influence thecirculation, the digestion, the secretions, the respiration. 

An objective scientific study of a living body yields results notunlike those which we might get from an objective study of a bookconsidered as something fabricated--its materials, its construction, itstypography, its binding, the number of its chapters and pages, and soon--without giving any heed to the meaning of the book--its ideas, thehuman soul and personality that it embodies, the occasion that gave riseto it, indeed all its subjective and immaterial aspects. All thesethings, the whole significance of the volume, would elude scientificanalysis. It would seem to be a manufactured article, representing onlyso much mechanics and chemistry. It is the same with the living body. Unless we permit ourselves to go behind the mere facts, the meremechanics and chemistry of life phenomena, and interpret them in thelight of immaterial principles, in short, unless we apply some sort ofphilosophy to them, the result of our analysis will be but dust in oureyes, and ashes in our mouths. Unless there is something like mind orintelligence pervading nature, some creative and transforming impulsethat cannot be defined by our mechanical concepts, then, to me, thewhole organic world is meaningless. If man is not more than an "accidentin the history of the thermic evolution of the globe, " or the result ofthe fortuitous juxtaposition and combination of carbonic acid gas andwater and a few other elements, what shall we say? It is at least abewildering proposition. 

Could one by analyzing a hive of bees find out the secret of itsorganization--its unity as an aggregate of living insects? Behold itswonderful economics, its division of labor, its complex socialstructure, --the queen, the workers, the drones, --thousands of beeswithout any head or code of laws or directing agent, all acting as oneindividual, all living and working for the common good. There is noconfusion 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 decideswho shall stay and who shall go? When the honey supply fails, or if itfail prematurely, on account of a drought, the swarming instinct isinhibited, and the unhatched queens are killed in their cells. Who orwhat issues the regicide order? We can do no better than to call it theSpirit 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 sameinstant. Something like that is true of a living body; the cells arelike the bees: they work together, they build up the tissues and organs, some are for one thing and some for another, each community of cellsplays its own part, and they all pull together for the good of thewhole. We can introduce cells and even whole organs, for example akidney from another living body, and all goes well; and yet we cannotfind the seat of the organization. Can we do any better than to call itthe Spirit of the Body?

IV

Our French biologist is of the opinion that the artificial production ofthat marvel of marvels, the living cell, will yet take place in thelaboratory. But the enlightened mind, he says, does not need such proofto be convinced that there is no essential difference between living andnon-living matter. 

Professor Henderson, though an expounder of the mechanistic theory ofthe origin of life, admits that he does not know of a biological chemistto whom the "mechanistic origin of a cell is scientifically imaginable. "Like Professor Loeb, he starts with the vital; how he came by it we getno inkling; he confesses frankly that the biological chemist cannot evenface the problem of the origin of life. He quotes with approval a remarkof Liebig's, as reported by Lord Kelvin, that he (Liebig) could no morebelieve that a leaf or a flower could be formed or could grow bychemical forces "than a book on chemistry, or on botany, could grow outof dead matter. " Is not this conceding to the vitalists all that theyclaim? The cell is the unit of life; all living bodies are but vastconfraternities of cells, some billions or trillions of them in thehuman body; the cell builds up the tissues, the tissues build up theorgans, the organs build up the body. Now if it is not thinkable thatchemism could beget a cell, is it any more thinkable that it could builda living tissue, and then an organ, and then the body as a whole? Ifthere is an inscrutable something at work at the start, which organizesthat wonderful piece of vital mechanism, the cell, is it any the lessoperative ever after, in all life processes, in all living bodies andtheir functions, --the vital as distinguished from the mechanical andchemical? Given the cell, and you have only to multiply it, and organizethese products into industrial communities, and direct them to specificends, --certainly a task which we would not assign to chemistry orphysics any more than we would assign to them the production of a workon chemistry or botany, --and you have all the myriad forms ofterrestrial life. 

The cell is the parent of every living thing on the globe; and if it isunthinkable that the material and irrational forces of inert mattercould produce it, then mechanics and chemistry must play second fiddlein all that whirl and dance of the atoms that make up life. And that isall the vitalists claim. The physico-chemical forces do play secondfiddle; that inexplicable something that we call vitality dominates andleads them. True it is that a living organism yields to scientificanalysis only mechanical and chemical forces--a fact which only limitsthe range of scientific analysis, and which by no means exhausts thepossibilities of the living organism. The properties of matter and thelaws of matter are intimately related to life, yea, are inseparablefrom it, but they are by no means the whole story. Professor Hendersonrepudiates the idea of any extra-physical influence as being involved inthe processes of life, and yet concedes that the very foundation of allliving matter, yea, the whole living universe in embryo--the cell--isbeyond the possibilities of physics and chemistry alone. Mechanism andchemism are adequate to account for astronomy and geology, andtherefore, he thinks, are sufficient to account for biology, withoutcalling in the aid of any Bergsonian life impulse. Still these forcesstand impotent before that microscopic world, the cell, the foundationof all life. 

Our professor makes the provisional statement, not in obedience to hisscience, but in obedience to his philosophy, that something more thanmechanics and chemistry may have had a hand in shaping the universe, some primordial tendency impressed upon or working in matter "justbefore mechanism begins to act"--"a necessary and preëstablishedassociate of mechanism. " So that if we start with the universe, withlife, and with this tendency, mechanism will do all the rest. But thisis not science, of course, because it is not verifiable; it ispractically the philosophy of Bergson. 

The cast-iron conclusions of physical science do pinch the Harvardprofessor a bit, and he pads them with a little of the Bergsonianphilosophy. Bergson himself is not pinched at all by the conclusions ofpositive science. He sees that we, as human beings, cannot live in thisuniverse without supplementing our science with some sort of philosophythat will help us to escape from the fatalism of matter and force intothe freedom of the spiritual life. If we are merely mechanical andchemical accidents, all the glory of life, all the meaning of our moraland spiritual natures, go by the board. 

Professor Henderson shows us how well this planet, with its oceans andcontinents, and its mechanical and chemical forces and elements, issuited to sustain life, but he brings us no nearer the solution of themystery than we were before. His title, to begin with, is ratherbewildering. 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 livingnature the foot is made to fit the shoe, and not the shoe the foot. Theenvironment is the mould in which the living organism is cast. Hence, itseems to me, that seeking to prove the fitness of the environment isvery much like seeking to prove the fitness of water for fish to swimin, or the fitness of the air for birds to fly in. The implication seemsto be made that the environment anticipates the organism, or meets ithalf way. But the environment is rather uncompromising. Man alonemodifies his environment by the weapon of science; but not radically; inthe end he has to fit himself to it. Life has been able to adjustitself to the universal forces and so go along with them; otherwise weshould not be here. We may say, humanly speaking, that the water isfriendly to the swimmer, if he knows how to use it; if not, it is hisdeadly 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 isnever tempered to the shorn lamb, the shorn lamb must clothe itselfagainst the wind. Life is adaptive, and this faculty of adaptation tothe environment, of itself takes it out of the category of thephysico-chemical. The rivers and seas favor navigation, if we havegumption enough to use and master their forces. The air is good tobreathe, and food to eat, for those creatures that are adapted to them. Bergson thinks, not without reason, that life on other planets may bequite different from what it is on our own, owing to a difference inchemical and physical conditions. Change the chemical constituents ofsea water, and you radically change the lower organisms. With anatmosphere entirely of oxygen, the processes of life would go on morerapidly and perhaps reach a higher form of development. Life on thisplanet is limited to a certain rather narrow range of temperature; thespan may be the same in other worlds, but farther up or farther down thescale. Had the air been differently constituted, would not our lungshave been different? The lungs of the fish are in his gills: he has tofilter his air from a much heavier medium. The nose of the pig is fittedfor rooting; shall we say, then, that the soil was made friable thatpigs might root in it? The webbed foot is fitted to the water; shall wesay, then, that water is liquid in order that geese and ducks may swimin it? One more atom of oxygen united to the two atoms that go to makethe molecule of air, and we should have had ozone instead of the air wenow breathe. How unsuited this would have made the air for life as weknow it! Oxidation would have consumed us rapidly. Life would have metthis extra atom by some new device. 

One wishes Professor Henderson had told us more about how life fitsitself to the environment--how matter, moved and moulded only bymechanical and chemical forces, yet has some power of choice that amachine does not have, and can and does select the environment bestsuited to its well-being. In fact, that it should have, or be capableof, any condition of well-being, if it is only a complex of physical andchemical forces, is a problem to wrestle with. The ground we walk on issuch a complex, but only the living bodies it supports have conditionsof well-being. 

Professor Henderson concedes very little to the vitalists or theteleologists. He is a thorough mechanist. "Matter and energy, " he says, "have an original property, assuredly not by chance, which organizesthe universe in space and time. " Where or how matter got this organizingproperty, he offers no opinion. "Given the universe, life, and thetendency [the tendency to organize], mechanism is inductively provedsufficient to account for all phenomena. " Biology, then, is onlymechanics and chemistry engaged in a new rôle without any change ofcharacter; but what put them up to this new rôle? "The wholeevolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologistmay now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric. "

V

Another Harvard voice is less pronounced in favor of the mechanisticconception of life. Professor Rand thinks that in a mechanicallydetermined universe, "our conscious life becomes a meaningless replicaof an inexorable physical concatenation"--the soul the result of afortuitous concourse of atoms. Hence all the science and art andliterature and religion of the world are merely the result of amolecular accident. 

Dr. Rand himself, in wrestling with the problem of organization in alate number of "Science, " seems to hesitate whether or not to regard manas a molecular accident, an appearance presented to us by the results ofthe curious accidents of molecules--which is essentially ProfessorLoeb's view; or whether to look upon the living body as the result of a"specific something" that organizes, that is, of "dominating organicagencies, " be they psychic or super-mundane, which dominate anddetermine the organization of the different parts of the body into awhole. Yet he is troubled with the idea that this specific something maybe "nothing more than accidental chemical peculiarities of cells. " Butwould these accidental peculiarities be constant? Do accidents happenmillions of times in the same way? The cell is without variableness orshadow of turning. The cells are the minute people that build up allliving forms, and what prompts them to build a man in the one case, andthe man's dog in another, is the mystery that puzzles Professor Rand. "Tissue cells, " he says, "are not structures like stone blockslaboriously carved and immovably cemented in place. They are rather likethe 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 newsubstance enters. What is it that prevents the local whirl in thisunstable stream from changing its form? How is it that a million musclecells remain alike, collectively ready to respond to a nerve impulse?"According to one view, expressed by Professor Rand, "Organization issomething that we read into natural phenomena. It is in itself nothing. "The alternative view holds that there is a specific organizing agentthat brings about the harmonious operation of all the organs and partsof the system--a superior dynamic force controlling and guiding all theindividual parts. 

A most determined and thorough-going attempt to hunt down the secret ofvitality, and to determine how far its phenomena can be interpreted interms of mechanics and chemistry, is to be found in Professor H. W. Conn's volume entitled "The Living Machine. " Professor Conn justifieshis title by defining a machine as "a piece of apparatus so designedthat it can change one kind of energy into another for a definitepurpose. " Of course the adjective "living" takes it out of the categoryof all mere mechanical devices and makes it super-mechanical, just asHaeckel's application of the word "living" to his inorganics ("livinginorganics"), takes them out of the category of the inorganic. In everymachine, properly so called, all the factors are known; but do we knowall the factors in a living body? Professor Conn applies his searchinganalysis to most of the functions of the human body, to digestion, toassimilation, to circulation, to respiration, to metabolism, and so on, and he finds in every function something that does not fall within hiscategory--some force not mechanical nor chemical, which he names vital. 

In following the processes of digestion, all goes well with hischemistry and his mechanics till he comes to the absorption offood-particles, or their passage through the walls of the intestinesinto the blood. Here, the ordinary physical forces fail him, and livingmatter comes to his aid. The inner wall of the intestine is not alifeless membrane, and osmosis will not solve the mystery. There issomething there that seizes hold of the droplets of oil by means oflittle extruded processes, and then passes them through its own body toexcrete them on an inner surface into the blood-vessels. "This fatabsorption thus appears to be a vital process and not one simplycontrolled by physical forces like osmosis. Here our explanation runsagainst what we call 'vital power' of the ultimate elements of thebody. " Professor Conn next analyzes the processes of circulation, andhis ready-made mechanical concepts carry him along swimmingly, till hetries to explain by them the beating of the heart, and the contractionof the small blood-vessels which regulate the blood-supply. Here comesin play the mysterious vital power again. He comes upon the same powerwhen he tries to determine what it is that enables the muscle-fibre totake from the lymph the material needed for its use, and to discard therest. The fibre acts as if it knew what it wanted--a very unmechanicalattribute. 

Then Professor Conn applies his mechanics and chemistry to therespiratory process and, of course, makes out a very clear case till hecomes to the removal of the waste, or ash. The steam-engine cannotremove its own ash; the "living machine" can. Much of this ash takesthe form of urea, and "the seizing upon the urea by the kidney cells isa vital phenomenon. " Is not the peristaltic movement of the bowels, bywhich the solid matter is removed, also a vital phenomenon? Is not theconception of a pipe or a tube that forces semi-fluid matter along itshollow interior, by the contraction of its walls, quite beyond the reachof mechanics? The force is as mechanical as the squeezing of the bulb ofa syringe by the hand, but in the case of the intestines, what does thesqueezing? The vital force?

When the mechanical and chemical concepts are applied to the phenomenaof the nervous system, they work very well till we come to mentalphenomena. When we try to correlate physical energy with thought orconsciousness, we are at the end of our tether. Here is a gulf we cannotspan. The theory of the machine breaks down. Some other force thanmaterial force is demanded here, namely, psychical, --a force orprinciple quite beyond the sphere of the analytic method. 

Hence Professor Conn concludes that there are vital factors and thatthey are the primal factors in the organism. The mechanical and chemicalforces are the secondary factors. It is the primal factors that eludescientific 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 thechemist's laboratory . . . It simply gives rise to heat, " are questions hecannot answer. In all his inquiries into the parts played by mechanicaland chemical laws in the organism, he is compelled to "assume as theirfoundation the simple vital properties of living phenomena. "

VI

It should not surprise nor disturb us that the scientific interpretationof life leads to materialism, or to the conviction of theall-sufficiency of the mechanical and chemical forces of dead matter toaccount for all living phenomena. It need not surprise us becausepositive science, as such, can deal only with physical and chemicalforces. If there is anything in this universe besides physical andchemical force, science does not know it. It does not know it because itis absolutely beyond the reach of its analysis. When we go beyond thesphere of the concrete, the experimental, the verifiable, only ourphilosophy can help us. The world within us, the world of psychicforces, is beyond the ken of science. It can analyze the living body, trace all its vital processes, resolve them into their mechanical andchemical equivalents, show us the parts played by the primary elements, the part played by the enzymes, or ferments, and the like, and yet itcannot tell us the secret of life--of that which makes organic chemistryso vastly different from inorganic. It discloses to us the wonders ofthe cell--a world of mystery by itself; it analyzes the animal body intoorgans, and the organs into tissues, and the tissues into cells, but thesecret of organization utterly baffles it. After Professor Wilson hadconcluded his masterly work on the cell, he was forced to admit that thefinal mystery of the cell eluded him, and that his investigation "on thewhole seemed to widen rather than to narrow the enormous gap thatseparates 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 honestlyas a man of science, when he related consciousness to the body, as thesound of a clock when it strikes is related to the machinery of theclock. The scientific analysis of a living body reveals nothing but theaction of the mechanical and chemical principles. If you analyze it byfire or by cremation, you get gases and vapors and mineral ash, that isall; the main thing about the live body--its organization, its life--youdo not get. Of course science knows this; and to account for thismissing something, it philosophizes, and relegates it to the interiorworld of molecular physics--it is all in the way the ultimate particlesof matter were joined or compounded, were held together in the bonds ofmolecular matrimony. What factor or agent or intelligence is active ordirective in this molecular marriage of the atoms, science does notinquire. Only philosophy can deal with that problem. 

What can science see or find in the brain of man that answers to thesoul? Only certain movements of matter in the brain cortex. Whatdifference does it find between inert matter and a living organism? Onlya vastly more complex mechanics and chemistry in the latter. A widedifference, 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 betweenthe germ cell of a starfish and the germ cell of a man; and yet think ofwhat a world of difference is hidden in those microscopic germs! Whatforce is there in inert matter that can build a machine by theadjustment of parts to each other? We can explain the most complexchemical compounds by the action of chemical forces and chemicalaffinity, but they cannot explain that adjustment of parts to eachother, the coördination of their activities that makes a living machine. 

In organized matter there is something that organizes. "The cell itselfis an organization of smaller units, " and to drive or follow theorganizing principle into the last hiding-place is past the power ofbiological chemistry. What constitutes the guiding force or principle ofa living body, adjusting all its parts, making them pull together, making of the circulation one system in which the heart, the veins, thearteries, the lungs, all work to one common end, coördinating severaldifferent organs into a digestive system, and other parts into thenervous system, is a mystery that no objective analysis of the body candisclose. 

To refer vitality to complexity alone, is to dodge the question. Multiplying the complexity of a machine, say of a watch, any conceivablenumber of times would not make it any the less a machine, or change itfrom the automatic order to the vital order. A motor-car is a vastlymore complex mechanism than a wheelbarrow, and yet it is not the less amachine. On the other hand, an amoeba is a far simpler animal than aman, and yet it is just as truly living. To refer life to complexitydoes not help us; we want to know what lies back of the complexity--whatmakes it a new species of complexity. 

We cannot explain the origin of living matter by the properties whichliving matter possesses. There are three things that mechanics andchemistry cannot explain: the relation of the psychical to the physicalthrough the law of the conservation and correlation of forces; the agentor principle that guides the blind chemical and physical forces so as toproduce the living body; and the kind of forces that have contributed tothe origin of that morphological unit--the cell. 

A Western university professor in a recent essay sounds quite adifferent note on this subject from the one that comes to us fromHarvard. Says Professor Otto C. Glaser, of the University of Michigan, in a recent issue of the "Popular Science Monthly": "Does not thefitness of living things; the fact that they perform acts useful tothemselves in an environment which is constantly shifting, and oftenvery harsh; the fact that in general everything during development, during digestion, during any of the complicated chains of processeswhich we find, happens at the right time, in the right place, and to theproper extent; does not all this force us to believe that there isinvolved something more than mere chemistry and physics?--something, notconsciousness necessarily, yet its analogue--a vital _x_?"

There is this suggestive fact about these recent biological experimentsof Dr. Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute: they seem to prove that thelife of a man is not merely the sum of the life of the myriad cells ofhis body. Stab the man to death, and the cells of his body still liveand will continue to live if grafted upon another live man. Probablyevery part of the body would continue to live and grow indefinitely, inthe proper medium. That the cell life should continue after the soullife has ceased is very significant. It seems a legitimate inferencefrom this fact that the human body is the organ or instrument of someagent that is not of the body. The functional or physiological life ofthe body as a whole, also seems quite independent of our consciousvolitional or psychic life. That which repairs and renews the body, heals its wounds, controls and coordinates its parts, adapts it to itsenvironment, carries on its processes during sleep, in fact in all ourinvoluntary life, seems quite independent of the man himself. Is thespirit of a race or a nation, or of the times in which we live, anotherillustration of the same mysterious entity?

If the vital principle, or vital force, is a fiction, invented to givethe mind something to take hold of, we are in no worse case than we arein some other matters. Science tells us that there is no such _thing_ asheat, or light; these are only modes of activity in matter. 

In the same way we seem forced to think of life, vitality, as anentity--a fact as real as electricity or light, though it may be only amode of motion. It may be of physico-chemical origin, as much so asheat, or light; and yet it is something as distinctive as they are amongmaterial things, and is involved in the same mystery. Is magnetism orgravitation a real thing? or, in the moral world, is love, charity, orconsciousness itself? The world seems to be run by nonentities. Heat, light, life, seem nonentities. That which organizes the different partsor organs of the human body into a unit, and makes of the many organsone organism, is a nonentity. That which makes an oak an oak, and apine a pine, is a nonentity. That which makes a sheep a sheep, and an oxan ox, is to science a nonentity. To physical science the soul is anonentity. 

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 notactive in the other cells of the body. But it is a nonentity. The bodyis a machine and a laboratory combined, but that which coördinates themand makes them work together--what is that? Another nonentity. Thatwhich distinguishes a living machine from a dead machine, science has noname for, except molecular attraction and repulsion, and these are namesmerely; they are nonentities. Is there not molecular attraction andrepulsion in a steam-engine also? And yet it is not alive. What has tosupplement the mechanical and the chemical to make matter alive? We haveno name for it but the vital, be it an entity or a nonentity. We have noname for a flash of lightning but electricity, be it an entity or anonentity. We have no name for that which distinguishes a man from abrute, but mind, soul, be it an entity or a nonentity. We have no namefor that which distinguishes the organic from the inorganic butvitality, be it an entity or a nonentity. 

VII

Without metaphysics we can do nothing; without mental concepts, whereare we? Natural selection is as much a metaphysical phrase as isconsciousness, or the subjective and the objective. Natural selection isnot an entity, it is a name for what we conceive of as a process. It isnatural rejection as well. The vital principle is a metaphysicalconcept; 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 diseaseas the work of evil spirits, of famine and pestilence as the visitationof the wrath of God, and the like, were unfounded. Science sets us rightabout all such matters. It corrects our philosophy, but it cannotdispense with the philosophical attitude of mind. The philosophical mustsupplement the experimental. 

In fact, in considering this question of life, it is about as difficultfor the unscientific mind to get along without postulating a vitalprinciple or force--which, Huxley says, is analogous to the idea of aprinciple of aquosity in water--as it is to walk upon the air, or tohang one's coat upon a sunbeam. It seems as if something must breatheupon the dead matter, as at the first, to make it live. Yet if there isa distinct vital force it must be correlated with physical force, itmust be related causally to the rest. The idea of a vital force assomething new and distinct and injected into matter from without at agiven time and place in the earth's history, must undoubtedly be givenup. Instead of escaping from mechanism, this notion surrenders one intothe hands of mechanism, since to supplement or reinforce a principlewith some other principle from without, is strictly a mechanicalprocedure. But the conception of vitality as potential in matter, or ofthe whole universe as permeated with spirit, which to me is the samething, is a conception that takes life out of the categories of thefortuitous 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 allphenomena are the result of natural principles, no doubt that the livingarose from the non-living, no doubt that the evolution process wasinherent in the constitution of the world; and yet there is a mysteryabout it all that is insoluble. The miracle of vitality takes placebehind a veil that we cannot penetrate, in the inmost sanctuary of themolecules of matter, in that invisible, imaginary world on theborderland between the material and the immaterial. We may fancy that itis here that the psychical effects its entrance into the physical--thatspirit weds matter--that the creative energy kindles the spark we callvitality. At any rate, vitality evidently begins in that inner world ofatoms and molecules; but whether as the result of their peculiar andvery complex compounding or as the cause of the compounding--how are weever 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 newbehavior of an old principle? In either case, we are in the world of theunverifiable; we take a step in the dark. Most of us, I fancy, willsympathize with George Eliot, who says in one of her letters: "To me theDevelopment Theory, and all other explanations of processes by whichthings came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mysterythat lies under the processes. "

V

SCIENTIFIC VITALISM

I

All living bodies, when life leaves them, go back to the earth fromwhence they came. What was it in the first instance that gathered theirelements from the earth and built them up into such wonderfulmechanisms? If we say it was nature, do we mean by nature a physicalforce or an immaterial principle? Did the earth itself bring forth aman, or did something breathe upon the inert clay till it became aliving spirit?

As life is a physical phenomenon, appearing in a concrete physicalworld, it is, to that extent, within the domain of physical science, andappeals to the scientific mind. Physical science is at home only in theexperimental, the verifiable. Its domain ends where that of philosophybegins. 

The question of how life arose in a universe of dead matter is just asbaffling a question to the ordinary mind, as how the universe itselfarose. If we assume that the germs of life drifted to us from otherspheres, propelled by the rays of the sun, or some other celestialagency, as certain modern scientific philosophers have assumed, we haveonly removed the mystery farther away from us. If we assume that itcame by spontaneous generation, as Haeckel and others assume, then weare only cutting a knot which we cannot untie. The god of spontaneousgeneration is as miraculous as any other god. We cannot break the causalsequence without a miracle. If something came from nothing, then thereis not only the end of the problem, but also the end of our boastedscience. 

Science is at home in discussing all the material manifestations oflife--the parts played by colloids and ferments, by fluids and gases, and all the organic compounds, and by mechanical and chemicalprinciples; it may analyze and tabulate all life processes, and show theliving body as a most wonderful and complex piece of mechanism, butbefore the question of the origin of life itself it stands dumb, and, when speaking through such a man as Tyndall, it also stands humble andreverent. After Tyndall had, to his own satisfaction, reduced all likephenomena to mechanical attraction and repulsion, he stood withuncovered head before what he called the "mystery and miracle ofvitality. " The mystery and miracle lie in the fact that in the organicworld the same elements combine with results so different from those ofthe inorganic world. Something seems to have inspired them with a newpurpose. In the inorganic world, the primary elements go their ceaselessround from compound to compound, from solid to fluid or gaseous, andback again, forming the world of inert matter as we know it, but in theorganic world the same elements form thousands of new combinationsunknown to them before, and thus give rise to the myriad forms of lifethat inhabit the earth. 

The much-debated life question has lately found an interesting exponentin Professor Benjamin Moore, of the University of Liverpool. His volumeon the subject in the "Home University Library" is very readable, and, in many respects, convincing. At least, so far as it is the word ofexact science on the subject it is convincing; so far as it isspeculative, or philosophical, it is or is not convincing, according tothe type of mind of the reader. Professor Moore is not a bald mechanistor materialist like Professor Loeb, or Ernst Haeckel, nor is he anidealist or spiritualist, like Henri Bergson or Sir Oliver Lodge. He maybe called a scientific vitalist. He keeps close to lines of scientificresearch as these lines lead him through the maze of the primordialelements of matter, from electron to atom, from atom to molecule, frommolecule to colloid, and so up to the border of the living world. Hisanalysis of the processes of molecular physics as they appear in theorganism leads him to recognize and to name a new force, or a newmanifestation of force, which he hesitates to call vital, because of theassociations of this term with a prescientific age, but which he calls"biotic energy. "

Biotic energy is peculiar to living bodies, and "there are precisely thesame criteria for its existence, " says Professor Moore, "as for theexistence of any one of the inorganic energy types, viz. , a set ofdiscrete phenomena; and its nature is as mysterious to us as the causeof any one of these inorganic forms about which also we know so little. It is biotic energy which guides the development of the ovum, whichregulates the exchanges of the cell, and causes such phenomena as nerveimpulse, muscular contraction, and gland secretion, and it is a form ofenergy which arises in colloidal structures, just as magnetism appearsin iron, or radio-activity in uranium or radium, and in itsmanifestations it undergoes exchanges with other forms of energy, in thesame manner as these do among one another. "

Like Professor Henderson, Professor Moore concedes to the vitalistsabout all they claim--namely, that there is some form of force ormanifestation of energy peculiar to living bodies, and one that cannotbe adequately described in terms of physics and chemistry. ProfessorMoore says this biotic energy "arises in colloidal structures, " and sofar as biochemistry can make out, arises _spontaneously_ and gives riseto that marvelous bit of mechanism, the cell. In the cell appears "aform of energy unknown outside life processes which leads the mazy danceof life from point to point, each new development furnishing a startingpoint for the next one. " It not only leads the dance along our own lineof descent from our remote ancestors--it leads the dance along the longroad of evolution from the first unicellular form in the dim palæozoicseas to the complex and highly specialized forms of our own day. 

The secret of this life force, or biotic energy, according to ProfessorMoore, is in the keeping of matter itself. The steps or stages from thedepths of matter by which life arose, lead up from that imaginarysomething, the electron, to the inorganic colloids, or to thecrystallo-colloids, which are the threshold of life, each stage showingsome new transformation of energy. There must be an all-potent energytransformation before we can get chemical energy out of physical energy, and then biotic energy out of chemical energy. This transformation ofinorganic energy into life energy cannot be traced or repeated in thelaboratory, yet science believes the secret will sometime be in itshands. It is here that the materialistic philosophers, such asProfessors 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 thatsee in the life processes "no problems save those of chemistry andphysics. " "Each link in the living chain may be physico-chemical, butthe chain as a whole, and its purpose, is something else. " He draws ananalogy from the production of music in which purely physical factorsare concerned; the laws of harmonics account for all; but back of all issomething that is not mechanical and chemical--there is the mind of thecomposer, and the performers, and the auditors, and something that takescognizance of the whole effect. A complete human philosophy cannot bebuilt upon physical science alone. He thinks the evolution of life frominert matter is of the same type as the evolution of one form of matterfrom another, or the evolution of one form of energy from another--amystery, to be sure, but little more startling in the one case than inthe other. "The fundamental mystery lies in the existence of thoseentities, or things, which we call matter and energy, " out of the playand interaction of which all life phenomena have arisen. Organicevolution is a series of energy exchanges and transformations from lowerto higher, but science is powerless to go behind the phenomena presentedand name or verify the underlying mystery. Only philosophy can do this. And Professor Moore turns philosopher when he says there is beauty anddesign in it all, "and an eternal purpose which is ever progressing. "

Bergson sets forth his views of evolution in terms of literature andphilosophy. Professor Moore embodies similar views in his volume, setforth in terms of molecular science. Both make evolution a creative anda continuous process. Bergson lays the emphasis upon the cosmic spiritinteracting with matter. Professor Moore lays the emphasis upon theindwelling potencies of matter itself (probably the same spiritconceived of in different terms). Professor Moore philosophizes as trulyas does Bergson when he says "there must exist a whole world of livingcreatures which the microscope has never shown us, leading up to thebacteria and the protozoa. The brink of life lies not at the productionof protozoa and bacteria, which are highly developed inhabitants of ourworld, but away down among the colloids; and the beginning of life wasnot a fortuitous event occurring millions of years ago and never againrepeated, but one which in its primordial stages keeps on repeatingitself all the time in our generation. So that if all intelligentcreatures were by some holocaust destroyed, up out of the depths inprocess of millions of years, intelligent beings would once moreemerge. " This passage shows what a speculative leap or flight thescientific mind is at times compelled to take when it ventures beyondthe bounds of positive methods. It is good philosophy, I hope, but wecannot call it science. Thrilled with cosmic emotion, Walt Whitman madea 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 makesmatter plastic to its will. Whether we call matter "the living garmentof God, " as Goethe did, or a reservoir of creative energy, as Tyndalland his school did, and as Professor Moore still does, we are payinghomage to a power that is super-material. Life came to our earth, saysProfessor Moore, through a "well-regulated orderly development, " and it"comes to every mother earth of the universe in the maturity of hercreation when the conditions arrive within suitable limits. " That nointelligent beings appeared upon the earth for millions upon millions ofyears, that for whole geologic ages there was no creature with morebrains than a snail possesses, shows the almost infinitely slow progressof development, and that there has been no arbitrary or high-handedexercise of creative power. The universe is not run on principles ofmodern business efficiency, and man is at the head of living forms, notby the fiat of some omnipotent power, some superman, but as the resultof the operation of forces that balk at no delay, or waste, or failure, and that are dependent upon the infinitely slow ripening andamelioration of both cosmic and terrestrial conditions. 

We do not get rid of God by any such dictum, but we get rid of theanthropomorphic views which we have so long been wont to read into theprocesses of nature. We dehumanize the universe, but we do not render itthe less grand and mysterious. Professor Moore points out to us how lifecame to a cooling planet as soon as the temperature became low enoughfor certain chemical combinations to appear. There must first be oxidesand 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 andwater are at hand, and life can make a start. At the white heat of someof the fixed stars, the primary chemical elements are not yet evolved;but more and more elements appear, and more and more complex compoundsare formed as the cooling process progresses. 

"This note cannot be too strongly sounded, that as matter is allowedcapacity for assuming complex forms, those complex forms appear. As soonas oxides can be there, oxides appear; when temperature admits ofcarbonates, then carbonates are forthwith formed. These are experimentswhich any chemist can to-day repeat in a crucible. And on a coolingplanet, as soon as temperature will admit the presence of life, thenlife appears, as the evidence of geology shows us. " When we speak of thebeginning of life, it is not clear just what we mean. The unit of allorganized 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 morecomplex form of more primitive living matter. As we go down the scaletoward the inorganic, can we find the point where the living and thenon-living meet and become one? "Life had to surge a long way up fromthe depths before a green plant cell came into being. " When the greenplant cell was found, life was fairly launched. This plant cell, in theform of chlorophyll, by the aid of water and the trace of carbon dioxidein the air, began to store up the solar energy in fruit and grain andwoody tissue, and thus furnish power to run all forms of life machinery. 

The materialists or naturalists are right in urging that we live in amuch more wonderful universe than we have ever imagined, and that inmatter itself sleep potencies and possibilities not dreamt of in ourphilosophy. The world of complex though invisible activities whichscience reveals all about us, the solar and stellar energies rainingupon us from above, the terrestrial energies and influences playingthrough us from below, the transformations and transmutations takingplace on every hand, the terrible alertness and potency of the world ofinert matter as revealed by a flash of lightning, the mysteries ofchemical affinity, of magnetism, of radio-activity, all point to deepbeneath deep in matter itself. It is little wonder that men who dwellhabitually upon these things and are saturated with the spirit andtraditions of laboratory investigation, should believe that in some waymatter itself holds the mystery of the origin of life. On the otherhand, a different type of mind, the more imaginative, artistic, andreligious type, recoils from the materialistic view. 

The sun is the source of all terrestrial energy, but the different formsthat energy takes--in the plant, in the animal, in the brain ofman--this type of mind is bound to ask questions about that. Gravitypulls matter down; life lifts it up; chemical forces pull it to pieces;vital forces draw it together and organize it; the winds and the watersdissolve and scatter it; vegetation recaptures and integrates it andgives it new qualities. At every turn, minds like that of Sir OliverLodge are compelled to think of life as a principle or force doingsomething with matter. The physico-chemical forces will not do in thehands of man what they do in the hands of Nature. Such minds, therefore, feel justified in thinking that something which we call "the hands ofNature, " plays a part--some principle or force which the hands of man donot hold. 

VI

A BIRD OF PASSAGE

I

There is one phase of the much-discussed question of the nature andorigin of life which, so far as I know, has not been considered eitherby those who hold a brief for the physico-chemical view or by those whostand for some form of vitalism or idealism. I refer to the small partthat life plays in the total scheme of things. The great cosmic machinewould go on just as well without it. Its relation to the whole appearsto be little different from that of a man to the train in which hejourneys. Life rides on the mechanical and chemical forces, but it doesnot seem to be a part of them, nor identical with them, because theywere before it, and will continue after it is gone. 

The everlasting, all-inclusive thing in this universe seems to be inertmatter with the energy it holds; while the slight, flitting, casualthing seems to be living matter. The inorganic is from all eternity toall eternity; it is distributed throughout all space and endures throughall time, while the organic is, in comparison, only of the here and thenow; it was not here yesterday, and it may not be here to-morrow; itcomes and goes. Life is like a bird of passage which alights and tarriesfor a time and is gone, and the places where it perched and nested andled forth its brood know it no more. Apparently it flits from world toworld as the great cosmic spring comes to each, and departs as thecosmic winter returns to each. It is a visitor, a migrant, a frail, timid thing, which waits upon the seasons and flees from the comingtempests and vicissitudes. 

How casual, uncertain, and inconsequential the vital order seems in ourown solar system--a mere incident or by-product in its cosmic evolution!Astronomy sounds the depths of space, and sees only mechanical andchemical forces at work there. It is almost certain that only a smallfraction of the planetary surfaces is the abode of life. On the earthalone, of all the great family of planets and satellites, is the vitalorder in full career. It may yet linger upon Mars, but it is evidentlywaning. On the inferior planets it probably had its day long ago, whileit must be millions of years before it comes to the superior planets, ifit ever comes to them. What a vast, inconceivable outlay of time andenergy for such small returns! Evidently the vital order is only anepisode, a transient or secondary phase of matter in the process ofsidereal evolution. Astronomic space is strewn with dead worlds, as aNew England field is with drift boulders. That life has touched andtarried here and there upon them can hardly be doubted, but if it isanything more than a passing incident, an infant crying in the night, aflush 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 appearancehere a no more significant event than in the foam and bubbles that whirland dance for a moment upon the river's current. The bubbles have theirreason for being; all the mysteries of molecular attraction andrepulsion 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 arebubbles upon the stream of energy that flows through the universe. Apparently the cosmic game is played for us no more than for theparasites that infest our bodies, or for the frost ferns that form uponour window-panes in winter. The making of suns and systems goes on inthe depths of space, and doubtless will go on to all eternity, withoutany more reference to the vital order than to the chemical compounds. 

The amount of living matter in the universe, so far as we can penetrateit, compared with the non-living, is, in amount, like a flurry of snowthat whitens the fields and hills of a spring morning compared to themiles of rock and soil beneath it; and with reference to geologic timeit is about as fleeting. In the vast welter of suns and systems in theheavens above us, we see only dead matter, and most of it is in acondition of glowing metallic vapor. There are doubtless livingorganisms upon some of the invisible planetary bodies, but they areprobably as fugitive and temporary as upon our own world. Much of thesurface of the earth is clothed in a light vestment of life, which, backin geologic time, seems to have more completely enveloped it than atpresent, as both the arctic and the antarctic regions bear evidence intheir coal-beds and other fossil remains of luxuriant vegetable growths. 

Strip the earth of its thin pellicle of soil, thinner with reference tothe mass than is the peel to the apple, and you have stripped it of itslife. 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 globeswings through space only as a mass of insensate rock. So limited andevanescent is the world of living matter, so vast and enduring is theworld of the non-living. Looked at in this way, in the light of physicalscience, life, I repeat, seems like a mere passing phase of the cosmicevolution, a flitting and temporary stage of matter which it passesthrough in the procession of changes on the surface of a cooling planet. Between the fiery mist of the nebula, and the frigid and consolidatedglobe, there is a brief span, ranging over about one hundred and twentydegrees of temperature, where life appears and organic evolution takesplace. Compared with the whole scale of temperature, from absolute zeroto the white heat of the hottest stars, it is about a hand's-breadthcompared to a mile. 

Life processes cease, but chemical and mechanical processes go onforever. 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 ofconditions. Like the bow, also, it is a perpetual creation, a constantbecoming, and its source is not in the matter through which it ismanifested, though inseparable from it. The material substance of life, like the rain-drops, is in perpetual flux and change; it hangs always onthe verge of dissolution and vanishes when the material conditions fail, to be renewed again when they return. We know, do we not? that life isas literally dependent upon the sun as is the rainbow, and equallydependent upon the material elements; but whether the physicalconditions sum up the whole truth about it, as they do with the bow, isthe insoluble question. Science says "Yes, " but our philosophy and ourreligion say "No. " The poets and the prophets say "No, " and our hopesand aspirations say "No. "

II

Where, then, shall we look for the key to this mysterious thing we calllife? Modern biochemistry will not listen to the old notion of a vitalforce--that is only a metaphysical will-o'-the-wisp that leaves usfloundering in the quagmire. If I question the forces about me, whatanswer do I get? Molecular attraction and repulsion seem to say, "It isnot in us; we are as active in the clod as in the flower. " The fourprincipal elements--oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon--say, "It isnot in us, because we are from all eternity, and life is not; we formonly its physical basis. " Warmth and moisture say, "It is not in us; weare only its faithful nurses and handmaidens. " The sun says: "It is notin me; I shine on dead worlds as well. I but quicken life after it isplanted. " The stars say, "It is not in us; we have seen life come and goamong myriads of worlds for untold ages. " No questioning of the heavensabove nor of the earth below can reveal to us the secret we are in questof. 

I can fancy brute matter saying to life: "You tarry with me at yourperil. You will always be on the firing-line of my blind, contendingforces; they will respect you not; you must take your chances amid myflying missiles. My forces go their eternal round without variablenessor shadow of turning, and woe to you if you cross their courses. Youmay bring all your gods with you--gods of love, mercy, gentleness, altruism; but I know them not. Your prayers will fall upon ears ofstone, your appealing gesture upon eyes of stone, your cries for mercyupon hearts of stone. I shall be neither your enemy nor your friend. Ishall be utterly indifferent to you. My floods will drown you, my windswreck you, my fires burn you, my quicksands suck you down, and not knowwhat they are doing. My earth is a theatre of storms and cyclones, ofavalanches and earthquakes, of lightnings and cloudbursts; wrecks andruins 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 fighton your side, if you put and keep yourself in right relations to them. My atoms and electrons will build your houses, my lightning do yourerrands, my winds sail your ships, on the same terms. You cannot livewithout my air and my water and my warmth; but each of them is a sourceof power that will crush or engulf or devour you before it will turn onehair's-breadth from its course. Your trees will be uprooted by mytornadoes, your fair fields will be laid waste by floods or fires; mymountains will fall on your delicate forms and utterly crush and burythem; my glaciers will overspread vast areas and banish or destroy wholetribes and races of your handiwork; the shrinking and wrinkling crust ofmy earth will fold in its insensate bosom vast forests of your tropicalgrowths, and convert them into black rock, and I will make rock of themyriad forms of minute life with which you plant the seas; throughimmense geologic ages my relentless, unseeing, unfeeling forces willdrive on like the ploughshare that buries every flower and grass-bladeand tiny creature in its path. My winds are life-giving breezes to-day, and the besom of destruction to-morrow; my rains will moisten andnourish you one day, and wash you into the gulf the next; my earthquakeswill bury your cities as if they were ant-hills. So you must take yourchances, but the chances are on your side. I am not all tempest, orflood, or fire, or earthquake. Your career will be a warfare, but youwill win more battles than you will lose. But remember, you are nothingto 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 andwarmth, without my carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen, you cando or be nothing; without my sunshine you perish; but you have thesethings on condition of effort and struggle. You have evolution oncondition of pain and failure and the hazard of the warring geologicages. Fate and necessity rule in my realm. When you fail, or are crushedor swallowed by my remorseless forces, do not blame my gods, or yourown; there is no blame, there is only the price to be paid: the hazardsof invading the closed circle of my unseeing forces. "

In California I saw an epitome of the merciless way inorganic Naturedeals with life. An old, dried, and hardened asphalt lake near LosAngeles tells a horrible tale of animal suffering and failure. It hadbeen a pit of horrors for long ages; it was Nature concentrated--herwild welter of struggling and devouring forms through the geologic agesmade visible and tangible in a small patch of mingled pitch and animalbones. There was nearly as much bone as pitch. The fate of the unluckyflies that alight upon tangle-foot fly-paper in our houses had been thefate of the victims that had perished here. How many wild creatures hadturned appealing eyes to the great unheeding void as they feltthemselves helpless and sinking in this all-engulfing pitch! In likemanner how many human beings in storms and disasters at sea and in floodand fire upon land have turned the same appealing look to the unpityingheavens! There is no power in the world of physical forces, or apartfrom our own kind, that heeds us or turns aside for us, or bestows onepitying glance upon us. Life has run, and still runs, the gantlet of along 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 oldage, seen, it is true, as against a background of their opposites, butseeming to indicate something above chance and change at the heart ofNature. Here is life in the midst of death; but death forever playinginto the hands of life; here is the organic in the midst of theinorganic, at strife with it, hourly crushed by it, yet sustained andkept going by its aid. 

III

Vitality is only a word, but it marks a class of phenomena in naturethat stands apart from all merely mechanical manifestations in theuniverse. The cosmos is a vast machine, but in this machine--thistremendous complex of physical forces--there appears, at least on thisearth, in the course of its evolution, this something, or this peculiarmanifestation of energy, that we call vital. Apparently it is atransient phase of activity in matter, which, unlike other chemical andphysical activities, has its beginning and its ending, and out of whichhave arisen all the myriad forms of terrestrial life. The merelymaterial forces, blind and haphazard from the first, did not arise inmatter; they are inseparable from it; they are as eternal as matteritself; but the activities called vital arose in time and place, andmust eventually disappear as they arose, while the career of theinorganic elements goes on as if life had never visited the sphere. Wasit, or is it, a visitation--something _ab extra_ that impliessuper-mundane, or supernatural, powers?

Added to this wonder is the fact that the vital order has gone onunfolding through the geologic ages, mounting from form to form, or fromorder to order, becoming more and more complex, passing from theemphasis of size of body, to the emphasis of size of brain, and finallyfrom instinct and reflex activities to free volition, and the reason andconsciousness of man; while the purely physical and chemical forcesremain where they began. There has been endless change among them, endless shifting of the balance of power, but always the tendency to adead equilibrium, while the genius of the organic forces has been in thepower to disturb the equilibrium and to ride into port on the crest ofthe wave it has created, or to hang forever between the stable and theunstable. 

So there we are, confronted by two apparently contrary truths. It is tome unthinkable that the vital order is not as truly rooted in theconstitution of things as are the mechanical and chemical orders; andyet, here we are face to face with its limited, fugitive, ortransitional character. It comes and goes like the dews of the morning;it has all the features of an exceptional, unexpected, extraordinaryoccurrence--of miracle, if you will; but if the light which physicalscience turns on the universe is not a delusion, if the habit of mindwhich it begets is not a false one, then life belongs to the samecategory 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 whatit was that constituted life--what it was that made the "wonderfuldifference between the dead particles and the living particles of matterappearing in other respects identical. " He thought there might be somebond between physico-chemical phenomena, on the one hand, and vitalphenomena, on the other, which philosophers will some day find out. Living matter is characterized by "spontaneity of action, " which isentirely absent from inert matter. Huxley cannot or does not think of avital force distinct from all other forces, as the cause of lifephenomena, as so many philosophers have done, from Aristotle down to ourday. He finds protoplasm to be the physical basis of life; it is one inboth the vegetable and animal worlds; the animal takes it from thevegetable, and the vegetable, by the aid of sunlight, takes ormanufactures it from the inorganic elements. But protoplasm is livingmatter. Before there was any protoplasm, what brought about thestupendous change of the dead into the living? Protoplasm makes moreprotoplasm, as fire makes more fire, but what kindled the first spark ofthis living flame? Here we corner the mystery, but it is still amystery that defies us. Cause and effect meet and are lost in eachother. Science cannot admit a miracle, or a break in the continuity oflife, yet here it reaches a point where no step can be taken. Huxley'sillustrations do not help his argument. "Protoplasm, " he says, "is theclay of the potter; which, bake it and paint it as he will, remainsclay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brickor sun-dried clod. " Clay is certainly the physical basis of the potter'sart, but would there be any pottery in the world if it contained onlyclay? Do we not have to think of the potter? In the same way, do we nothave to think of something that fashions these myriad forms of life outof protoplasm?--and back of that, of something that begat protoplasm outof non-protoplasmic matter, and started the flame of life going? Lifeaccounts for protoplasm, but what accounts for life? We have to think ofthe 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 reallyno 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 conclusionthat life is an entity, or an agent, working upon matter and independentof it. 

There is more wit than science in Huxley's question, "What betterphilosophical status has vitality than aquosity?" There is at least thisdifference: When vitality is gone, you cannot recall it, or reproduceit by your chemistry; but you can recombine the two gases in which youhave decomposed water, any number of times, and get your aquosity backagain; it never fails; it is a power of chemistry. But vitality will notcome at your beck; it is not a chemical product, at least in the samesense that water is; it is not in the same category as the wetness orliquidity of water. It is a name for a phenomenon--the most remarkablephenomenon in nature. It is one that the art of man is powerless toreproduce, while water may be made to go through its cycle ofchange--solid, fluid, vapor, gas--and always come back to water. Welldoes the late Professor Brooks, of Johns Hopkins, say that "livingthings do, in some way and in some degree, control or conditioninorganic nature; that they hold their own by setting the mechanicalproperties of matter in opposition to each other, and that this is theirmost notable and distinctive characteristic. " Does not Ray Lankester, the irate champion of the mechanistic view of life, say essentially thesame thing when he calls man the great Insurgent in Nature'scamp--"crossing her courses, reversing her processes, and defeating herends?"

Life appears like the introduction of a new element or force or tendencyinto the cosmos. Henceforth the elements go new ways, form newcompounds, build up new forms, and change the face of nature. Riversflow where they never would have flowed without it, mountains fall in aspace of time during which they never would have fallen; barriers arise, rough ways are made smooth, a new world appears--the world of man'sphysical 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 isalways from the inside, while ours is from the outside; hers is circularwhile ours is direct. We think, as Bergson says, of things created, andof a thing that creates, but things in nature are not created, they areevolved; they grow, and the thing that grows is not separable from theforce that causes it to grow. The water turns the wheel, and can be shutoff or let on. This is the way of the mechanical world. But the wheelsin organic nature go around from something inside them, a kind ofperpetual motion, or self-supplying power. They are not turned, theyturn; they are not repaired, they repair. The nature of living thingscannot 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 ProfessorHartog suggests, make use of the term "vital behavior. "

Of course man tries everything by himself and his own standards. Heknows no intelligence but his own, no prudence, no love, no mercy, nojustice, no economy, but his own, no god but such a one as fits hisconception. 

In view of all these things, how man got here is a problem. Why theslender thread of his line of descent was not broken in the warrings andupheavals of the terrible geologic ages, what power or agent took a handin furthering his development, is beyond the reach of our biologicscience. 

Man's is the only intelligence, as we understand the word, in theuniverse, and his intelligence demands something akin to intelligence inthe nature from which he sprang. 

VII

LIFE AND MIND

I

There are three kinds of change in the world in which we live--physicaland mechanical change which goes on in time and place among the tangiblebodies about us, chemical change which goes on in the world of hiddenmolecules and atoms of which bodies are composed, and vital change whichinvolves the two former, but which also involves the mysteriousprinciple or activity which we call life. Life comes and goes, but thephysical and chemical orders remain. The vegetable and animal kingdomswax and wane, or disappear entirely, but the physico-chemical forces areas indestructible as matter itself. This fugitive and evanescentcharacter of life, the way it uses and triumphs over the materialforces, setting up new chemical activities in matter, sweeping over theland-areas of the earth like a conflagration, lifting the inorganicelements up into myriads of changing and beautiful forms, instituting avast number of new chemical processes and compounds, defying thelaboratory to reproduce it or kindle its least spark--a flame thatcannot exist without carbon and oxygen, but of which carbon and oxygendo not hold the secret, a fire reversed, building up instead of pullingdown, in the vegetable with power to absorb and transmute the inorganicelements into leaves and fruit and tissue; in the animal with power tochange the vegetable products into bone and muscle and nerve and brain, and finally into thought and consciousness; run by the solar energy anddependent upon it, yet involving something which the sunlight cannotgive us; in short, an activity in matter, or in a limited part ofmatter, 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 lookupon it as something _ab extra_, or super-added to matter, and not anevolution from it. It has led Sir Oliver Lodge to conceive of life as adistinct entity, existing independent of matter, and it is thisconception that gives the key to Henri Bergson's wonderful book, "Creative Evolution. "

There is possibly or probably a fourth change in matter, physical in itsnature, but much more subtle and mysterious than any of the physicalchanges which our senses reveal to us. I refer to radioactive change, orto the atomic transformation of one element into another, such as thechange of radium into helium, and the change of helium into lead--asubject that takes us to the borderland between physics and chemistrywhere is still debatable ground. 

I began by saying that there were three kinds of changes in matter--thephysical, the chemical, and the vital. But if we follow up this idea anddeclare that there are three kinds of force also, claiming thisdistinction for the third term of our proposition, we shall be runningcounter to the main current of recent biological science. "The idea thata peculiar 'vital force' acts in the chemistry of life, " says ProfessorSoddy, "is extinct. "

"Only chemical and physical agents influence the vital processes, " saysProfessor Czapek, of the University of Prague, "and we need no longertake refuge in mysterious 'vital forces' when we want to explain these. "

Tyndall was obliged to think of a force that guided the molecules ofmatter into the special forms of a tree. This force was in the ultimateparticles 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 alldistinctions between the living and the non-living, solely becausescientific analysis reveals no difference, is a curious and interestingphenomenon. 

Professor Schäfer, in his presidential address before the BritishAssociation in 1912, argued that all the main characteristics of livingmatter, such as assimilation and disassimilation, growth andreproduction, spontaneous and amoeboid movement, osmotic pressure, karyokinesis, etc. , were equally apparent in the non-living; thereforehe concluded that life is only one of the many chemical reactions, andthat it is not improbable that it will yet be produced by chemicalsynthesis in the laboratory. The logic of the position taken byProfessor Schäfer and of the school to which he belongs, demands thisartificial production of life--an achievement that seems no nearer thanit did a half-century ago. When it has been attained, the problem willbe simplified, but the mystery of life will by no means have beencleared up. One follows these later biochemists in working out theirproblem of the genesis of life with keen interest, but always with afeeling that there is more in their conclusions than is justified bytheir premises. For my own part, I am convinced that whatever is, isnatural, but to obtain life I feel the need of something of a differentorder from the force that evokes the spark from the flint and the steel, or brings about the reaction of chemical compounds. If asked to explainwhat this something is that is characteristic of living matter, I shouldsay intelligence. 

The new school of biologists start with matter that possessesextraordinary properties--with matter that seems inspired with thedesire for life, and behaving in a way that it never will behave in thelaboratory. They begin with the earth's surface warm and moist, theatmosphere saturated with watery vapor and carbon dioxide and many othercomplex unstable compounds; then they summon all the material elementsof life--carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, with a little sodium, chlorine, iron, sulphur, phosphorus, and others--and make these runtogether to form a jelly-like body called a colloid; then they endowthis jelly mass with the power of growth, and of subdivision when itgets too large; they make it able to absorb various unstable compoundsfrom the air, giving it internal stores of energy, "the setting free ofwhich would cause automatic movements in the lump of jelly. " Thus theylay the foundations of life. This carbonaceous material with propertiesof movement and subdivision due to mechanical and physical forces is theimmediate ancestor of the first imaginary living being, the _protobion_. To get this _protobion_ the chemists summon a reagent known as acatalyser. The catalyser works its magic on the jelly mass. It sets up awonderful reaction by its mere presence, without parting with any of itssubstance. Thus, if a bit of platinum which has this catalytic power isdropped into a vessel containing a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen, thetwo gases instantly unite and form water. A catalyser introduced in theprimordial jelly liberates energy and gives the substance power to breakup the various complex unstable compounds into food, and promote growthand subdivision. In fact, it awakens or imparts a vital force and leadsto "indefinite increase, subdivision, and movement. "

With Professor Schäfer there is first "the fortuitous production of lifeupon this globe"--the chance meeting or jostling of the elements thatresulted in a bit of living protoplasm, "or a mass of colloid slime" inthe old seas, or on their shores, "possessing the property ofassimilation and therefore of growth. " Here the whole mystery isswallowed at one gulp. "Reproduction would follow as a matter ofcourse, " because all material of this physical nature--fluid orsemi-fluid in character--"has a tendency to undergo subdivision when itsbulk exceeds a certain size. "

"A mass of colloidal slime" that has the power of assimilation and ofgrowth and reproduction, is certainly a new thing in the world, and nochemical analysis of it can clear up the mystery. It is easy enough toproduce colloidal slime, but to endow it with these wonderful powers sothat "the promise and the potency of all terrestrial life" slumbers init is a staggering proposition. 

Whatever the character of this subdivision, whether into equal parts orin the form of buds, "every separate part would resemble the parent inchemical and physical properties, and would equally possess the propertyof taking in and assimilating suitable material from its liquidenvironment, growing in bulk and reproducing its like by subdivision. In this way from any beginning of living material a primitive form oflife would spread and would gradually people the globe. Theestablishment of life being once effected, all forms of organizationfollow under the inevitable laws of evolution. " Why all forms oforganization--why the body and brain of man--must inevitably follow fromthe primitive bit of living matter, is just the question upon which wewant light. The proposition begs the question. Certainly when you havegot the evolutionary process once started in matter which has thesewonderful powers, all is easy. The professor simply describes what hastaken 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 oneanother, the machine is accounted for. What caused the iron and steeland wood of the machine to take this special form, while in other casesthe iron and steel and wood took other radically different forms, andvast quantities of these substances took no form at all?

In working out the evolution of living forms by the aid of the blindphysical and chemical agents alone, Professor Schäfer unconsciouslyascribes the power of choice and purpose to the individual cells, aswhen he says that the cells of the external layer sink below the surfacefor better protection and better nutrition. It seems to have been amatter of choice or will that the cells developed a nervous system inthe animal and not in the vegetable. Man came because a few cells insome early form of life acquired a slightly greater tendency to react toan external stimulus. In this way they were brought into closer touchwith the outer world and thereby gained the lead of their dullerneighbor cells, and became the real rulers of the body, and developedthe mind. 

It is bewildering to be told by so competent a person as ProfessorSchäfer that at bottom there is no fundamental difference between theliving and non-living. We need not urge the existence of a peculiarvital force, as distinct from all other forces, but all distinctionsbetween things are useless if we cannot say that a new behavior is setup in matter which we describe by the word "vital, " and that a newprinciple is operative in organized matter which we must call"intelligence. " Of course all movements and processes of living beingsare in conformity with the general laws of matter, but does such astatement necessarily rule out all idea of the operation of anorganizing and directing principle that is not operative in the world ofinanimate things?

In Schäfer's philosophy evolution is purely a mechanical process--thereis no inborn tendency, no inherent push, no organizing effort, but allresults from the blind groping and chance jostling of the inorganicelements; from the molecules of undifferentiated protoplasm to thebrain of a Christ or a Plato, is just one series of unintelligentphysical and chemical activities in matter. 

May we not say that all the marks or characteristics of a living bodywhich distinguish it in our experience from an inanimate body, are of anon-scientific character, or outside the sphere of experimental science?We recognize them as readily as we distinguish day from night, but wecannot describe them in the fixed terms of science. When we say growth, metabolism, osmosis, the colloidal state, science points out that allthis may be affirmed of inorganic bodies. When we say a life principle, a vital force or soul or spirit or intelligence, science turns a deafear. 

The difference between the living and the non-living is not so much aphysical difference as a metaphysical difference. Living matter isactuated by intelligence. Its activities are spontaneous andself-directing. The rock, and the tree that grows beside it, and theinsects and rodents that burrow under it, may all be made of one stuff, but their difference to the beholder is fundamental; there is anintelligent activity in the one that is not in the other. Now noscientific analysis of a body will reveal the secret of this activity. As well might your analysis of a phonographic record hope to disclose asonata of Beethoven latent in the waving lines. No power of chemistrycould reveal any difference between the gray matter of Plato's brainand that of the humblest citizen of Athens. All the difference betweenman, all that makes a man a man, and an ox an ox, is beyond the reach ofany of your physico-chemical tests. By the same token the gulf thatseparates the organic from the inorganic is not within the power ofscience to disclose. The biochemist is bound to put life in the categoryof the material forces because his science can deal with no other. Tohim the word "vital" is a word merely, it stands for no reality, and thesecret of life is merely a chemical reaction. A living body awakens atrain of ideas in our minds that a non-living fails to awaken--a trainof ideas that belong to another order from that awakened by scientificdemonstration. We cannot blame science for ruling out that which itcannot touch with its analysis, or repeat with its synthesis. Thephenomena of life are as obvious to us as anything in the world; we knowtheir signs and ways, and witness their power, yet in the alembic of ourscience they turn out to be only physico-chemical processes; hence thatis all there is of them. Vitality, says Huxley, has no more reality thanthe horology of a clock. Yet Huxley sees three equal realities in theuniverse--matter, energy, and consciousness. But consciousness is thecrown of a vital process. Hence it would seem as if there must besomething more real in vitality than Huxley is willing to admit. 

II

Nearly all the later biologists or biological philosophers are as shy ofthe term "vital force, " and even of the word "vitality, " as they are ofthe words "soul, " "spirit, " "intelligence, " when discussing naturalphenomena. To experimental science such words have no meaning becausethe supposed realities for which they stand are quite beyond the reachof scientific analysis. Ray Lankester, in his "Science from an EasyChair, " following Huxley, compares vitality with aquosity, and says thatto have recourse to a vital principle or force to explain a living bodyis no better philosophy than to appeal to a principle of aquosity toexplain water. Of course words are words, and they have such weight withus that when we have got a name for a thing it is very easy to persuadeourselves that the thing exists. The terms "vitality, " "vital force, "have long been in use, and it is not easy to convince one's self thatthey stand for no reality. Certain it is that living and non-livingmatter are sharply separated, though when reduced to their chemicalconstituents in the laboratory they are found to be identical. Thecarbon, 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 asthese 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 ofone stuff; Jew and Gentile are made of one stuff. Should we bejustified, then, in saying that there is no difference between them?There is certainly a moral and an intellectual difference between a manand his dog, if there is no chemical and mechanical difference. Andthere is as certainly as wide or a wider difference between living andnon-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 undeniablerealities as the words heat, light, chemical affinity, gravitation. There is not a principle of roundness, though "nature centres intoballs, " nor of squareness, though crystallization is in right lines, norof aquosity, though two thirds of the surface of the earth is coveredwith water. Can we on any better philosophical grounds say that there isa principle of vitality, though the earth swarms with living beings? Yetthe word vitality stands for a reality, it stands for a peculiaractivity in matter--for certain movements and characteristics for whichwe have no other term. I fail to see any analogy between aquosity andthat condition of matter we call vital or living. Aquosity is not anactivity, it is a property, the property of wetness; viscosity is a termto describe other conditions of matter; solidity, to describe stillanother condition; and opacity and transparency, to describe stillothers--as they affect another of our senses. But the vital activity inmatter is a concrete reality. With it there goes the organizing tendencyor impulse, and upon it hinges the whole evolutionary movement of thebiological history of the globe. We can do all sorts of things withwater and still keep its aquosity. If we resolve it into its constituentgases we destroy its aquosity, but by uniting these gases chemically wehave 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 brayyour living body in a mortar, destroy every one of its myriad cells, andyet you may not extinguish the last spark of life; the protoplasm isstill living. But boil it or bake it and the vitality is gone, and allthe art and science of mankind cannot bring it back again. The physicaland chemical activities remain after the vital activities have ceased. Do we not then have to supply a non-chemical, a non-physical force orfactor to account for the living body? Is there no difference betweenthe growth of a plant or an animal, and the increase in size of asand-bank or a snow-bank, or a river delta? or between the wear andrepair of a working-man's body and the wear and repair of the machine hedrives? Excretion and secretion are not in the same categories. Theliving and the non-living mark off the two grand divisions of matter inthe world in which we live, as no two terms merely descriptive ofchemical and physical phenomena ever can. Life is a motion in matter, but of another order from that of the physico-chemical, thoughinseparable from it. We may forego the convenient term "vital force. "Modern science shies at the term "force. " We must have force or energyor pressure of some kind to lift dead matter up into the myriad forms oflife, 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 agravel-bank, or moves a glacier, we call it a mechanical force; when itwrites a poem or composes a symphony, we call it a psychic force--alldistinctions which we cannot well dispense with, though of the ultimatereality for which these terms stand we can know little. In the latestscience heat and light are not substances, though electricity is. Theyare peculiar motions in matter which give rise to sensations in certainliving bodies that we name light and heat, as another peculiar motion inmatter gives rise to a sensation we call sound. Life is another kind ofmotion in certain aggregates of matter--more mysterious or inexplicablethan 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 standingin the court of modern biological science, it is interesting to observehow often recourse is had by biological writers to terms that embodythe same idea. Thus the German physiologist Verworn, the determinedenemy of the old conception of life, in his great work on"Irritability, " has recourse to "the specific energy of livingsubstances. " One is forced to believe that without this "specificenergy" his "living substances" would never have arisen out of thenon-living. 

Professor Moore, of Liverpool University, as I have already pointed outwhile discussing the term "vital force, " invents a new phrase, "bioticenergy, " to explain the same phenomena. Surely a force by any other nameis no more and no less potent. Both Verworn and Moore feel the need, aswe all do, of some term, or terms, by which to explain that activity inmatter which we call vital. Other writers have referred to "a peculiarpower of synthesis" in plants and animals, which the inanimate forms donot possess. 

Ray Lankester, to whom I have already referred in discussing thissubject, helps himself out by inventing, not a new force, but a newsubstance in which he fancies "resides the peculiar property of livingmatter. " He calls this hypothetical substance "plasmogen, " and thinks ofit as an ultimate chemical compound hidden in protoplasm. Has this"ultimate molecule of life" any more scientific or philosophicalvalidity than the old conception of a vital force? It looks very muchlike another name for the same thing--an attempt to give the mindsomething to take hold of in dealing with the mystery of living things. This imaginary "life-stuff" of the British scientist is entirely beyondthe reach of chemical analysis; no man has ever seen it or proved itsexistence. In fact it is simply an invention of Ray Lankester to fill abreak in the sequence of observed phenomena. Something seems to possessthe power of starting or kindling that organizing activity in a livingbody, and it seems to me it matters little whether we call it"plasmogen, " or a "life principle, " or "biotic energy, " or what not; itsurely leavens the loaf. Matter takes on new activities under itsinfluence. Ray Lankester thinks that plasmogen came into being in earlygeologic ages, and that the conditions which led to its formation haveprobably never recurred. Whether he thinks its formation was merely achance 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 livingbody together as Nature does, in the same order and proportion, andcombine them in the selfsame way, or bring about the vital conditions, aliving being would result. Undoubtedly. It amounts to saying that if wehad Nature's power we could do what she does. _If_ we could marry theelements as she does, and bless the banns as she seems to, we couldbuild 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 andaccommodating. It is like a stream that can be turned into variouschannels; the gall insects turn it into channels to suit their ends whenthey sting the leaf of a tree or the stalk of a plant, and deposit anegg in the wound. "Build me a home and a nursery for my young, " says theinsect. "With all my heart, " says the leaf, and forthwith forgets itsfunction as a leaf, and proceeds to build up a structure, often of greatdelicacy and complexity, to house and cradle its enemy. The current oflife flows on blindly and takes any form imposed upon it. But in thecase of the vegetable galls it takes life to control life. Man cannotproduce these galls by artificial means. But we can take variousmechanical and chemical liberties with embryonic animal life in itslower sea-forms. Professor Loeb has fertilized the eggs of sea-urchinsby artificial means. The eggs of certain forms may be made to producetwins by altering the constitution of the sea-water, and the twins canbe made to grow together so as to produce monstrosities by anotherchemical change in the sea-water. The eyes of certain fish embryos maybe fused into a single cyclopean eye by adding magnesium chloride to thewater in which they live. Loeb says, "It is _a priori_ obvious that anunlimited number of pathological variations might be produced by avariation in the concentration and constitution of the sea water, andexperience confirms this statement. " It has been found that when frog'seggs are turned upside down and compressed between two glass plates fora number of hours, some of the eggs give rise to twins. Professor Morganfound that if he destroyed half of a frog's egg after the firstsegmentation, the remaining half gave rise to half an embryo, but thatif he put the half-egg upside down, and compressed it between two glassplates, he got a perfect embryo frog of half the normal size. Suchthings show how plastic and adaptive life is. Dr. Carrel's experimentswith living animal tissue immersed in a proper mother-liquid illustratehow the vital process--cell-multiplication--may be induced to go on andon, blindly, aimlessly, for an almost indefinite time. The cellsmultiply, but they do not organize themselves into a constructivecommunity and build an organ or any purposeful part. They may be likenedto a lot of blind masons piling up brick and mortar without anyarchitect to direct their work or furnish them a plan. A living body ofthe higher type is not merely an association of cells; it is anassociation and coöperation of communities of cells, each communityworking to a definite end and building an harmonious whole. Thebiochemist who would produce life in the laboratory has before him theproblem of compounding matter charged with this organizing tendency orpower, and doubtless if he ever should evoke this mysterious processthrough his chemical reactions, it would possess this power, as this iswhat distinguishes the organic from the inorganic. 

I do not see mind or intelligence in the inorganic world in the sense inwhich I see it in the organic. In the heavens one sees power, vastness, sublimity, unspeakable, but one sees only the physical laws working on agrander scale than on the earth. Celestial mechanics do not differ fromterrestrial mechanics, however tremendous and imposing the result oftheir activities. But in the humblest living thing--in a spear of grassby the roadside, in a gnat, in a flea--there lurks a greater mystery. Inan animate body, however small, there abides something of which we getno trace in the vast reaches of astronomy, a kind of activity that isincalculable, indeterminate, and super-mechanical, not lawless, butmaking its own laws, and escaping from the iron necessity that rules inthe inorganic world. 

Our mathematics and our science can break into the circle of thecelestial and the terrestrial forces, and weigh and measure and separatethem, and in a degree understand them; but the forces of life defy ouranalysis as well as our synthesis. 

Knowing as we do all the elements that make up the body and brain of aman, all the physiological processes, and all the relations andinterdependence of his various organs, if, in addition, we knew all hisinheritances, his whole ancestry back to the primordial cells from whichhe sprang, and if we also knew that of every person with whom he comesin contact and who influences his life, could we forecast his future, predict the orbit in which his life would revolve, indicate itseclipses, its perturbations, and the like, as we do that of anastronomic body? or could we foresee his affinities and combinations aswe do that of a chemical body? Had we known any of the animal forms inhis 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 remotebeginnings? Would our mathematics and our chemistry have been of anyavail in our dealing with such a problem? Biology is not in the samecategory with geology and astronomy. In the inorganic world, chemicalaffinity builds up and pulls down. It integrates the rocks and, underchanged conditions, it disintegrates them. In the organic world chemicalaffinity is equally active, but it plays a subordinate part. It neitherbuilds up nor pulls down. Vital activities, if we must shun the term"vital force, " do both. Barring accidents, the life of all organisms isterminated by other organisms. In the order of nature, life destroyslife, and compounds destroy compounds. When the air and soil and waterhold no invisible living germs, organic bodies never decay. It is notthe heat that begets putrefaction, but germs in the air. Sufficient heatkills the germs, but what disintegrates the germs and reduces them todust? Other still smaller organisms? and so on _ad infinitum_? Does thesequence of life have no end? The destruction of one chemical compoundmeans the formation of other chemical compounds; chemical affinitycannot be annulled, but the activity we call vital is easily arrested. Aliving body can be killed, but a chemical body can only be changed intoanother chemical body. 

The least of living things, I repeat, holds a more profound mystery thanall our astronomy and our geology hold. It introduces us to activitieswhich our mathematics do not help us to deal with. Our science candescribe the processes of a living body, and name all the materialelements that enter into it, but it cannot tell us in what the peculiaractivity consists, or just what it is that differentiates living matterfrom non-living. Its analysis reveals no difference. But this differenceconsists in something beyond the reach of chemistry and of physics; itis active intelligence, the power of self-direction, of self-adjustment, of self-maintenance, of adapting means to an end. It is notorious thatthe hand cannot always cover the flea; this atom has will, and knowsthe road to safety. Behold what our bodies know over and above what weknow! Professor Czapek reveals to us a chemist at work in the body whoproceeds precisely like the chemist in his laboratory; they might bothhave graduated at the same school. Thus the chemist in the laboratory isaccustomed to dissolve the substance which is to be used in anexperiment to react on other substances. The chemical course in livingcells is the same. All substances destined for reactions are firstdissolved. No compound is taken up in living cells before it isdissolved. Digestion is essentially identical with dissolving orbringing into a liquid state. On the other hand, when the chemist wishesto preserve a living substance from chemical change, he transfers itfrom a state of solution into a solid state. The chemist in the livingbody does the same thing. Substances which are to be stored up, such asstarch, fat, or protein bodies, are deposited in insoluble form, readyto be dissolved and used whenever wanted for the life processes. Poisonous substances are eliminated from living bodies by the sameprocess of precipitation. Oxalic acid is a product of oxidation inliving cells, and has strong poisonous properties. To get rid of it, thechemist inside the body, by the aid of calcium salts, forms insolublecompounds of it, and thus casts it out. To separate substances from eachother by filtration, or by shaking with suitable liquids, is one of thedaily tasks of the chemist. Analogous processes occur regularly inliving cells. Again, when the chemist wishes to finish his filtrationquickly, he uses filters which have a large surface. "In livingprotoplasms, this condition is very well fulfilled by the foam-likestructure which affords an immense surface in a very small space. " Inthe laboratory the chemist mixes his substances by stirring. The bodychemist achieves the same result by the streaming of protoplasm. Thecells know what they want, and how to attain it, as clearly as thechemist does. The intelligence of the living body, or what we must callsuch for want of a better term, is shown in scores of ways--by the meansit takes to protect itself against microbes, by the antitoxins that itforms. Indeed, if we knew all that our bodies know, what mysteries wouldbe revealed to us!

IV

Life goes up-stream--goes against the tendency to a static equilibriumin matter; decay and death go down. What is it in the body thatstruggles against poisons and seeks to neutralize their effects? What isit that protects the body against a second attack of certain diseases, making it immune? Chemical changes, undoubtedly, but what brings aboutthe chemical changes? The body is a _colony_ of living units calledcells, that behaves much like a colony of insects when it takes measuresto protect itself against its enemies. The body forms anti-toxins whenit has to. It knows how to do it as well as bees know how to ventilatethe 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 itstissues, is like the act of the bees in encasing with wax a worm in thecombs!

What is that in the body which at great altitudes increases the numberof red corpuscles in the blood, those oxygen-bearers, so as to make upfor the lessened amount of oxygen breathed by reason of the rarity ofthe air? Under such conditions, the amount of hæmoglobin is almostdoubled. I do not call this thing a force; I call it anintelligence--the intelligence that pervades the body and all animatenature, and does the right thing at the right time. We, no doubt, speaktoo loosely of it when we say that it prompts or causes the body to dothis, or to do that; it _is_ the body; the relation of the two has nohuman analogy; the two are one. 

Man breaks into the circuit of the natural inorganic forces and arreststhem 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 thesame sense with the organic forces; he cannot put a spell upon the pinetree and cause it to build him a house or a nursery. Only the insectscan do a thing like that; only certain insects can break into thecircuit of vegetable life and divert its forces to serve their specialends. One kind of an insect stings a bud or a leaf of the oak, and thetree forthwith grows a solid nutlike protuberance the size of achestnut, in which the larvæ of the insect live and feed and mature. Another insect stings the same leaf and produces the common oak-apple--asmooth, round, green, shell-like body filled with a network of radiatingfilaments, 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 eggsthere, and the oak proceeds to grow a large white ball made up of a kindof succulent vegetable wool with red spots evenly distributed over itssurface, as if it were some kind of spotted fruit or flower. In June, itis about the size of a small apple. Cut it in half and you find scoresof small shell-like growths radiating from the bud-stem, like the seedsof the dandelion, each with a kind of vegetable pappus rising from it, and together making up the ball as the pappus of the dandelion seedsmakes up the seed-globe of this plant. It is one of the most singularvegetable products, or vegetable perversions, that I know of. A shamfruit 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 allis!--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, denseand succulent like the flesh of an apple, with the larvæ of the insectsubsisting in its interior. Each of these widely different forms isevoked 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. Itshows how plastic and versatile life is, and how utterly unmechanical. Life plays so many and such various tunes upon the same instruments; orrather, the living organism is like many instruments in one; the tonesof all instruments slumber in it to be awakened when the right performerappears. At least four different insects get four different tunes, so tospeak, out of the oak leaf. 

Certain insects avail themselves of the animal organism also and gothrough their cycle of development and metamorphosis within its tissuesor organs in a similar manner. 

V

On the threshold of the world of living organisms stands that wonderfulminute body, the cell, the unit of life--a piece of self-regulating andself-renewing mechanism that holds the key to all the myriads of livingforms that fill the world, from the amoeba up to man. For chemistryto produce the cell is apparently as impossible as for it to produce abird's egg, or a living flower, or the heart and brain of man. The bodyis a communal state made up of myriads of cells that all work togetherto build up and keep going the human personality. There is the samecoöperation and division of labor that takes place in the civic state, and in certain insect communities. As in the social and politicalorganism, thousands of the citizen cells die every day and new cells ofthe same kind take their place. Or, it is like an army in battle beingconstantly recruited--as fast as a soldier falls another takes hisplace, till the whole army is changed, and yet remains the same. Thewaste is greatest at the surface of the body through the skin, andthrough the stomach and lungs. The worker cells, namely, the tissuecells, like the worker bees in the hive, pass away the most rapidly;then, according to Haeckel, there are certain constants, certain cellsthat remain throughout life. "There is always a solid groundwork ofconservative cells, the descendants of which secure the furtherregeneration. " The traditions of the state are kept up by thecitizen-cells that remain, so that, though all is changed in time, thegenius of the state remains; the individuality of the man is not lost. "The sense of personal identity is maintained across the flight ofmolecules, " just as it is maintained in the state or nation, by theunits that remain, and by the established order. There is an unwrittenconstitution, a spirit that governs, like Maeterlinck's "spirit of thehive. " The traditions of the body are handed down from mother cell todaughter cell, though just what that means in terms of physiology ormetabolism 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 oraccounted for in terms of the material forces. 

VIII

LIFE AND SCIENCE

I

The limited and peculiar activity which arises in matter and which wecall vital; which comes and goes; which will not stay to be analyzed;which we in vain try to reproduce in our laboratories; which isinseparable from chemistry and physics, but which is not summed up bythem; which seems to use them and direct them to new ends, --an entitywhich seems to have invaded the kingdom of inert matter at some definitetime in the earth's history, and to have set up an insurgent movementthere; cutting across the circuits of the mechanical and chemicalforces; turning them about, pitting one against the other; availingitself of gravity, of chemical affinity, of fluids and gases, of osmosisand exosmosis, of colloids, of oxidation and hydration, and yetexplicable by none of these things; clothing itself with garments ofwarmth and color and perfume woven from the cold, insensate elements;setting up new activities in matter; building up myriads of new unstablecompounds; struggling against the tendency of the physical forces to adead equilibrium; indeterminate, intermittent, fugitive; limited intime, limited in space; present in some worlds, absent from others;breaking up the old routine of the material forces, and instituting newcurrents, new tendencies; departing from the linear activities of theinorganic, and setting up the circular activities of living currents;replacing change by metamorphosis, revolution by evolution, accretion bysecretion, crystallization by cell-formation, aggregation by growth;and, finally, introducing a new power into the world--the mind and soulof man--this wonderful, and apparently transcendental something which wecall life--how baffling and yet how fascinating is the inquiry into itsnature and origin! Are we to regard it as Tyndall did, and as othersbefore and since his time did and do, as potential in the constitutionof matter, and self-evolved, like the chemical compounds that areinvolved 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 isconvertible into electrical energy, and _vice versa_. Indeed, the circleof the physical forces is easily traced, easily broken into, but when orhow these forces merge into the vital and psychic forces, or supportthem, or become them--there is the puzzle. If we limit the natural tothe inorganic order, then are living bodies supernatural?Super-mechanical and super-chemical certainly, and chemics andmechanics and electro-statics include all the material forces. Is lifeoutside this circle? It is certain that this circle does not alwaysinclude life, but can life exist outside this circle? When it appears itis always inside it. 

Science can only deal with life as a physical phenomenon; as a psychicphenomenon it is beyond its scope, except so far as the psychic ismanifested through the physical. Not till it has produced living matterfrom dead can it speak with authority upon the question of the origin oflife. Its province is limited to the description and analysis of lifeprocesses, but when it essays to name what institutes the processes, orto disclose the secret of organization, it becomes philosophy ortheology. When Haeckel says that life originated spontaneously, he doesnot speak with the authority of science, because he cannot prove hisassertion; it is his opinion, and that is all. When Helmholtz says thatlife had no beginning, he is in the same case. When our laterbiophysicists say that life is of physico-chemical origin, they are inthe same case; when Tyndall says that there is no energy in the universebut solar energy, he is in the same case; when Sir Oliver Lodge saysthat life is an entity outside of and independent of matter, he is inthe same case. Philosophy and theology can take leaps in the dark, butscience must have solid ground to go upon. When it speculates ortheorizes, it must make its speculations good. Scientific prophecy isamenable to the same tests as other prophecy. In the absence of proof byexperiment--scientific proof--to get the living out of the non-living wehave either got to conceive of matter itself as fundamentally creative, as the new materialism assumes, or else we have got to have an externalCreator, as the old theology assumes. And the difference is moreapparent than real. Tyndall is "baffled and bewildered" by the fact thatout of its molecular vibrations and activities "things so utterlyincongruous with them as sensation, thought, and emotion can bederived. " His science is baffled and bewildered because it cannot, boundas it is by the iron law of the conservation and correlation of energy, trace the connection between them. But his philosophy or his theologywould experience little difficulty. Henri Bergson shows no hesitation indeclaring that the fate of consciousness is not involved in the fate ofthe brain through which it is manifested, but it is his philosophy andnot his science that inspires this faith. Tyndall deifies matter to getlife out of it--makes the creative energy potential in it. Bergsondeifies or spiritualizes life as a psychic, creative principle, andmakes matter its instrument or vehicle. 

Science is supreme in its own sphere, the sphere, or hemisphere, of theobjective world, but it does not embrace the whole of human life, because human life is made up of two spheres, or hemispheres, one ofwhich is the subjective world. There is a world within us also, theworld of our memories, thoughts, emotions, aspirations, imaginings, which overarches the world of our practical lives and materialexperience, as the sky overarches the earth. It is in the spirit ofscience that we conquer and use the material world in which we live; itis in the spirit of art and literature, philosophy and religion, that weexplore 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 sayhe is also a prophet and poet? Not otherwise could he organize hisscientific facts and see their due relations, see their drift and thesequence of forces that bind the universe into a whole. As a man ofscience he traces out the causes of the tides and the seasons, thenature and origin of disease, and a thousand and one other things; butonly as a philosopher can he see the body as a whole and speculate aboutthe mystery of its organization; only as a philosopher can he frametheories and compare values and interpret the phenomena he sees abouthim. 

II

We can only know, in the scientific sense, the physical and chemicalphenomena of life; its essence, its origin, we can only know asphilosophy and idealism know them. We have to turn philosophers when weask any ultimate question. The feeling we have that the scientificconception of life is inadequate springs from the philosophical habit ofmind. Yet this habit is quite as legitimate as the scientific habit, andis bound to supplement the latter all through life. 

The great men of science, like Darwin and Huxley, are philosophers intheir theories and conclusions, and men of science in their observationsand experiments. The limitations of science in dealing with such aproblem are seen in the fact that science can take no step till it haslife to begin with. When it has got the living body, it can analyze itsphenomena and reduce them to their chemical and physical equivalents, and thus persuade itself that the secret of life may yet be hit upon inthe laboratory. Professor Czapek, of the University of Prague, in hiswork on "The Chemical Phenomena of Life" speaks for science when hesays, "What we call life is nothing else but a complex of innumerablechemical reactions in the living substance which we call protoplasm. "The "living substance" is assumed to begin with, and then we are toldthat the secret of its living lies in its chemical and physicalprocesses. This is in one sense true. No doubt at all that if theseprocesses were arrested, life would speedily end, but do they aloneaccount for its origin? Is it not like accounting for a baby in terms ofits breathing and eating? It was a baby before it did either, and itwould seem as if life must in some way ante-date the physical andchemical processes that attend it, or at least be bound up in them in away that no scientific analysis can reveal. 

If life is merely a mode of motion in matter, it is fundamentally unlikeany and all other modes of motion, because, while we can institute allthe others at will, we are powerless to institute this. The mode ofmotion we call heat is going on in varying degrees of velocity all aboutus at all times and seasons, but the vital motion of matter is limitedto a comparatively narrow circle. We can end it, but we cannot start it. 

The rigidly scientific type of mind sees no greater mystery in thedifference in contour of different animal bodies than a mere differencein the density of the germ cells: "one density results in a sequence ofcell-densities to form a horse; another a dog; another a cat"; and aversthat if we "repeat the same complex conditions, the same results are asinevitable as the sequences of forces that result in the formation ofhydrogen monoxide from hydrogen and oxygen. "

Different degrees of density may throw light on the different behaviorof gases and fluids and solids, but can it throw any light on thequestion of why a horse is a horse, and a dog a dog? or why one is anherbivorous feeder, and the other a carnivorous?

The scientific explanation of life phenomena is analogous to reducing aliving body to its ashes and pointing to them--the lime, the iron, thephosphorus, the hydrogen, the oxygen, the carbon, the nitrogen--as thewhole secret. 

Professor Czapek is not entirely consistent. He says that it is hisconviction that there is something in physiology that transcends thechemistry and the physics of inorganic nature. At the same time heaffirms, "It becomes more and more improbable that Life develops forceswhich are unknown in inanimate Nature. " But psychic forces are a productof life, and they certainly are not found in inanimate nature. Butwithout laying stress upon this fact, may we not say that if no newforce is developed by, or is characteristic of, life, certainly neweffects, new processes, new compounds of matter are produced by life?Matter undergoes some change that chemical analysis does not reveal. Themystery of isomeric substances appears, a vast number of new compoundsof carbon appear, the face of the earth changes. The appearance of lifein inert matter is a change analogous to the appearance of the mind ofman in animate nature. The old elements and forces are turned to new andhigher uses. Man does not add to the list of forces or elements in theearth, but he develops them, and turns them to new purposes; they nowobey and serve him, just as the old chemistry and physics obey andserve life. Czapek tells us of the vast number of what are calledenzymes, or ferments, that appear in living bodies--"never found ininorganic Nature and not to be gained by chemical synthesis. " Orders andsuborders of enzymes, they play a part in respiration, in digestion, inassimilation. Some act on the fats, some on the carbohydrates, someproduce inversion, others dissolution and precipitation. These enzymesare at once the products and the agents of life. They must exert force, chemical force, or, shall we say, they transform chemical force intolife force, or, to use Professor Moore's term, into "biotic energy"?

III

The inorganic seems dreaming of the organic. Behold its dreams in thefern and tree forms upon the window pane and upon the stone flagging ofa winter morning! In the Brunonian movement of matter in solution, incrystallization, in chemical affinity, in polarity, in osmosis, in thegrowth of flint or chert nodules, in limestone formations--like seekinglike--in these and in other activities, inert matter seems dreaming oflife. 

The chemists have played upon this tendency in the inorganic to parodyor simulate some of the forms of living matter. A noted Europeanchemist, Dr. Leduc, has produced what he calls "osmotic growths, " frompurely unorganized mineral matter--growths in form like seaweed andpolyps and corals and trees. His seeds are fragments of calciumchloride, and his soil is a solution of the alkaline carbonates, phosphates, or silicates. When his seeds are sown in these solutions, wesee inert matter germinating, "putting forth bud and stem and root andbranch and leaf and fruit, " precisely as in the living vegetablekingdom. It is not a growth by accretion, as in crystallization, but byintussusception, as in life. These ghostly things exhibit the phenomenaof circulation and respiration and nutrition, and a crude sort ofreproduction by budding; they repair their injuries, and are able toperform periodic movements, just as does an animal or a plant; they havea period of vigorous youthful growth, of old age, of decay, and ofdeath. In form, in color, in texture, and in cell structure, theyimitate so closely the cell structures of organic growth as to suggestsomething uncanny or diabolical. And yet the author of them does notclaim that they are alive. They are not edible, they contain noprotoplasm--no starch or sugar or peptone or fats or carbohydrates. These chemical creations by Dr. Leduc are still dead matter--deadcolloids--only one remove from crystallization; on the road to life, fore-runners of life, but not life. If he could set up thechlorophyllian process in his chemical reactions among inorganiccompounds, the secret of life would be in his hands. But only the greenleaf can produce chlorophyll; and yet, which was first, the leaf or thechlorophyll?

Professor Czapek is convinced that "some substances must exist inprotoplasm which are directly responsible for the life processes, " andyet the chemists cannot isolate and identify those substances. 

How utterly unmechanical a living body is, at least how far ittranscends mere mechanics is shown by what the chemists call"autolysis. " Pulverize your watch, and you have completely destroyedeverything that made it a watch except the dead matter; but pulverize orreduce to a pulp a living plant, and though you have destroyed all cellstructure, you have not yet destroyed the living substance; you haveannihilated the mechanism, but you have not killed the something thatkeeps up the life process. Protoplasm takes time to die, but yourmachine stops instantly, and its elements are no more potent in a newmachine than they were at first. "In the pulp prepared by grinding downliving organisms in a mortar, some vital phenomena continue for a longtime. " The life processes cease, and the substances or elements of thedead body remain as before. Their chemical reactions are the same. Thereis 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 partscompany with exact science. It is here that the philosophers go oneway, and the rigid scientists the other. It is from this point of viewthat the philosophy of Henri Bergson, based so largely as it is uponscientific material, has been so bitterly assailed from the scientificcamp. 

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 thecell, and the analytical or splitting reaction--the organizing, and thedisorganizing processes--what keeps up this seesaw and preserves theequilibrium? A life force, said the older scientists; only chemicallaws, say the new. A prodigious change in the behavior of matter iswrought by life, and whether we say it is by chemical laws, or by a lifeforce, the mystery remains. 

The whole secret of life centres in the cell, in the plant cell; andthis cell does not exceed . 005 millimetres in diameter. An enormousnumber of chemical reactions take place in this minute space. It is aworld in little. Here are bodies of different shapes whose service is toabsorb carbon dioxide, and form sugar and carbohydrates. Must we gooutside of matter itself, and of chemical reactions, to account for it?Call this unknown factor "vital force, " as has so long been done, orname it "biotic energy, " as Professor Moore has lately done, and themystery remains the same. It is a new behavior in matter, call it bywhat name we will. 

Inanimate nature seems governed by definite laws; that is, given thesame conditions, the same results always follow. The reactions betweentwo chemical elements under the same conditions are always the same. Thephysical forces go their unchanging ways, and are variable only as theconditions vary. In dealing with them we know exactly what to expect. Weknow at what degree of temperature, under the same conditions, waterwill boil, and at what degree of temperature it will freeze. Chance andprobability play no part in such matters. But when we reach the world ofanimate nature, what a contrast we behold! Here, within certain limits, all is in perpetual flux and change. Living bodies are never two momentsthe same. Variability is the rule. We never know just how a living bodywill behave, under given conditions, till we try it. A late spring frostmay kill nearly every bean stalk or potato plant or hill of corn in yourgarden, or nearly every shoot upon your grapevine. The survivors havegreater powers of resistance--a larger measure of that mysterioussomething we call vitality. One horse will endure hardships andexposures that will kill scores of others. What will agitate onecommunity will not in the same measure agitate another. What will breakor discourage one human heart will sit much more lightly upon another. Life introduces an element of uncertainty or indeterminateness that wedo not find in the inorganic world. Bodies still have their laws orconditions of activity, but they are elastic and variable. Among livingthings we have in a measure escaped from the iron necessity that holdsthe world of dead matter in its grip. Dead matter ever tends to a staticequilibrium; living matter to a dynamic poise, or a balance between theintake and the output of energy. Life is a peculiar activity in matter. If the bicyclist stops, his wheel falls down; no mechanical contrivancecould be devised that could take his place on the wheel, and nocombination of purely chemical and physical forces can alone do withmatter what life does with it. The analogy here hinted at is onlytentative. I would not imply that the relation of life to matter ismerely mechanical and external, like that of the rider to his wheel. Inlife, the rider and his wheel are one, but when life vanishes, the wheelfalls down. The chemical and physical activity of matter is perpetual;with a high-power microscope we may see the Brunonian movement inliquids and gases any time and at all times, but the movement we callvitality dominates these and turns them to new ends. I suppose thenature of the activity of the bombarding molecules of gases and liquidsis the same in our bodies as out; that turmoil of the particles goes onforever; it is, in itself, blind, fateful, purposeless; but lifefurnishes, or _is_, an organizing principle that brings order andpurpose out of this chaos. It does not annul any of the mechanical orchemical principles, but under its tutelage or inspiration they producea host of new substances, and a world of new and beautiful and wonderfulforms. 

IV

Bergson says the intellect is characterized by a natural inability tounderstand life. Certain it is, I think, that science alone cannot graspits mystery. We must finally appeal to philosophy; we must have recourseto ideal values--to a non-scientific or super-scientific principle. Wecannot live intellectually or emotionally upon science alone. Sciencereveals to us the relations and inter-dependence of things in thephysical 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 hasno philosophy, no commanding outlook over the tangles and contradictionsof the world of sense. There is probably some unknown and unknowablefactor involved in the genesis of life, but that that factor orprinciple does not belong to the natural, universal order isunthinkable. Yet to fail to see that what we must call intelligencepervades 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 doviolence to our faith in the constancy and sufficiency of the naturalorder. One star differeth from another in glory. There are degrees ofmystery in the universe. The most mystifying thing in inorganic natureis electricity, --that disembodied energy that slumbers in the ultimateparticles of matter, unseen, unfelt, unknown, till it suddenly leapsforth with such terrible vividness and power on the face of the storm, or till we summon it through the transformation of some other form ofenergy. A still higher and more inscrutable mystery is life, thatsomething which clothes itself in each infinitely varied and beautifulas well as unbeautiful form of matter. We can evoke electricity at willfrom 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 nota rabbit. " There is no secret about a rainbow; we can produce it at willout of perfectly colorless beginnings. "But nothing but rabbits will orcan produce a rabbit, a proof again that we cannot say what a rabbit is, though we may have a perfect knowledge of every anatomical andmicroscopic detail. "

To regard life as of non-natural origin puts it beyond the sphere oflegitimate inquiry; to look upon it as of natural origin, or as bound ina chain of chemical sequences, as so many late biochemists do, is stillto put it where our science cannot unlock the mystery. If we should eversucceed in producing living matter in our laboratories, it would notlessen the mystery any more than the birth of a baby in the householdlessens 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 universallaw of the transformation of energy is operative. In its minute compassthe transmutation of the inorganic into the organic, which constituteswhat Tyndall called "the miracle and the mystery of vitality, " isperpetually enacted. But what is the secret of the cell itself? Scienceis powerless to tell us. You may point out to your heart's content thatonly chemical and physical forces are discoverable in living matter;that there is no element or force in a plant that is not in the stonebeside 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 theliving 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 causesurprising chemical results. "

Behold the four principal elements forming stones and soils and waterand air for whole geologic or astronomic ages, and then behold themforming plants and animals, and finally forming the brains that give usart and literature and philosophy and modern civilization. What promptedthe elements to this new and extraordinary behavior? Science is dumbbefore such a question. 

Living bodies are immersed in physical conditions as in a sea. Externalagencies--light, moisture, air, gravity, mechanical and chemicalinfluences--cause great changes in them; but their power to adaptthemselves 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 outwardphysical forces; a natural bridge is a striking example of the action ofblind mechanical forces among the rocks. In the organic world we seeliving adaptation which involves a non-mechanical principle. Anadjustment is an outward fitting together of parts; an adaptationimplies something flowing, unstable, plastic, compromising; it is amoulding process; passivity on one side, and activity on the other. Living things struggle; they struggle up as well as down; they struggleall 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 thecarbonic acid in the air, retaining the carbon and returning the oxygento the atmosphere! Then the plant can do what no chemist has yet beenable to do; it can manufacture chlorophyll, a substance which is thebasis of all life on the globe. Without chlorophyll (the green substancein plants) the solar energy could not be stored up in the vegetableworld. Chlorophyll makes the plant, and the plant makes chlorophyll. Toask which is first is to call up the old puzzle, Which is first, theegg, or the hen that laid it?

According to Professor Soddy, the engineer's unit of power, that of theBritish cart-horse, has to be multiplied many times in a machine beforeit can do the work of a horse. He says that a car which two horses usedto pull, it now takes twelve or fifteen engine-horse to pull. Themachine horse belongs to a different order. He does not respond to thewhip; he has no nervous system; he has none of the mysterious reservepower which a machine built up of living cells seems to possess; he isinelastic, non-creative, non-adaptive; he cannot take advantage of theground; his pull is a dead, unvarying pull. Living energy is elastic, adaptive, self-directive, and suffers little loss through friction, orthrough imperfect adjustment of the parts. A live body converts its fuelinto energy at a low temperature. One of the great problems of themechanics of the future is to develop electricity or power directly fromfuel and thus cut out the enormous loss of eighty or ninety per centwhich we now suffer. The growing body does this all the time; lifepossesses this secret; the solar energy stored up in fuel suffers noloss in being transformed into work by the animal mechanism. 

Soddy asks whether or not the minute cells of the body may not have thepower of taking advantage of the difference in temperature of themolecules bombarding them, and thus of utilizing energy that is beyondthe capacity of the machinery of the motor-car. Man can make no machinethat can avail itself of the stores of energy in the uniform temperatureof the earth or air or water, or that can draw upon the potential energyof the atoms, but it may be that the living cell can do this, and thus ahorse can pull more than a one-horse-power engine. Soddy makes thesuggestive inquiry: "If life begins in a single cell, does intelligence?does the physical distinction between living and dead matter begin inthe jostling molecular crowd? Inanimate molecules, in all theirmovements, obey the law of probability, the law which governs thesuccessive falls of a true die. In the presence of a rudimentaryintelligence, do they still follow that law, or do they now obey anotherlaw--the law of a die that is loaded?" In a machine the energy of fuelhas first to be converted into heat before it is available, but in aliving machine the chemical energy of food undergoes directtransformation into work, and the wasteful heat-process is cut off. 

VI

Professor Soddy, in discussing the relation of life to energy, does notcommit himself to the theory of the vitalistic or non-mechanical originof life, but makes the significant statement that there is a consensusof opinion that the life processes are not bound by the second law ofthermo-dynamics, namely, the law of the non-availability of the energylatent in low temperatures, or in the chaotic movements of moleculeseverywhere around us. To get energy, one must have a fall or an inclineof some sort, as of water from a higher to a lower level, or oftemperature from a higher to a lower degree, or of electricity from onecondition of high stress to another less so. But the living machineseems able to dispense with this break or incline, or else has thesecret of creating one for itself. 

In the living body the chemical energy of food is directly transformedinto work, without first being converted into heat. Why a horse can domore work than a one-horse-power engine is probably because his livingcells can and do draw upon this molecular energy. Molecules of matteroutside the living body all obey the law of probability, or the law ofchance; but inside the living body they at least seem to obey some otherlaw--the law of design, or of dice that are loaded, as Soddy says. Theyare more likely always to act in a particular way. Life supplies adirecting agency. Soddy asks if the physical distinction between livingand dead matter begins in the jostling molecular crowd--begins by thecrowd being directed and governed in a particular way. If so, by what?Ah! that is the question. Science will have none of it, because sciencewould have to go outside of matter for such an agent, and that sciencecannot do. Such a theory implies intelligence apart from matter, orworking in matter. Is that a hard proposition? Intelligence clearlyworks in our bodies and brains, and in those of all the animals--acontrolled and directed activity in matter that seems to be life. Thecell which builds up all living bodies behaves not like a machine, butlike a living being; its activities, so far as we can judge, arespontaneous, its motions and all its other processes are self-prompted. But, of course, in it the mechanical, the chemical, and the vital are soblended, so interdependent, that we may never hope to separate them; butwithout the activity called vital, there would be no cell, and hence nobody. 

It were unreasonable to expect that scientific analysis should show thatthe physics and chemistry of a living body differs from that of thenon-living. What is new and beyond the reach of science to explain isthe _kind of activity_ of these elements. They enter into new compounds;they build up bodies that have new powers and properties; they peoplethe seas and the air and the earth with living creatures, they buildthe body and brain of man. The secret of the activity in matter that wecall vital is certainly beyond the power of science to tell us. It islike expecting that the paint and oil used in a great picture mustdiffer from those in a daub. The great artist mixed his paint withbrains, and the universal elements in a living body are mixed withsomething that science cannot disclose. Organic chemistry does notdiffer intrinsically from inorganic; the difference between the two liesin 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 acertain quantity of matter and energy in the continuous orderly fermentwe call life"?

I recall that Huxley said that there was a third reality in thisuniverse besides matter and energy, and this third reality wasconsciousness. But neither the "_x_-entity" of Professor Ganong nor the"consciousness" of Huxley can be said to be of the same cosmic rank asmatter and energy, because they do not pervade the universe as matterand energy do. These forces abound throughout all space and endurethroughout all time, but life and consciousness are flitting anduncertain phenomena of matter. A prick of a pin, or a blow from ahammer, may destroy both. Unless we consider them as potential in allmatter (and who shall say that they are not?) may we look upon them asof cosmic rank?

It is often urged that it is not the eye that sees, or the brain thatthinks, but something in them. But it is something in them that neverwent into them; it arose in them. It is the living eye and the livingbrain that do the seeing and the thinking. When the life activityceases, these organs cease to see and to think. Their activity is keptup by certain physiological processes in the organs of the body, and toask what keeps up these is like the puppy trying to overtake its owntail, or to run a race with its own shadow. 

The brain is not merely the organ of the mind in an external andmechanical sense; it is the mind. When we come to living things, allsuch analogies fail us. Life is not a thing; thought is not a thing; butrather the effect of a certain activity in matter, which mind alone canrecognize. When we try to explain or account for that which we are, itis as if a man were trying to lift himself. 

Life seems like something apart. It does not seem to be amenable to thelaw of the correlation and conservation of forces. You cannot transformit into heat or light or electricity. The force which a man extractsfrom the food he eats while he is writing a poem, or doing any othermental work, seems lost to the universe. The force which the engine, orany machine, uses up, reappears as work done, or as heat or light orsome other physical manifestation. But the energy of foodstuffs which aman uses up in a mental effort does not appear again in the circuit ofthe law of the conservation of energy. A man uses up more energy in hiswaking moments, though his body be passive, than in his sleeping. Whatwe 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 soruns our mental faculties, but how does it get back again into thephysical realm? Science does not know. 

It must be some sort of energy that lights the lamps of the firefly andthe glow-worm, and it must be some sort or degree of energy that keepsconsciousness going. The brain of a Newton, or of a Plato, must make alarger draft on the solar energy latent in food-stuffs than the brain ofa day laborer, and his body less. The same amount of food-consumption, or of oxidation, results in physical force in the one case, and mentalforce in the other, but the mental force escapes the great law of theequivalence of the material forces. 

John Fiske solves the problem when he drops his physical science andtakes up his philosophy, declaring that the relation of the mind to thebody is that of a musician to his instrument, and this is practicallythe position of Sir Oliver Lodge. 

Inheritance and adaptation, says Haeckel, are sufficient to account forall the variety of animal and vegetable forms on the earth. But is therenot a previous question? Do we not want inheritance and adaptationaccounted for? What mysteries they hold! Does the river-bed account forthe river? How can a body adapt itself to its environment unless itpossess an inherent, plastic, changing, and adaptive principle? A stonedoes not adapt itself to its surroundings; its change is external andnot internal. There is mechanical adjustment between inert bodies, butthere is no adaptation without the push of life. A response to newconditions by change of form implies something activelyresponsive--something that profits by the change. 

VII

If we could tell what determines the division of labor in the hive ofbees or a colony of ants, we could tell what determines the division oflabor among the cells in the body. A hive of bees and a colony of antsis a unit--a single organism. The spirit of the body, that whichregulates all its economies, which directs all its functions, whichcoördinates its powers, which brings about all its adaptations, whichadjusts it to its environment, which sees to its repairs, heals itswounds, meets its demands, provides more force when more is needed, which makes one organ help do the work of another, which wages war ondisease germs by specific ferments, which renders us immune to this orthat disease; in fact, which carries on all the processes of ourphysical life without asking leave or seeking counsel of us, --all thisis on another plane from the mechanical or chemical--super-mechanical. 

The human spirit, the brute spirit, the vegetable spirit--all are merenames to fill a void. The spirit of the oak, the beech, the pine, thepalm--how different! how different the plan or idea or interioreconomies of each, though the chemical and mechanical processes are thesame, the same mineral and gaseous elements build them up, the same sunis their architect! But what physical principle can account for thedifference between a pine and an oak, or, for that matter, between a manand his dog, or a bird and a fish, or a crow and a lark? What play andaction or interaction and reaction of purely chemical and mechanicalforces can throw any light on the course evolution has taken in theanimal life of the globe--why the camel is the camel, and the horse thehorse? or in the development of the nervous system, or the circulatorysystem, or the digestive system, or of the eye, or of the ear?

A living body is never in a state of chemical repose, but inorganicbodies usually are. Take away the organism and the environment remainsessentially the same; take away the environment and the organism changesrapidly and perishes--it goes back to the inorganic. Now, what keeps upthe constant interchange--this seesaw? The environment is permanent; theorganism is transient. The spray of the falls is permanent; the bowcomes and goes. Life struggles to appropriate the environment; a rock, for example, does not, in the same sense, struggle with itssurroundings, it weathers passively, but a tree struggles with thewinds, and to appropriate minerals and water from the soil, and theleaves struggle to store up the sun's energy. The body struggles toeliminate poisons or to neutralize them; it becomes immune to certaindiseases, learns to resist them; the thing is _alive_. Organismsstruggle 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 forcewithout, but the force within does all the struggling. The air does notstruggle to get into the lungs, nor the lime and iron to get into ourblood. The body struggles to digest and assimilate the food; thechlorophyll in the leaf struggles to store up the solar energy. Theenvironment is unaware of the organism; the light is indifferent to thesensitized plate of the photographer. Something in the seed we plantavails itself of the heat and the moisture. The relation is not that ofa thermometer or hygrometer to the warmth and moisture of the air; it isa vital relation. 

Life may be called an aquatic phenomenon, because there can be no lifewithout water. It may be called a thermal phenomenon, because there canbe no life below or above a certain degree of temperature. It may becalled a chemical phenomenon, because there can be no life withoutchemical reactions. Yet none of these things define life. We may discussbiological facts in terms of chemistry without throwing any light on thenature of life itself. If we say the particular essence of life ischemical, do we mean any more than that life is inseparable fromchemical reactions?

After we have mastered the chemistry of life, laid bare all itsprocesses, named all its transformations and transmutations, analyzedthe living cell, seen the inorganic pass into the organic, and beheldchemical reaction, the chief priestess of this hidden rite, we shallhave to ask ourselves, Is chemistry the creator of life, or does lifecreate or use chemistry? These "chemical reaction complexes" in livingcells, as the biochemists call them, are they the cause of life, or onlythe effect of life? We shall decide according to our temperaments or ourhabits of thought. 

IX

THE JOURNEYING ATOMS

I

Emerson confessed in his "Journal" that he could not read thephysicists; their works did not appeal to him. He was probably repelledby their formulas and their mathematics. But add a touch of chemistry, and he was interested. Chemistry leads up to life. He said he did notthink he would feel threatened or insulted if a chemist should take hisprotoplasm, or mix his hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and make ananimalcule incontestably swimming and jumping before his eyes. It wouldbe only evidence of a new degree of power over matter which man hadattained to. It would all finally redound to the glory of matter itself, which, it appears, "is impregnated with thought and heaven, and isreally of God, and not of the Devil, as we had too hastily believed. "This conception of matter underlies the new materialism of such men asHuxley and Tyndall. But there is much in the new physics apart from itschemical 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 verycorner-stone of the modern scientific conception of matter. It is hardlyan exaggeration to say that in this conception we are brought intocontact with a kind of transcendental physics. A new world for theimagination is open--a world where the laws and necessities ofponderable bodies do not apply. The world of gross matter disappears, and in its place we see matter dematerialized, and escaping from thebondage of the world of tangible bodies; we see a world where frictionis abolished, where perpetual motion is no longer impossible; where twobodies may occupy the same space at the same time; where collisions anddisruptions take place without loss of energy; where subtraction oftenmeans more--as when the poison of a substance is rendered more virulentby the removal of one or more atoms of one of the elements; and whereaddition often means less--as when three parts of the gases of oxygenand hydrogen unite and form only two parts of watery vapor; where massand form, centre and circumference, size and structure, exist withoutany of the qualities ordinarily associated with these things through ourexperience in a three-dimension world. We see, or contemplate, bodieswhich are indivisible; if we divide them, their nature changes; if wedivide a molecule of water, we get atoms of hydrogen and oxygen gas; ifwe divide a molecule of salt, we get atoms of chlorine gas and atoms ofthe metal sodium, which means that we have reached a point where matteris no longer divisible in a mechanical sense, but only in a chemicalsense; which again means that great and small, place and time, insideand outside, dimensions and spatial relations, have lost their ordinarymeanings. Two bodies get inside of each other. To the physicist, heatand 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 thevibrations in the air; motion, or the energy which it implies, is thelife of the universe. 

Physics proves to us the impossibility of perpetual motion amongvisible, tangible bodies, at the same time that it reveals to us a worldwhere perpetual motion is the rule--the world of molecules and atoms. Inthe world of gross matter, or of ponderable bodies, perpetual motion isimpossible because here it takes energy, or its equivalent, to begetenergy. Friction very soon turns the kinetic energy of motion into thepotential energy of heat, which quickly disappears in that great sea ofenergy, the low uniform temperature of the earth. But when we reach theinterior world of matter, the world of molecules, atoms, and electrons, we have reached a world where perpetual motion _is_ the rule; we havereached the fountain-head of energy, and the motion of one body is notat the expense of the motion of some other body, but is a part of thespontaneous struggling and jostling and vibration that go on forever inall the matter of the universe. What is called the Brunonian movement(first discovered by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827) is within reachof the eye armed with a high-power microscope. Look into any liquid thatholds in suspension very small particles of solid matter, such as dustparticles in the air, or the granules of ordinary water-color paintsdissolved in water: not a single one of the particles is at rest; theyare all mysteriously agitated; they jump hither and thither; it is awild chaotic whirl and dance of minute particles. Brown at first thoughtthey were alive, but they were only non-living particles dancing to thesame tune which probably sets suns and systems whirling in the heavens. Ramsay says that tobacco smoke confined in the small flat chamber formedin the slide of a microscope, shows this movement, in appearance likethe flight of minute butterflies. The Brunonian movement is now believedto be due to the bombardment of the particles by the molecules of theliquid or gas in which they are suspended. The smaller the particles, the livelier they are. These particles themselves are made up of a vastnumber of molecules, among which the same movement or agitation, muchmore intense, is supposed to be taking place; the atoms which composethe molecules are dancing and frisking about like gnats in the air, andthe electrons inside the atoms are still more rapidly changing places. 

We meet with the same staggering figures in the science of theinfinitely little that we do in the science of the infinitely vast. Thusthe physicist deals with a quantity of matter a million million timessmaller than can be detected in the most delicate chemical balance. Molecules inconceivably small rush about in molecular spaceinconceivably small. Ramsay calculates how many collisions the moleculesof gas make with other molecules every second, which is four and onehalf quintillions. This staggers the mind like the tremendousrevelations of astronomy. Mathematics has no trouble to compute thefigures, but our slow, clumsy minds feel helpless before them. In everydrop of water we drink, and in every mouthful of air we breathe, thereis a movement and collision of particles so rapid in every second oftime that it can only be expressed by four with eighteen naughts. If themovement of these particles were attended by friction, or if the energyof their impact were translated into heat, what hot mouthfuls we shouldhave! But the heat, as well as the particles, is infinitesimal, and isnot perceptible. 

II

The molecules and atoms and electrons into which science resolves matterare hypothetical bodies which no human eye has ever seen, or ever cansee, but they build up the solid frame of the universe. The air and therocks are not so far apart in their constituents as they might seem toour senses. The invisible and indivisible molecules of oxygen which webreathe, and which keep our life-currents going, form about half thecrust of the earth. The soft breeze that fans and refreshes us, and therocks that crush us, are at least half-brothers. And herein we get aglimpse of the magic of chemical combinations. That mysterious propertyin matter which we call chemical affinity, a property beside which humanaffinities and passions are tame and inconstant affairs, is thearchitect of the universe. Certain elements attract certain otherelements with a fierce and unalterable attraction, and when they unite, the resultant compound is a body totally unlike either of theconstituents. Both substances have disappeared, and a new one has takentheir place. This is the magic of chemical change. A physical change, asof water into ice, or into steam, is a simple matter; it is merely amatter of more or less heat; but the change of oxygen and hydrogen intowater, or of chlorine gas and the mineral sodium into common salt, is achemical change. In nature, chlorine and sodium are not found in a freeor separate state; they hunted each other up long ago, and united toproduce the enormous quantities of rock salt that the earth holds. Onecan give his imagination free range in trying to picture what takesplace when two or more elements unite chemically, but probably there isno physical image that can afford even a hint of it. A snake trying toswallow himself, or two fishes swallowing each other, or two bulletsmeeting in the air and each going through the centre of the other, orthe fourth dimension, or almost any other impossible thing, from thepoint of view of tangible bodies, will serve as well as anything. Theatoms seem to get inside of one another, to jump down one another'sthroats, and to suffer a complete transformation. Yet we know that theydo not; oxygen is still oxygen, and carbon still carbon, amid all thestrange partnerships entered into, and all the disguises assumed. We caneasily evoke hydrogen and oxygen from water, but just how theirmolecules unite, how they interpenetrate and are lost in one another, itis impossible for us to conceive. 

We cannot visualize a chemical combination because we have no experienceupon which to found it. It is so fundamentally unlike a mechanicalmixture that even our imagination can give us no clew to it. It isthinkable that the particles of two or more substances however fine, mechanically mixed, could be seen and recognized if sufficientlymagnified; but in a chemical combination, say like iron sulphide, noamount of magnification could reveal the two elements of iron andsulphur. They no longer exist. A third substance unlike either has takentheir place. 

We extract aluminum from clay, but no conceivable power of vision couldreveal to us that metal in the clay. It is there only potentially. In achemical combination the different substances interpenetrate and arelost in one another: they are not mechanically separable norindividually distinguishable. The iron in the red corpuscles of theblood 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 didnot belong to the visible order and hence were incapable ofmagnification. 

That mysterious force, chemical affinity, is the true and originalmagic. That two substances should cleave to each other and absorb eachother and produce a third totally unlike either is one of the profoundmysteries of science. Of the nature of the change that takes place, Isay, we can form no image. Chemical force is selective; it is notpromiscuous and indiscriminate like gravity, but specific andindividual. Nearly all the elements have their preferences and they willchoose no other. Oxygen comes the nearest to being a free lover amongthe elements, but its power of choice is limited. 

Science conceives of all matter as grained or discrete, like a bag ofshot, or a pile of sand. Matter does not occupy space continuously, noteven in the hardest substances, such as the diamond; there is space, molecular space, between the particles. A rifle bullet whizzing past isno more a continuous body than is a flock of birds wheeling and swoopingin the air. Air spaces separate the birds, and molecular spaces separatethe molecules of the bullet. Of course it is unthinkable thatindivisible 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 inthe atom, we are called upon to go still further and divide theindivisible. The electrons, of which the atom is composed, are onehundred thousand times smaller, and two thousand times lighter than thesmallest particle hitherto recognized, namely, the hydrogen atom. AFrench physicist conceives of the electrons as rushing about in theinterior of the atom like swarms of gnats whirling about in the dome ofa cathedral. The smallest particle of dust that we can recognize in theair is millions of times larger than the atom, and millions of millionsof times larger than the electron. Yet science avers that themanifestations 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 atomto another at a speed so great as to change its location forty milliontimes a second. In the electron we have matter dematerialized; theelectron is not a material particle. Hence the step to the electricconstitution of matter is an easy one. In the last analysis we have puredisembodied energy. "With many of the feelings of an air-man, " saysSoddy, "who has left behind for the first time the solid ground beneathhim, " we make this plunge into the demonstrable verities of the newestphysics; matter in the old sense--gross matter--fades away. To the threestates in which we have always known it, the solid, the liquid, and thegaseous, we must add a fourth, the ethereal--the state of matter whichSir Oliver Lodge thinks borders on, or is identical with, what we callthe spiritual, and which affords the key to all the occult phenomena oflife and mind. 

As we have said, no human eye has ever seen, or will see, an atom; onlythe mind's eye, or the imagination, sees atoms and molecules, yet theatomic theory of matter rests upon the sure foundation of experimentalscience. Both the chemist and the physicist are as convinced of theexistence of these atoms as they are of the objects we see and touch. The theory "is a necessity to explain the experimental facts of chemicalcomposition. " "Through metaphysics first, " says Soddy, "then throughalchemy and chemistry, through physical and astronomical spectroscopy, lastly through radio-activity, science has slowly groped its way to theatom. " The physicists make definite statements about these hypotheticalbodies all based upon definite chemical phenomena. Thus Clerk Maxwellassumes that they are spherical, that the spheres are hard and elasticlike billiard-balls, that they collide and glance off from one anotherin the same way, that is, that they collide at their surfaces and not attheir centres. 

Only two of our senses make us acquainted with matter in a state whichmay be said to approach the atomic--smell and taste. Odors are materialemanations, and represent a division of matter into inconceivably smallparticles. What are the perfumes we smell but emanations, flying atomsor electrons, radiating in all directions, and continuing for a shorteror longer time without any appreciable diminution in bulk or weight ofthe substances that give them off? How many millions or trillions oftimes does the rose divide its heart in the perfume it sheds so freelyupon the air? The odor of the musk of certain animals lingers undercertain conditions for years. The imagination is baffled in trying toconceive of the number and minuteness of the particles which the foxleaves of itself in the snow where its foot was imprinted--so palpablethat the scent of a hound can seize upon them hours after the fox haspassed! The all but infinite divisibility of matter is proved by everyodor that the breeze brings us from field and wood, and by the delicateflavors that the tongue detects in the food we eat and drink. But theseemanations and solutions that affect our senses probably do notrepresent a chemical division of matter; when we smell an apple or aflower, 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 orelectrons. A chemical analysis of odors, if it were possible, wouldprobably show the elements in the same state of combination as thesubstances from which the odors emanated. 

The physicists herd these ultimate particles of matter about; they havea regular circus with them; they make them go through films and screens;they guide them through openings; they count them as their tiny flash isseen on a sensitized plate; they weigh them; they reckon their velocity. The alpha-rays from radio-active substances are swarms of tiny meteorsflying at the incredible speed of twelve thousand miles a second, whilethe meteors of the midnight sky fly at the speed of only forty miles asecond. Those alpha particles are helium atoms. They are much largerthan beta particles, and have less penetrative power. Sir J. J. Thomsonhas devised a method by which he has been able to photograph the atoms. The photographic plate upon which their flight is recorded suggests ashower of shooting stars. Oxygen is found to be made up of atoms ofseveral different forms. 

III

The "free path" of molecules, both in liquids and in gases, is so minuteas to be beyond the reach of the most powerful microscope. This freepath in liquids is a zigzag course, owing to the perpetual collisionswith other molecules. The molecular behavior of liquids differs fromthat of gases only in what is called surface tension. Liquids have askin, a peculiar stress of the surface molecules; gases do not, but tendto dissipate and fill all space. A drop of water remains intact tillvaporization 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 isslowly evolved. When the combustion is rapid, as in actual fire, heat israpidly evolved. The same phenomenon may reach the eye as light, and thehand as heat, though different senses get two different impressions ofthe same thing. So a mechanical disturbance may reach the ear as sound, and be so interpreted, and reach the hand as motion in matter. Incombustion, the oxygen combines rapidly with the carbon, giving out heatand light and carbon dioxide, but why it does so admits of noexplanation. Herein again is where life differs from fire; we candescribe combustion in terms of chemistry, but after we have describedlife in the same terms something--and this something is the mainthing--remains untouched. 

The facts of radio-activity alone demonstrate the truth of the atomictheory. The beta rays, or emanations from radium, penetrating one footof solid iron are very convincing. And this may go on for hundreds ofyears without any appreciable diminution of size or weight of theradio-active substance. "A gram of such substance, " says Sir OliverLodge, "might lose a few thousand of atoms a second, and yet we couldnot detect the loss if we continued to weigh it for a century. " Thevolatile essences of organic bodies which we detect in odors andflavors, are not potent like the radium emanations. We can confine themand control them, but we cannot control the rays of radio-active matterany more than we can confine a spirit. We can separate the threedifferent kinds of rays--the alpha, the beta, and the gamma--by magneticdevices, but we cannot cork them up and isolate them, as we can musk andthe attar of roses. 

And these emanations are taking place more or less continuously allabout us and we know it not. In fact, we are at all times subjected to amolecular bombardment of which we never dream; minute projectiles, indivisible points of matter, are shot out at us in the form ofelectrons from glowing metals, from lighted candles, and from othernoiseless and unsuspected batteries at a speed of tens of thousands ofmiles a second, and we are none the wiser for it. Indeed, if we couldsee or feel or be made aware of it, in what a different world we shouldfind ourselves! How many million-or billion-fold our sense of sight andtouch would have to be increased to bring this about! We live in a worldof collisions, disruptions, and hurtling missiles of which our sensesgive 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 wedrink, in the food we eat, and in the soil we walk upon, which, ifmagnified till our senses could take it in, would probably drive us mad. It is in this interior world of molecular activity, this world ofelectric vibrations and oscillations, that the many transformations ofenergy take place. This is the hiding-place of the lightning, of theelectrons which moulded together make the thunderbolt. What anunderworld of mystery and power it is! In it slumbers all the might andmenace of the storm, the power that rends the earth and shakes theheavens. With the mind's eye one can see the indivisible atoms giving uptheir electrons, see the invisible hosts, in numbers beyond the power ofmathematics to compute, being summoned and marshalled by some mysteriouscommander and hurled in terrible fiery phalanxes across the battlefieldof the storm. 

The physicist describes the atom and talks about it as if it were "atangible body which one could hold in his hand like a baseball. " "Anatom, " Sir Oliver Lodge says, "consists of a globular mass of positiveelectricity with minute negative electrons embedded in it. " He speaks ofthe spherical form of the atom, and of its outer surface, of its centre, and of its passing through other atoms, and of the electrons thatrevolve around its centre as planets around a sun. The electron, onehundred thousand times smaller than an atom, yet has surface, and thatsurface 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 anelectron is vastly greater than that between the sun and the earth. Represent an atom, says Sir Oliver Lodge, by a church one hundred andsixty feet long, eighty feet broad, and forty feet high; the electronsare 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 thegnats rushing about. We know of nothing so empty and hollow, so near avacuum, 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 thebank sliding down and leaving the woodchuck-hole sticking out, lookslike pretty good physics. The electrons give matter its inertia, andgive 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-atomicenergy, which, if it could be tapped and controlled, would so easily doall the work of the world. But this we cannot do. "We are no morecompetent, " says Professor Soddy, "to make use of these supplies ofatomic energy than a savage, ignorant of how to kindle a fire, couldmake use of a steam-engine. " The natural rate of flow of this energyfrom its atomic sources we get as heat, and it suffices to keep lifegoing upon this planet. It is the source of all the activity we see uponthe globe. Its results, in the geologic ages, are stored up for us incoal and oil and natural gas, and, in our day, are available in thewinds, the tides, and the waterfalls, and in electricity. 

IV

The electric constitution of matter is quite beyond anything we canimagine. The atoms are little worlds by themselves, and the wholemystery of life and death is in their keeping. The whole difference inthe types of mind and character among men is supposed to be in theirkeeping. The different qualities and properties of bodies are in theirkeeping. Whether an object is hot or cold to our senses, depends uponthe character of their vibrations; whether it be sweet or sour, poisonous or innocuous to us, depends upon how the atoms select theirpartners in the whirl and dance of their activities. The hardness andbrilliancy of the diamond is supposed to depend upon how the atoms ofcarbon unite and join hands. 

I have heard the view expressed that all matter, as such, is deadmatter, that the molecules of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, phosphorus, calcium, and so on, in a living body, are themselves no morealive than the same molecules in inorganic matter. Nearly nine tenths ofa living body is water; is not this water the same as the water we getat the spring or the brook? is it any more alive? does water undergo anychemical change in the body? is it anything more than a solvent, than acurrent that carries the other elements to all parts of the body? Thereare any number of chemical changes or reactions in a living body, butare the atoms and molecules that are involved in such changes radicallychanged? Can oxygen be anything but oxygen, or carbon anything butcarbon? Is what we call life the result of their various newcombinations? Many modern biologists hold to this view. In thisconception merely a change in the order of arrangement of the moleculesof a substance--which follows which or which is joined to which--isfraught with consequences as great as the order in which the letters ofthe alphabet are arranged in words, or the words themselves are arrangedin sentences. The change of one letter in a word often utterly changesthe meaning of that word, and the changing of a word in the sentence maygive expression to an entirely different idea. Reverse the letters inthe 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 ultimateparticles of matter are compounded that makes the whole differencebetween a cabbage and an oak, or between a frog and a man. It is a hardproposition. We know with scientific certainty that the differencebetween a diamond and a piece of charcoal, or between a pearl and anoyster-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 equalcertainty that the difference between certain chemical bodies, likealcohol and ether, is the arrangement of their ultimate particles, sinceboth have the same chemical formula. We do not spell acetic acid, alcohol, sugar, starch, animal fat, vegetable oils, glycerine, and thelike, with the same letters; yet nature compounds them all of the sameatoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, but in different proportions andin different orders. 

Chemistry is all-potent. A mechanical mixture of two or more elementsis a simple affair, but a chemical mixture introduces an element ofmagic. No conjurer's trick can approach such a transformation as that ofoxygen and hydrogen gases into water. The miracle of turning water intowine is tame by comparison. Dip plain cotton into a mixture of nitricand sulphuric acids and let it dry, and we have that terrible explosive, guncotton. Or, take the cellulose of which cotton is composed, and addtwo atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, and we have sugar. But we areto 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 spiritsof wine, and add four more atoms of carbon to the carbon molecule, andwe have the poison carbolic acid. Pure alcohol can be turned into adeadly poison, not by adding to, but simply by taking from it; take outone atom of carbon and two of hydrogen from the alcohol molecule, and wehave the poison methyl alcohol. But we are to remember that thedifference 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 andoxygen chemically (N_{2}O) we have nitrous oxide, laughing-gas. Ordinarystarch is made up of three different elements--six parts of carbon, tenparts of hydrogen, and five parts of oxygen (C_{6}H_{10}O_{5}). Now ifwe add water to this compound, we have a simple mixture of starch andwater, but if we bring about a chemical union with the elements of water(hydrogen and oxygen), we have grape sugar. This sugar is formed ingreen leaves by the agency of sunlight, and is the basis of all plantand 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, thehardest body in nature and the most valued of all precious stones, butit enters largely into all living bodies and is an important constituentof 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, andprobably helped kindle the first vital spark. In the shape of wood andcoal, it now warms us and makes the wheels of our material civilizationgo round. Diamond stuff, through the magic of chemistry, plays one ofthe principle rôles in our physical life; we eat it, and are warmed andpropelled by it, and cheered by it. Taken as carbonic acid gas into ourlungs, it poisons us; taken into our stomachs, it stimulates us;dissolved in water, it disintegrates the rocks, eating out the carbonateof lime which they contain. It is one of the principal actors in thedrama of organized matter. 

V

We have a good illustration of the power of chemistry, and how closelyit is dogging the footsteps of life, in the many organic compounds ithas built up out of the elements, such as sugar, starch, indigo, camphor, rubber, and so forth, all of which used to be looked upon asimpossible aside from life-processes. It is such progress as this thatleads some men of science to believe that the creation of life itself iswithin the reach of chemistry. I do not believe that any occult ortranscendental principle bars the way, but that some unknown and perhapsunknowable condition does, as mysterious and unrepeatable as that whichseparates our mental life from our physical. The transmutation of thephysical into the psychical takes place, but the secret of it we do notknow. It does not seem to fall within the law of the correlation and theconservation of energy. 

Free or single atoms are very rare; they all quickly find their mates orpartners. This eagerness of the elements to combine is one of themysteries. If the world of visible matter were at one stroke resolvedinto its constituent atoms, it would practically disappear; we mightsmell it, or taste it, if we were left, but we could not see it, or feelit; the water would vanish, the solid ground would vanish--more thanhalf of it into oxygen atoms, and the rest mainly into silicon atoms. 

The atoms of different bodies are all alike, and presumably each holdsthe same amount of electric energy. One wonders, then, how the order inwhich they are arranged can affect them so widely as to produce bodiesso unlike as, say, alcohol and ether. This brings before us again themystery of chemical arrangement or combination, so different fromanything we know among tangible bodies. It seems to imply that each atomhas its own individuality. Mix up a lot of pebbles together, and theresult would be hardly affected by the order of the arrangement, but mixup a lot of people, and the result would be greatly affected by the factof who is elbowing who. It seems the same among the mysterious atoms, asif some complemented or stimulated those next them, or had an oppositeeffect. But can we think of the atoms in a chemical compound as beingnext one another, or merely in juxtaposition? Do we not rather have tothink of them as identified with one another to an extent that has noparallel in the world of ponderable bodies? A kind of sympathy oraffinity makes them one in a sense that we only see realized amongliving beings. 

Chemical activity is the first step from physical activity to vitalactivity, but the last step is taken rarely--the other two areuniversal. Chemical changes involve the atom. What do vital changesinvolve? We do not know. We can easily bring about the chemicalchanges, but not so the vital changes. A chemical change destroys one ormore substances and produces others totally unlike them; a vital changebreaks up substances and builds up other bodies out of them; it resultsin new compounds that finally cover the earth with myriads of new andstrange forms. 

X

THE VITAL ORDER

I

The mechanistic theory of life--the theory that all living things can beexplained and fully accounted for on purely physico-chemicalprinciples--has many defenders in our day. The main aim of the foregoingchapters is to point out the inadequacy of this view. At the risk ofwearying my reader I am going to collect under the above heading a fewmore considerations bearing on this point. 

A thing that grows, that develops, cannot, except by very free use oflanguage, be called a machine. We speak of the body as a machine, but wehave to qualify it by prefixing the adjective living--the livingmachine, which takes it out of the mechanical order of thingsfabricated, contrived, built up from without, and puts it in the orderwe call vital, the order of things self-developed from within, the orderof things autonomous, as contrasted with things automatic. All themechanical principles are operative in the life processes, but they havebeen vitalized, not changed in any way but in the service of a new orderof reality. The heart with its chambers and valves is a pump thatforces the blood through the system, but a pump that works itself anddoes not depend upon pneumatic pressure--a pump in which vital energytakes the place of gravitational energy. The peristaltic movement in theintestines involves a mechanical principle, but it is set up by aninward stimulus, and not by outward force. It is these inward stimuli, which of course involve chemical reactions, that afford the motive powerfor all living bodies and that put the living in another order from themechanical. The eye is an optical instrument, --a rather crude one, it issaid, --but it cannot be separated from its function, as can a mereinstrument--the eye sees as literally as the brain thinks. In breathingwe unconsciously apply the principle of the bellows; it is a bellowsagain which works itself, but the function of which, in a very limitedsense, we can inhibit and control. An artificial, or man-made, machinealways implies an artificer, but the living machine is not made in anysuch sense; it grows, it arises out of the organizing principle thatbecomes active in matter under conditions that we only dimly understand, and that we cannot reproduce. 

The vital and the mechanical coöperate in all our bodily functions. Swallowing our food is a mechanical process, the digestion of it is achemical process and the assimilation and elimination of it a vitalprocess. Inhaling and exhaling the air is a mechanical process, theoxidation of the blood is a chemical process, and the renewal of thecorpuscles is a vital process. Growth, assimilation, elimination, reproduction, metabolism, and secretion, are all vital processes whichcannot be described in terms of physics and chemistry. All our bodilymovements--lifting, striking, walking, running--are mechanical, butseeing, hearing, and tasting, are of another order. And that whichcontrols, directs, coördinates, and inhibits our activities belongs to astill higher order, the psychic. The world of thoughts and emotionswithin us, while dependent upon and interacting with the physical worldwithout us, cannot be accounted for in terms of the physical world. Aliving thing is more than a machine, more than a chemical laboratory. 

We can analyze the processes of a tree into their mechanical andchemical elements, but there is besides a kind of force there which wemust call vital. The whole growth and development of the tree, itsmanner of branching and gripping the soil, its fixity of species, itsindividuality--all imply something that does not belong to the order ofthe inorganic, automatic forces. In the living animal how the psychicstands related to the physical or physiological and arises out of it, science cannot tell us, but the relation must be real; only philosophycan grapple with that question. To resolve the psychic and the vitalinto the mechanical and chemical and refuse to see any other factors atwork is the essence of materialism. 

II

Any contrivance which shows an interdependence of parts, that results inunity of action, is super-mechanical. The solar system may be regardedas a unit, but it has not the purposive unity of a living body. It isone only in the sense that its separate bodies are all made of onestuff, 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 ofone purposive end. An army is a unit, a flock of gregarious birds, acolony of ants or bees, is a unit because the spirit and purpose of oneis the spirit and purpose of all; the unity is psychological. 

Only living bodies are adaptive. Adaptation, of course, has its physicsor its chemistry, because it is a physical phenomenon; but there is noadaptation of a rock or a clay-bank to its environment; there is onlymechanical and chemical adjustment. The influence of the environment maybring about chemical and physical changes in a non-living body, but theyare not purposive as in a living body. The fat in the seeds of plants innorthern countries is liquid and solid at a lower temperature than intropical climates. Living organisms alone react in a formative ordeformative way to external stimuli. In warm climates the fur ofanimals and the wool of sheep become thin and light. The colder theclimate, the thicker these coverings. Such facts only show that in thematter of adaptation among living organisms, there is a factor at workother than chemistry and physics--not independent of them, but making apurposive use of them. Cut off the central shoot that leads the youngspruce tree upwards, and one of the shoots from the whirl of lateralbranches below it slowly rises up and takes the place of the lostleader. Here is an action not prompted by the environment, but by themorphological needs of the tree, and it illustrates how different is itsunity from the unity of a mere machine. I am only aiming to point outthat in all living things the material forces behave in a purposive wayto 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 oflife, --that is, the same degree of irritability. The bone cells and thehair cells, for instance, can hardly be so much alive--or soirritable--as the muscle cells; nor these as intensely alive as thenerve and brain cells. Does not a bird possess a higher degree of lifethan a mollusk, or a turtle? Is not a brook trout more alive than amud-sucker? You can freeze the latter as stiff as an icicle andresuscitate it, but not the former. There is a scale of degrees in lifeas clearly as there is a scale of degrees in temperature. There is anendless gradation of sensibilities of the living cells, dependentprobably upon the degree of differentiation of function. Anæstheticsdull or suspend this irritability. The more highly developed and complexthe nervous system, the higher the degree of life, till we pass frommere physical life to psychic life. Science might trace this differenceto cell structure, but what brings about the change in the character ofthe cell, or starts the cells to building a complex nervous system, is aquestion unanswerable to science. The biologist imagines this and thatabout the invisible or hypothetical molecular structure; he assignsdifferent functions to the atoms; some are for endosmosis, others forcontraction, others for conduction of stimuli. Intramolecular oxygenplays a part. Other names are given to the mystery--the micellar stringsof Naegeli, the biophores of Weismann, the plastidules of Haeckel; theyall presuppose millions of molecules peculiarly arranged in theprotoplasm. 

On purely mechanical and chemical principles Tyndall accounts for thegrowth from the germ of a tree. The germ would be quiet, but the solarlight and heat disturb its dreams, break up its atomic equilibrium. Thegerm makes an "effort" to restore it (why does it make an effort?), which effort is necessarily defeated and incessantly renewed, and inthe turmoil or "scrapping" between the germ and the solar forces, matteris gathered from the soil and from the air and built into the specialform of a tree. Why not in the form of a cabbage, or a donkey, or aclam? If the forces are purely automatic, why not? Why should matter begathered in at all in a mechanical struggle between inorganic elements?But these are not all inorganic; the seed is organic. Ah! that makes thedifference! That accounts for the "effort. " So we have to have theorganic to start with, then the rest is easy. No doubt the molecules ofthe seed would remain in a quiescent state, if they were not disturbedby external influences, chemical and mechanical. But there is somethinglatent 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, isthe mystery. 

III

I fancy that the difficulty which an increasing number of persons findin accepting the mechanistic view of life, or evolution, --the view whichHerbert Spencer built into such a ponderous system of philosophy, andwhich such men as Huxley, Tyndall, Gifford, Haeckel, Verworn, andothers, have upheld and illustrated, --is temperamental rather thanlogical. The view is distasteful to a certain type of mind--theflexible, imaginative, artistic, and literary type--the type that lovesto see itself reflected in nature or that reads its own thoughts andemotions into nature. In a few eminent examples the two types of mind towhich I refer seem more or less blended. Sir Oliver Lodge is a case inpoint. Sir Oliver is an eminent physicist who in his conception of thetotality of things is yet a thoroughgoing idealist and mystic. Hissolution of the problem of living things is extra-scientific. He sees inlife a distinct transcendental principle, not involved in theconstitution of matter, but independent of it, entering into it andusing it for its own purposes. 

Tyndall was another great scientist with an inborn idealistic strain inhim. His famous, and to many minds disquieting, declaration, made in hisBelfast address over thirty years ago, that in matter itself he saw thepromise and the potency of all terrestrial life, stamps him as ascientific materialist. But his conception of matter, as "at bottomessentially mystical and transcendental, " stamps him as also anidealist. The idealist in him speaks very eloquently in the passagewhich, in the same address, he puts into the mouth of Bishop Butler, inthe latter's imaginary debate with Lucretius: "Your atoms, " says theBishop, "are individually without sensation, much more are they withoutintelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your hand upon this problem. Take your dead hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your dead carbonatoms, your dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus atoms, and allthe other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the brain is formed. Imagine them separate and sensationless, observe them running togetherand forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely mechanicalprocess, is _seeable_ by the mind. But can you see or dream, or in anyway imagine, how out of that mechanical art, and from these individuallydead atoms, sensation, thought, and emotion are to arise? Are you likelyto extract Homer out of the rattling of dice, or the DifferentialCalculus out of the clash of billiard balls?" Could any vitalist, orBergsonian 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 goodmany people; it is shared by or is characteristic of all the greatpoets, artists, seers, idealists of the world; it is the humanistic typethat sees man everywhere reflected in nature; and is radically differentfrom the strictly scientific type which dehumanizes nature and reducesit to impersonal laws and forces, which distrusts analogy and sentimentand poetry, and clings to a rigid logical method. 

This type of mind is bound to have trouble in accepting thephysico-chemical theory of the nature and origin of life. It visualizeslife, sees it as a distinct force or principle working in and throughmatter but not of it, super-physical in its origin and psychological inits nature. This is the view Henri Bergson exploits in his "CreativeEvolution. " This is the view Kant took when he said, "It is quitecertain that we cannot even satisfactorily understand, much lessexplain, the nature of an organism and its internal forces on purelymechanical principles. " It is the view Goethe took when he said, "Mattercan never exist without spirit, nor spirit without matter. "

Tyndall says Goethe was helped by his poetic training in the field ofnatural history, but hindered as regards the physical and mechanicalsciences. "He could not formulate distinct mechanical conceptions; hecould not see the force of mechanical reasoning. " His literary culturehelped him to a literary interpretation of living nature, but not to ascientific explanation of it; it helped put him in sympathy with livingthings, and just to that extent barred him from the mechanisticconception of those of pure science. Goethe, like every great poet, sawthe universe through the colored medium of his imagination, hisemotional and æsthetic nature; in short, through his humanism, and notin the white light of the scientific reason. His contributions toliterature were of the first order, but his contributions to sciencehave not taken high rank. He was a "prophet of the soul, " and not adisciple of the scientific understanding. 

If we look upon life as inherent or potential in the constitution ofmatter, dependent upon outward physical and chemical conditions for itsdevelopment, we are accounting for life in terms of matter and motion, and are in the ranks of the materialists. But if we find ourselvesunable to set the ultimate particles of matter in action, or so workingas to produce the reaction which results in life, without conceiving ofsome new force or principle operating upon them, then we are in theranks of the vitalists or idealists. The idealists see the originalatoms slumbering there in rock and sea and soil for untold ages, till, moved upon by some unknown factor, they draw together in certain fixedorder and numbers, and life is the result. Something seems to put aspell upon them and cause them to behave so differently from the waythey behaved before they were drawn into the life circuit. 

When we think of life, as the materialists do, as of mechanico-chemicalorigin, or explicable in terms of the natural universal order, we thinkof the play of material forces amid which we live, we think of theirsubtle action and interaction all about us--of osmosis, capillarity, radio-activity, electricity, thermism, and the like; we think of thefour states of matter, --solid, fluid, gaseous, and ethereal, --of howlittle our senses take in of their total activities, and we do not feelthe need of invoking a transcendental principle to account for it. 

Yet to fail to see that what we must call intelligence pervades and isactive in all organic nature is to be spiritually blind. But to see itas something foreign to, or separable from, nature is to do violence toour faith in the constancy and sufficiency of the natural order. Onestar differeth from another star in glory. There are degrees of mysteryin the universe. The most mysterious thing in inorganic nature iselectricity--that disembodied energy that slumbers in the ultimateparticles of matter--unseen, unfelt, unknown, till it suddenly leapsforth with such terrible vividness and power on the face of the storm, or till we summon it through the transformation of some other form ofenergy. A still higher and more inscrutable mystery is life--thatsomething which clothes itself in such infinitely varied and beautifulas well as unbeautiful forms of matter. We can evoke electricity at willfrom 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 ifwe divest it of all our associations with the machine-mad andmachine-ridden world in which we live and out of which our materialcivilization came. The mechanical, the automatic, is the antithesis ofthe spontaneous and the poetic, and it repels us on that account. We areso made that the artificial systems please us far less than the naturalsystems. A sailing-ship takes us more than a steamship. It is nearerlife, nearer the winged creatures. There is determinism in nature, mechanical forces are everywhere operative, but there are no machines inthe proper sense of the word. When we call an organism a living machinewe at once take it out of the categories of the merely mechanical andautomatic and lift it into a higher order--the vital order. 

Professor Le Dantec says we are mechanisms in the third degree, amechanism of a mechanism of a mechanism. The body is a mechanism byvirtue of its anatomy--its framework, its levers, its hinges; it is amechanism by virtue of its chemical activities; and it is a mechanism byvirtue of its colloid states--three kinds of mechanisms in one, and allacting together harmoniously and as a unit--in other words, asuper-mechanical combination of activities. 

The mechanical conception of life repels us because of its associationin our minds with the fabrications of our own hands--the dead metal andwood and the noise and dust of our machine-ridden and machine-producedcivilization. 

But Nature makes no machines like our own. She uses mechanicalprinciples everywhere, in inert matter and in living bodies, but shedoes not use them in the bald and literal way we do. We must divest hermechanisms of the rigidity and angularity that pertain to the works ofour own hands. Her hooks and hinges and springs and sails and coils andaeroplanes, all involve mechanical contrivances, but how differentlythey impress us from our own application of the same principles! Even ininert matter--in the dews, the rains, the winds, the tides, the snows, the streams, --her mechanics and her chemistry and her hydrostatics andpneumatics, seem much nearer akin to life than our own. We must rememberthat Nature's machines are not human machines. When we place our machineso that it is driven by the great universal currents, --the wheel in thestream, the sail on the water, --the result is much more pleasing andpoetic than when propelled by artificial power. The more machinery weget between ourselves and Nature, the farther off Nature seems. Themarvels of crystallization, the beautiful vegetable forms which thefrost etches upon the stone flagging of the sidewalk, and upon thewindow-pane, delight us and we do not reason why. A natural bridgepleases more than one which is the work of an engineer, yet the naturalbridge can only stand when it is based upon good engineering principles. I found at the great Colorado Cañon, that the more the monuments oferosion were suggestive of human structures, or engineering andarchitectural works, the more I was impressed by them. We are pleasedwhen Nature imitates man, and we are pleased when man imitates Nature, and yet we recoil from the thought that life is only applied mechanicsand chemistry. But the thought that it is mechanics and chemistryapplied by something of which they as such, form no part, some agent orprinciple which we call vitality, is welcome to us. No machine we haveever made or seen can wind itself up, or has life, no chemical compoundfrom the laboratories ever develops a bit of organic matter, andtherefore 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 matterup, in opposition to gravity, into thousands of living forms. The treelifts 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; itsroots split rocks. A giant sequoia lifts tons of solid matter and waterup hundreds of feet. So will an explosion of powder or dynamite, but thetree does it slowly and silently by the organizing power of life. Thevital is as inscrutably identified with the mechanical and chemical asthe soul is identified with the body. They are one while yet they aretwo. 

For purely mechanical things we can find equivalents. Arrest a purelymechanical process, and the machine only rests or rusts; arrest a vitalprocess, and the machine evaporates, disintegrates, myriads of othermachines reduce it to its original mineral and gaseous elements. In theorganic world we strike a principle that is incalculable in itsoperation and incommensurable in its results. The physico-chemicalforces we can bring to book; we know their orbits, their attractions andrepulsions, and just what they will and will not do; we can forecasttheir movements and foresee their effects. But the vital forcestranscend all our mathematics; we cannot anticipate their behavior. Start inert matter in motion and we know pretty nearly what will happento it; mix the chemical elements together and we can foresee theresults; but start processes or reactions we call life, and who canforesee the end? We know the sap will mount in the tree and the treewill be true to its type, but what do we or can we know of what it isthat determines its kind and size? We know that in certain plants theleaves will always be opposite each other on the stalk, and that inother plants the leaves will alternate; that certain plants will haveconspicuous and others inconspicuous flowers; but how can we know whatit is in the cells of the plants that determines these things? We cangraft the scion of a sour apple tree upon a sweet, and _vice versa_, andthe fruit of the scion will be true to its kind, but no analysis of thescion or of the stock will reveal the secret, as it would in the case ofchemical compounds. In inorganic nature we meet with concretions, butnot secretions; with crystallization, but not with assimilation andgrowth from within. Chemistry tells us that the composition of animalbodies is identical with that of vegetable; that there is nothing in onethat is not in the other; and yet, behold the difference! a differencebeyond the reach of chemistry to explain. Biology can tell us all aboutthese differences and many other things, but it cannot tell us thesecret we are looking for, --what it is that fashions from the sameelements two bodies so unlike as a tree and a man. 

Decay and disintegration in the inorganic world often lead to theproduction of beautiful forms. In life the reverse is true; the vitalforces build up varied and picturesque forms which when pulled down areshapeless and displeasing. The immense layers of sandstone and limestoneout of which the wonderful forms that fill the Grand Cañon of theColorado are carved were laid down in wide uniform sheets; if the watershad deposited their material in the forms which we now see, it wouldhave been a miracle. We marvel and admire as we gaze upon them now; wedo more, we have to speculate as to how it was all done by the blind, unintelligent forces. Giant stairways, enormous alcoves, dizzy, highlywrought balustrades, massive vertical walls standing four-square likehuge foundations--how did all the unguided erosive forces do it? Thesecret is in the structure of the rock, in the lines of cleavage, in theunequal hardness, and in the impulsive, irregular, and unequal action ofthe eroding agents. These agents follow the lines of least resistance;they are active at different times and seasons, and from differentdirections; they work with infinite slowness; they undermine, theydisintegrate, they dislodge, they transport; the hard streaks resistthem, the soft streaks invite them; water charged with sand and gravelsaws down; the wind, armed with fine sand, rounds off and hollows out;and thus the sculpturing goes on. But after you have reasoned out allthese things, you still marvel at the symmetry and the structural beautyof the forms. They look like the handiwork of barbarian gods. They arethe handiwork of physical forces which we can see and measure and in adegree control. But what a gulf separates them from the handiwork of theorganic forces!

VI

Some things come and some things arise; things that already exist maycome, but potential things arise; my friend comes to visit me, the tidecomes up the river, the cold or hot wave comes from the west; but theseasons, night and morning, health and disease, and the like, do notcome in this sense; they arise. Life does not come to dead matter inthis 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 earthupon 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, orsunset, or at noon, or at any other moment we cared to elect. Love orhate does not come to our hearts; it is born there; the breath does notcome to the newborn infant; respiration arises there automatically. Seehow the life of the infant is involved in that first breath, yet it isnot its life; the infant must first be alive before it can breathe. Ifit is still-born, the respiratory reaction does not take place. We cansay, then, that the breath means life, and the life means breath; onlywe must say the latter first. We can say in the same way thatorganization means life, and life means organization. Something sets upthe organizing process in matter. We may take all the physical elementsof life known to us and jumble them together and shake them up to alleternity, and life will not result. A little friction between solidbodies begets heat, a little more and we get fire. But no amount offriction begets life. Heat and life go together, but heat is thesecondary factor. 

Life is always a vanishing-point, a constant becoming--an unstablesomething that escapes us while we seem to analyze it. In its nature oressence, it is a metaphysical problem, and not one of physical science. Science cannot grasp it; it evaporates in its crucibles. And science iscompelled finally to drive it into an imaginary region--I had almostsaid, metaphysical region, the region of the invisible, hypotheticalatoms of matter. Here in the mysteries of molecular attraction andrepulsion, 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 itthat travels along lifting new water each moment up into waves? It is aphysical force communicated usually by the winds. When the wave diesupon the shore, this force is dissipated, not lost, or is turned intoheat. Why may we not think of life as a vital force traveling throughmatter and lifting up into organic life waves in the same way? But nottranslatable into any other form of energy because not derivable fromany other form. 

Every species of animal has something about it that is unique andindividual and that no chemical or physiological analysis of it willshow--probably some mode of motion among its ultimate particles that ispeculiar to itself. This prevents cross-breeding among different speciesand avoids a chaos of animal and vegetable forms. Living tissues andliving organs from one species cannot be grafted upon the individualsof another species; the kidney of a cat, for instance, cannot besubstituted for that of a dog, although the functions and the anatomy ofthe two are identical. It is suggested that an element of felineness andan element of canineness adhere in the cells of each, and the two areantagonistic. This specific quality, or selfness, of an animal pervadesevery drop of its blood, so that the blood relationship of the differentforms may be thus tested, where chemistry is incompetent to showagreement or antagonism. The reactions of life are surer and more subtlethan those of chemistry. Thus the blood relationship between birds andreptiles is clearly shown, as is the relationship of man and thechimpanzee and the orang-outang. The same general fact holds true in thevegetable world. You cannot graft the apple upon the oak, or the plumupon the elm. It seems as if there were the quality of oakness and thequality of appleness, and they would not mix. 

The same thing holds among different chemical compounds. Substanceswhich have precisely the same chemical formulæ (called isomers) haveproperties as widely apart as alcohol and ether. 

If chemistry is powerless to trace the relationship between differentforms of life, is it not highly improbable that the secret of lifeitself is in the keeping of chemistry?

Analytical science has reached the end of its tether when it hasresolved a body into its constituent elements. Why or how these elementsbuild up a man in the one case, and a monkey in another, is beyond itsprovince to say. It can deal with all the elements of the living body, vegetable and animal; it can take them apart and isolate them indifferent bottles; but it cannot put them together again as they were inlife. It knows that the human body is built up of a vast multitude ofminute cells, that these cells build tissues, that the tissues buildorgans, that the organs build the body; but the secret of the man, orthe 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 ofgeology or astronomy, is a profound mystery. Science can take livingtissue and make it grow outside of the body from which it came, but itwill only repeat endlessly the first step of life--that ofcell-multiplication; it is like a fire that will burn as long as fuel isgiven it and the ashes are removed; but it is entirely purposeless; itwill not build up the organ of which it once formed a part, much lessthe whole organized body. 

The difference between one man and another does not reside in hisanatomy or physiology, or in the elements of which the brains and bodiesare composed, but in something entirely beyond the reach of experimentalscience to disclose. The difference is psychological, or, we may say, philosophical, and science is none the wiser for it. The mechanics andthe chemistry of a machine are quite sufficient to account for it, plusthe man behind it. To the physics and chemistry of a living body, we arecompelled to add some intangible, unknowable principle or tendency thatphysics and chemistry cannot disclose or define. One hesitates to makesuch 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, theirashes, and to the air and the light for their imponderable, --theircarbon and their energy, --but what makes the tree, and makes one treediffer from another? Has the career of life upon this globe, theunfolding of the evolutionary process, been accounted for when you havenamed all the physical and material elements and processes which itinvolves? We take refuge in the phrase "the nature of things, " but thenature of things evidently embraces something not dreamed of in ourscience. 

VII

It is reported that a French scientist has discovered the secret of theglow-worm's light. Of course it is a chemical reaction, --what else couldit be?--but it is a chemical reaction in a vital process. Our mental andspiritual life--our emotions of art, poetry, religion--are inseparablefrom physical processes in the brain and the nervous system; but isthat their final explanation? The sunlight has little effect on awithered leaf, but see what effect it has upon the green leaf upon thetree! The sunlight is the same, but it falls upon a new force or potencyin the chlorophyll of the leaf, --a bit of chemistry there inspired bylife, --and the heat of the sun is stored up in the carbon or woodytissues of the plant or tree, to be given out again in our stoves orfireplaces. And behold how much more of the solar heat is stored up inone kind of a tree than in certain other kinds, --how much in thehickory, oak, maple, and how little comparatively in the pine, spruce, linden, --all through the magic of something in the leaf, or shall we sayof the spirit of the tree? If the laws of matter and force alone accountfor the living organism, if we do not have to think of something thatorganizes, then how do we account for the marvelous diversity of livingforms, and their still more marvelous power of adaptation to changedconditions, since the laws of matter and force are the same everywhere?Science can deal only with the mechanism and chemistry of life, not withits essence; that which sets up the new activity in matter that we callvital is beyond its analysis. It is hard to believe that we have toldthe whole truth about a living body when we have enumerated all itschemical and mechanical activities. It is by such enumeration that wedescribe a watch, or a steam-engine, or any other piece of machinery. Describe I say, but such description does not account for the watch ortell us its full significance. To do this, we must include thewatchmaker, and the world of mind and ideas amid which he lives. Now, ina living machine, the machine and the maker are one. The watch isperpetually self-wound and self-regulated and self-repaired. It is madeup of millions of other little watches, the cells, all working togetherfor one common end and ticking out the seconds and minutes of life withunfailing regularity. Unlike the watch we carry in our pockets, if wetake it apart so as to stop its ticking, it can never be put togetheragain. It has not merely stopped; it is dead. 

The late William Keith Brooks, of Johns Hopkins University, said inopposition to Huxley that he held to the "old-fashioned conviction thatliving things do in some way, and in some degree, control or conditioninorganic nature; that they hold their own by setting the mechanicalproperties of matter in opposition to each other, and that this is theirmost notable and distinctive characteristic. " And yet, he said, to thinkof the living world as "anything but natural" is impossible. 

VIII

Life seems to beget a new kind of chemistry, the same elements behave sodifferently when they are drawn into the life circuit from what theydid before. Carbon, for instance, enters into hundreds of new compoundsin the organic world that are unknown in the inorganic world. I am thusspeaking of life as if it were something, some force or agent, thatantedates its material manifestations, whereas in the eyes of sciencethere is no separation of the one from the other. In an explosion thereis 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 machinerygoing, we cannot make such a distinction. The spark and the powder areone; the gun primes and fires itself; the battery is perpetuallyself-charged; the lamp is self-trimmed and self-lit. 

Sir Oliver Lodge is apparently so impressed with some suchconsiderations that he spiritualizes life, and makes it some mysteriousentity in itself, existing apart from the matter which it animates anduses; not a source of energy but a timer and releaser of energy. HenriBergson, in his "Creative Evolution, " expounds a similar philosophy oflife. 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 thanin terms of physical science. The view falls in better with ouranthropomorphic tendencies. It appeals to the imagination and to ourmyth-making aptitudes. It gives a dramatic interest to the question. With Bergson we see life struggling with matter, seeking to overcome itsobduracy, compromising with it, taking a half-loaf when it cannot get awhole one; we see evolution as the unfolding of a vast drama acted uponthe stage of geologic time. Creation becomes a perpetual process, thecreative energy an ever-present and familiar fact. Bergson's book is awonderful addition to the literature of science and of philosophy. Thepoet, the dreamer, the mystic, in each of us takes heart at Bergson'sbeautiful philosophy; it seems like a part of life; it goes so well withliving things. As James said, it is like the light of the morning andthe singing of birds; we glory in seeing the intellect humbled as hehumbles it. The concepts of science try our mettle. They do not appealto our humanity, or to our myth-making tendencies; they appeal to thepurely intellectual, impersonal force within us. Though all our godstotter and fall, science goes its way; though our hearts are chilled andour lives are orphaned, science cannot turn aside, or veil its light. Itdoes not temper the wind to the shorn lamb. 

Hence the scientific conception of the universe repels many people. Theyare not equal to it. To think of life as involved in the veryconstitution of matter itself is a much harder proposition than toconceive of it as Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge do, as an independentreality. The latter view gives the mind something more tangible to layhold of. Indeed, science gives the mind nothing to take hold of. Doesany 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; tryto think of him as being fathered and mothered by the mere mechanicaland chemical forces that we see at work in the rocks and soil underfoot, begotten by chemical affinity or the solar energy working as molecularphysic, and mothered by the warmth and moisture, by osmosis and thecolloid state--and all through the chance clashings and groupings of theirrational physical forces. Nothing is added to them, nothing guides orinspires them, nothing moves upon the face of the waters, nothingbreathes upon the insensate clay. The molecules or corpuscles of thefour principal elements--carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen--justhappened to come together in certain definite numbers, and in a certaindefinite order, and invented or built up that most marvelous thing inthe universe, the cell. The cells put their heads, or bodies, together, and built the tissues, the tissues formed the organs, the organs inconvention assembled organized themselves into the body, and behold! aman, a bird, or a tree!--as chance a happening as the juxtaposition ofthe grains of sand upon the shore, or the shape of the summer clouds inthe sky. 

Aristotle dwells upon the internal necessity. The teeth of an animalarise from necessity, he says; the animal must have them in order tolive. Yet it must have lived before it had them, else how would thenecessity arise? If the horns of an animal arise from the samenecessity, the changing conditions of its life begat the necessity; itslife problem became more and more complicated, till new tools arose tomeet new wants. But without some indwelling principle of development andprogress, how could the new wants arise? Spencer says this progress isthe result of the action and reaction between organisms and theirchanging environment. But you must first get your organism before theenvironment can work its effects, and you must have something in theorganism that organizes and reacts from the environment. We see theagents he names astronomic, geologic, meteorologic, having their effectsupon inanimate objects as well, but they do not start the process ofdevelopment in them; they change a stone, but do not transform it intoan organism. The chemist can take the living body apart as surely as thewatchmaker can take a watch apart, but he cannot put the parts togetheragain so that life will reappear, as the watchmaker can restore thetime-keeping power of the watch. The watch is a mere mechanicalcontrivance with parts fitted to parts externally, while the living bodyis a mechanical and chemical contrivance, with parts blended with partsinternally, so to speak, and acting together through sympathy, and notmerely by mechanical adjustment. Do we not have to think of someorganizing agent embracing and controlling all the parts, and integralin each of them, making a vital bond instead of a mechanical one?

There are degrees of vitality in living things, whereas there are onlydegrees of complexity and delicacy and efficiency in mechanicalcontrivances. One watch differs from another in the perfection of itsworks, but not as two living bodies with precisely similar structurediffer from each other in their hold upon life, or in their measure ofvitality. No analysis possible to science could show any difference inthe chemistry and physics of two persons of whom one would withstandhardships and diseases that would kill the other, or with whom one wouldhave the gift of long life and the other not. Machines differ from oneanother quantitatively--more or less efficiency; a living body differsfrom a machine qualitatively--its efficiency is of a different order;its unity is of a different order; its complexity is of a differentorder; the interdependence of its parts is of a different order. Yetwhat a parallel there is between a machine and a living body! Both arerun by external forces or agents, solar energy in one appliedmechanically from without; in the other applied vitally from within;both suffer from the wear and tear of time and from abuse, but one isself-repaired and the other powerless in this respect--two machines withthe same treatment running the same number of years, but two men withthe same treatment running a very unequal number of years. Machines ofthe same kind differ in durability, men differ in powers of endurance; aman can "screw up his courage, " but a machine has no courage to screwup. Science may be unable to see any difference between vital mechanics, vital chemistry, and the chemics and mechanics of inorganic bodies--itsanalysis reveals no difference; but that there is a difference asbetween two different orders, all men see and feel. 

Science cannot deal with fundamental questions. Only philosophy can dothis. Science is only a tool or a key, and it can unlock only certainmaterial problems. It cannot appraise itself. It is not a judge but awitness. Problems of mind, of character, moral, æsthetic, literary, artistic problems, are not its sphere. It counts and weighs and measuresand analyzes, it traces relations, but it cannot appraise its ownresults. Science and religion come in conflict only when the latterseeks to deal with objective facts, and the former seeks to deal withsubjective ideas and emotions. On the question of miracle they clash, because religion is then dealing with natural phenomena and challengesscience. Philosophy offends science when it puts its own interpretationupon scientific facts. Science displeases literature when it dehumanizesnature and shows us irrefragable laws when we had looked for humanisticdivinities. 

XI

THE ARRIVAL OF THE FIT

In my youth I once heard the then well-known lecturer Starr King speakon "The Law of Disorder. " I have no recollection of the main thought ofhis discourse, but can see that it might have been upon the order andharmony that finally come out of the disharmonies of nature and of man. The whole universe goes blundering on, but surely arrives. Collisionsand dispersions in the heavens above, and failure and destruction amongliving things on the earth below, yet here we all are in a world good tobe 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 oneloses the other gains. 

It has been aptly said that while Darwin's theory of natural selectionmay account for the survival of the fittest, it does not account for thearrival of the fittest. The arrival of the fittest, sooner or later, seems in some way guaranteed by tendencies that are beyond thehit-and-miss method of natural selection. 

When we look back over the course of organic evolution, we see theunfolding of a great drama, or tragedy, in which, for millions uponmillions of years the sole actors are low and all but brainless formsof life, devouring and devoured, in the old seas. We see, during othermillions upon millions of years, a savage carnival of huge bestial formsupon the land, amphibian monsters and dragons of the land and air, devouring and being devoured, a riot of blood and carnage. We see theshifting of land and sea, the folding and crumpling of the earth'scrust, the rise of mountains, the engulfing of forests, a vastdestruction of life, immense numbers of animal forms becoming extinctthrough inability to adapt themselves to new conditions, or from othercauses. We see creatures, half beast, half bird, or half dragon, halffish; we see the evolutionary process thwarted or delayed apparently bythe hardening or fixing of its own forms. We see it groping its way likea blind man, and experimenting with this device and with that, fumbling, awkward, ineffectual, trying magnitude of body and physical strengthfirst, and then shifting the emphasis to size of brain and delicacy andcomplexity of nerve-organization, pushing on but gropingly, learningonly by experience, regardless of pain and waste and suffering; wholeraces of sentient beings swept away by some terrestrial cataclysm, as atthe end of Palæozoic 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, theproduction of pain as much a part of the scheme of things as theproduction of pleasure; the creative impulse feeling its way through themollusk to the fish, and through the fish to the amphibian and thereptile, through the reptile to the mammal, and through the mammal tothe anthropoid apes, and through the apes to man, then through the rudeand savage races of man, the long-jawed, small-brained, Pliocene man, hairy and savage, to the cave-dwellers and stone-implement man ofPleistocene times, and so on to our rude ancestors whom we see dimly atthe dawn of history, and thus rapidly upward to the European man of ourown era. What a record! What savagery, what thwartings and delays, whatcarnage and suffering, what an absence of all that we mean byintelligent planning and oversight, of love, of fatherhood! Just a clashof forces, the battle to the strong and the race to the fleet. 

It is hard to believe that the course of organic evolution would haveeventuated in man and the other higher forms of life without someguiding principle; yet it is equally difficult to believe that thecourse of any guiding intelligence down the ages would have been strewnwith so many failures and monstrosities, so much waste and suffering anddelay. Man has not been specially favored by one force or element innature. Behold the enemies that beset him without and within, and thatare armed for his destruction! The intelligence that appears to pervadethe organic world, and that reaches its conscious expression in thebrain of man, is just as manifest in all the forms of animals and plantsthat are inimical to him, in all his natural enemies, --venomous snakesand beasts of prey, and insect pests, --as in anything else. Nature is aswise and solicitous for rats and mice as for men. In fact, she hasendowed many of the lower creatures with physical powers that she hasdenied 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 onmodern business-efficiency principles. There is no question of time, orof profit, of solvency or insolvency. The profit-and-loss account in thelong run always balances. In our astronomic age there are probablyvastly more dead suns and planets strewing the depths of sidereal spacethan there are living suns and planets. But in some earlier period inthe cycle of time the reverse may have been true, or it may be true insome future period. 

There is economy of effort in the individual organism, but not in theorganic series, at least from the human point of view. During thebiologic ages there have been a vast number of animal forms, great andsmall, and are still, that had no relation to man, that were not in hisline of descent, and played no part in his evolution. During thatcarnival of monstrous and gigantic forms in Mesozoic time the ancestorof man was probably some small and insignificant creature whose life wasconstantly imperiled by the huge beasts about it. That it survived atall in the clash of forces, bestial and elemental, during those earlyages, is one of the wonders of time. The drama or tragedy of evolutionhas had many actors, some of them fearful and terrible to look upon, whohave played their parts and passed off the stage, as if the sole purposewas the entertainment of some unseen spectator. When we reach humanhistory, what wasted effort, what failures, what blind groping, whatfutile undertakings!--war, famine, pestilence, delaying progress orbringing to naught the wisdom of generations of men! Those who live inthis age are witnessing in the terrible European war something analogousto the blind, wasteful fury of the elemental forces; millions of men whonever saw one another, and who have not the shadow of a quarrel, engagein a life-and-death struggle, armed with all the aids that centuries ofscience and civilization can give them--a tragedy that darkens the veryheavens and makes a mockery of all our age-old gospel of peace and goodwill to men. It is a catastrophe on a scale with the cataclysms ofgeologic time when whole races disappeared and the face of continentswas changed. It seems that men in the aggregate, with all their scienceand religion, are no more exempt from the operation of cosmic laws thanare the stocks and stones. Each party to this gigantic struggle declaresthat he is in it against his will; the fate that rules in the solarsystem seems to have them all in its grip; the working of forces andtendencies for which no man was responsible seems to have brought itabout. Social communities grow in grace and good-fellowship, butgovernments in their relations to one another, and often in relation totheir own subjects, are still barbarous. Men become christianized, butman is still a heathen, the victim of savage instincts. In this struggleone of the most admirable and efficient of nations, and one of the mostsolicitous for the lives and well-being of its citizens, is suddenlyseized with a fury of destruction, hurling its soldiers to death as ifthey were only the waste of the fields, and trampling down other peopleswhose geographic position placed them in their way as if they weremerely vermin, throwing international morality to the winds, lookingupon treaties as "scraps of paper, " regarding themselves as the salt ofthe earth, the chosen of the Lord, appropriating the Supreme Being asdid the colossal egotism of old Israel, and quickly getting down to thebasic principle of savage life--that might makes right. 

Little wonder that the good people are asking, Have we lost faith? Wemay or we may not have lost faith, but can we not see that our faithdoes not give us a key to the problem? Our faith is founded on the oldprescientific conception of a universe in which good and evil arestruggling with each other, with a Supreme Being aiding and abetting thegood. We fail to appreciate that the cosmic laws are no respecters ofpersons. Emerson says there is no god dare wrong a worm, but worms darewrong one another, and there is no god dare take sides with either. Thetides in the affairs of men are as little subject to human control asthe tides of the sea and the air. We may fix the blame of the Europeanwar upon this government or upon that, but race antagonisms andgeographical position are not matters of choice. An island empire, likeEngland, is bound to be jealous of all rivals upon the sea, because hervery life, when nations clash, depends upon her control of it; and aninland empire, like Germany, is bound to grow restless under thepressure of contiguous states of other races. A vast empire, likeRussia, is always in danger of falling apart by its own weight. It isfused and consolidated by a turn of events that arouse the patrioticemotions of the whole people and unite them in a common enthusiasm. 

The evolution of nations is attended by the same contingencies, the samelaw of probability, the same law of the survival of the fit, as areorganic bodies. I say the survival of the fit; there are degrees offitness in the scale of life; the fit survive, and the fittest lead anddominate, as did the reptiles in Mesozoic time, and the mammals inTertiary time. Among the mammals man is dominant because he is thefittest. Nations break up or become extinct when they are no longer fit, or equal to the exigencies of the struggles of life. The Roman Empirewould still exist if it had been entirely fit. The causes of itsunfitness form a long and intricate problem. Germany of to-day evidentlylooks upon herself as the dominant nation, the one fittest to survive, and she has committed herself to the desperate struggle of justifyingher self-estimate. She tramples down weaker nations as we do the stubbleof the fields. She would plough and harrow the world to plant herPrussian _Kultur_. This _Kultur_ is a mighty good product, but weoutside of its pale think that French _Kultur_, and English _Kultur_, and American _Kultur_ are good products also, and equally fit tosurvive. We naturally object to being ploughed under. That Russian_Kultur_ has so far proved itself a vastly inferior product cannot bedoubted, but the evolutionary processes will in time bring a finer andhigher Russia out of this vast weltering and fermenting mass ofhumanity. In all these things impersonal laws and forces are at work, and the balance of power, if temporarily disturbed, is bound, sooner orlater, 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 blindclashing of opposing tendencies among living forms, --a universe thatseems run entirely on the trial-and-error principle, --evolution has gonesteadily forward, a certain order and stability has been reached in theworld of inert bodies and forces, and myriads of forms of wonderfulfitness and beauty have been reached in the organic realm. Just as thewater-system and the weather-system of the globe have worked themselvesout on the hit-and-miss plan, but not without serious defects, --much toomuch water and heat at a few places, and much too little at a fewothers, --so the organic impulse, warred upon by the blind inorganicelements and preyed upon by the forms it gave rise to, has worked itselfout and peopled the world as we see it peopled to-day--not with formsaltogether admirable and lovely from our point of view, but so from thepoint of view of the whole. The forests get themselves planted by thego-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 fitnessand system. The waters gather themselves together in great bodies andbreathe salubrity and fertility upon the land. 

A certain order and reasonableness emerges from the chaos andcross-purposes. There are harmony and coöperation among the elementalforces, as well as strife and antagonism. Life gets on, for all gropingand blundering. There is the inherent variability of living forms tobegin with--the primordial push toward the development from withinwhich, so far as we can see, is not fortuitous, but predestined; andthere is the stream of influences from without, constantly playing uponand modifying the organism and taken advantage of by it. 

The essence of life is in adaptability; it goes into partnership withthe forces and conditions that surround it. It is this trait which leadsthe teleological philosopher to celebrate the fitness of the environmentwhen its fitness is a foregone conclusion. Shall we praise the fitnessof the air for breathing, or of the water for drinking, or of the windsfor filling our sails? If we cannot say explicitly, without speakingfrom our anthropomorphism, that there is a guiding intelligence in theevolution of living forms, we can at least say, I think, that thestruggle for life is favored by the very constitution of the universeand that man in some inscrutable way was potential in the fiery nebulaitself. 

XII

THE NATURALIST'S VIEW OF LIFE

I

William James said that one of the privileges of a philosopher was tocontradict other philosophers. I may add in the same spirit that one ofthe fatalities of many philosophers is, sooner or later, to contradictthemselves. I do not know that James ever contradicted himself, but Ihave little doubt that a critical examination of his works would showthat he sometimes did so; I remember that he said he often had troubleto make both ends of his philosophy meet. Any man who seeks to compassany 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 ofscience seldom has any such trouble with his problems; he usually knowswhat is the matter and forthwith seeks to remedy it. But the philosopherworks with a much more intangible and elusive material, and is lucky ifhe is ever aware when both ends fail to meet. 

I have often wondered if Darwin, who was a great philosopher as well asa great man of science, saw or felt the contradiction between his theoryof the origin of species through natural selection working uponfortuitous variations, and his statement, made in his old age, that hecould not look upon man, with all his wonderful powers, as the result ofmere chance. The result of chance man certainly is--is he not?--as areall other forms of life, if evolution is a mere mechanical process setgoing and kept going by the hit-and-miss action of the environment uponthe organism, or by the struggle for existence. If evolution involves nointelligence in nature, no guiding or animating principle, then is notman an accidental outcome of the blind clashing and jolting of thematerial forces, as much so as the great stone face in the rocks whichHawthorne used so suggestively in one of his stories?

I have wondered if Huxley was aware that both ends of his argument didnot quite meet when he contended for the truth of determinism--thatthere is and can be no free or spontaneous volition; and at the sametime set man apart from the cosmic order, and represented him as workinghis will upon it, crossing and reversing its processes. In one of hisearlier essays, Huxley said that to the student of living things, ascontrasted with the student of inert matter, the aspect of nature isreversed. "In living matter, incessant, and so far as we know, spontaneous, change is the rule, rest the exception, the anomaly, to beaccounted for. Living things have no inertia, and tend to noequilibrium, " except the equilibrium of death. This is good vitalisticdoctrine, as far as it goes, yet Huxley saw no difference between thematter of life and other matter, except in the manner in which the atomsare aggregated. Probably the only difference between a diamond and apiece of charcoal, or between a pearl and an oyster-shell, is the mannerin which the atoms are aggregated; but that the secret of life is in thepeculiar compounding of the atoms or molecules--a spatial arrangement ofthem--is a harder proposition. It seems to me also that Haeckel involveshimself in obvious contradictions when he ascribes will, sensation, inclination, dislike, though of a low order, to the atoms of matter; infact, 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 ofman. 

A philosopher cannot well afford to assume the air of lofty indifferencethat the poet Whitman does when he asks, "Do I contradict myself? Verywell, then, I contradict myself"; but he may take comfort in the thoughtthat contradictions are often only apparent, and not real, as when twomen 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 thesame terrestrial centre. The logic of the earth completely contradictsthe ideas we draw from our experience with other globes, both ourartificial globes and the globes in the forms of the sun and the moonthat 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, weare on the top side. I fancy the whole truth of any of the greatproblems, if we could see it, would reconcile all our half-truths, allthe contradictions in our philosophy. 

In considering this problem of the mystery of living things, I have hada good deal of trouble in trying to make my inborn idealism go hand inhand with my inborn naturalism; but I am not certain that there is anyreal break or contradiction between them, only a surface one, and thatdeeper down the strata still unite them. Life seems beyond the capacityof inorganic nature to produce; and yet here is life in its myriadforms, here is the body and mind of man, and here is the world ofinanimate matter out of which all living beings arise, and into whichthey sooner or later return; and we must either introduce a newprinciple to account for it all, or else hold to the idea that what isis natural--a legitimate outcome of the universal laws and processesthat have been operating through all time. This last is the point ofview of the present chapter, --the point of view of naturalism; notstrictly the scientific view which aims to explain all life phenomena interms of exact experimental science, but the larger, freer view of theopen-air naturalist and literary philosopher. I cannot get rid of, orhold in abeyance, my inevitable idealism, if I would; neither can I doviolence to my equally inevitable naturalism, but may I not hope to makethe face of my naturalism beam with the light of the ideal--the lightthat 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, whichin inert matter is automatic and fateful, and which in living matter isprophetic and indeterminate; the course of one down the geologic ages, seeking only a mechanical repose, being marked by collisions anddisruptions; the other in its course down the biologic ages seeking avital and unstable repose, being marked by pain, failure, carnage, extinction, and ceaseless struggle with the physical order upon which itdepends. Man has taken his chances in the clash of blind matter, and inthe warfare of living forms. He has been the pet of no god, the favoriteof no power on earth or in heaven. He is one of the fruits of the greatcosmic tree, and is subject to the same hazards and failures as thefruit of all other trees. The frosts may nip him in the bud, the stormsbeat him down, foes of earth and air prey upon him, and hostileinfluences from all sides impede or mar him. The very forces thatuphold him and furnish him his armory of tools and of power, willdestroy him the moment he is off his guard. He is like the trainer ofwild beasts who, at his peril, for one instant relaxes his mastery overthem. Gravity, electricity, fire, flood, hurricane, will crush orconsume him if his hand is unsteady or his wits tardy. Nature has dealtwith him upon the same terms as with all other forms of life. She hasshown 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 asmake up theirs, and the same make up theirs as are the constituents ofthe insensate rocks, soils, and clouds. The same elements, the sameatoms and molecules, but a different order; the same solar energy, butworking to other ends; the same life principle but lifted to a higherplane. How can we separate man from the total system of things, settinghim upon one side and them upon another, making the relation of the twomechanical or accidental? It is only in thought, or in obedience to somecreed or philosophy, that we do it. In life, in action, we unconsciouslyrecognize ourselves as a part of Nature. Our success and well-beingdepend upon the closeness and spontaneousness of the relation. 

If all this is interpreted to mean that life, that the mind and soul ofman, are of material origin, science does not shrink from the inference. Only the inference demands a newer and higher conception of matter--theconception that Tyndall expressed when he wrote the word with a capitalM, and declared that Matter was "at bottom essentially mystical andtranscendental"; that Goethe expressed when he called matter "the livinggarment of God"; and that Whitman expressed when he said that the souland the body were one. The materialism of the great seers and prophetsof science who penetrate into the true inwardness of matter, who seethrough the veil of its gross obstructive forms and behold it translatedinto pure energy, need disturb no one. 

In our religious culture we have beggared matter that we might exaltspirit; we have bankrupted earth that we might enrich heaven; we havedebased the body that we might glorify the soul. But science has changedall this. Mankind can never again rest in the old crude dualism. TheDevil 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 appearswhen we try to think of a being as a part of Nature, having his genesisin her material forces, who is yet able to master and direct Nature, reversing her processes and defeating her ends, opposing his will to herfatalism, his mercy to her cruelty--in short, a being who thinks, dreams, aspires, loves truth, justice, goodness, and sits in judgmentupon the very gods he worships. Must he not bring a new force, an alienpower? Can a part be greater than the whole? Can the psychic dominatethe physical out of which it came? Again we have only to enlarge ourconception of the physical--the natural--or make our faith measure up tothe demands of reason. Our reason demands that the natural order beall-inclusive. Can our faith in the divinity of matter measure up tothis standard? Not till we free ourselves from the inherited prejudiceswhich have grown up from our everyday struggles with gross matter. Wemust follow the guidance of science till we penetrate this husk and seeits real mystical and transcendental character, as Tyndall did. 

When we have followed matter from mass to molecule, from molecule toatom, from atom to electron, and seen it in effect dematerialized, --seenit in its fourth or ethereal, I had almost said spiritual, state, --whenwe have grasped the wonder of radio-activity, and the atomictransformations that attend it, we shall have a conception of thepotencies and possibilities of matter that robs scientific materialismof most of its ugliness. Of course, no deductions of science can satisfyour longings for something kindred to our own spirits in the universe. But neither our telescopes nor our microscopes reveal such a reality. Isthis longing only the result of our inevitable anthropomorphism, or isit the evidence of things unseen, the substance of things hoped for, theprophecy of our kinship with the farthest star? Can soul arise out of asoulless universe?

Though the secret of life is under our feet, yet how strange andmysterious it seems! It draws our attention away from matter. It arisesamong the inorganic elements like a visitant from another sphere. It isa new thing in the world. Consciousness is a new thing, yet Huxley makesit one of his trinity of realities--matter, energy, and consciousness. We are so immersed in these realities that we do not see the divinitythey embody. We call that sacred and divine which is far off andunattainable. Life and mind are so impossible of explanation in terms ofmatter and energy, that it is not to be wondered at that mankind has solong looked upon their appearance upon this earth as a miraculous event. But until science opened our eyes we did not know that the celestial andthe terrestrial are one, and that we are already in the heavens amongthe stars. When we emancipate ourselves from the bondage of wont anduse, and see with clear vision our relations to the Cosmos, all ourideas of materialism and spiritualism are made over, and we see how thetwo are one; how life and death play into each other's hands, and howthe whole truth of things cannot be compassed by any number of finiteminds. 

III

When we are bold enough to ask the question, Is life an addition tomatter or an evolution from matter? how all these extra-scientifictheories about life as a separate entity wilt and fade away! If we knowanything about the ways of creative energy, we know that they are not asour ways; we know its processes bear no analogy to the linear andexternal doings of man. Creative energy works from within; it identifiesitself with, and is inseparable from, the element in which it works. Iknow 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 tointroduce things, when we begin to separate the two orders, the vitaland the material, or, as Bergson says, when we begin to think of thingscreated, and of a thing that creates, we are not far from the state ofmind of our childhood, and of the childhood of the race. We are not farfrom 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 forevolution; because here we are, here is this amazing world of life aboutus, and here it goes on through the action and interaction of purelyphysical 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 globereveal the fact that life appeared upon a cooling planet when thetemperature was suitable, and when its basic elements, water and carbondioxide, were at hand. How it began, whether through insensible changesin the activities of inert matter, lasting whole geologic ages, or by asudden transformation at many points on the earth's surface, we cannever know. But science can see no reason for believing that itsbeginning was other than natural; it was inevitable from theconstitution of matter itself. Moreover, since the law of evolutionseems of universal application, and affords the key to more greatproblems than any other generalization of the human mind, one would sayon _a priori_ grounds that life is an evolution, that its genesis is tobe sought in the inherent capacities and potentialities of matteritself. How else could it come? Science cannot go outside of matter andits laws for an explanation of any phenomena that appear in matter. Itgoes inside of matter instead, and in its mysterious molecularattractions and repulsions, in the whirl and dance of the atoms andelectrons, in their emanations and transformations, in their amazingpotencies and activities, sees, or seems to see, the secret of theorigin of life itself. But this view is distasteful to a large number ofthinking persons. Many would call it frank materialism, and declarethat it is utterly inadequate to supply the spiritual and idealbackground which is the strength and solace of our human life. 

IV

The lay mind can hardly appreciate the necessity under which the man ofscience feels to account for all the phenomena of life in terms of thenatural order. To the scientist the universe is complete in itself. Hecan 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 subtleforces and influences, bind all things, living and dead, into a cosmicunity. Creation is one, and that one is symbolized by the sphere whichrests forever on itself, which is whole at every point, which holds allforms, which reconciles all contradictions, which has no beginning andno ending, which has no upper and no under, and all of whose lines arefluid and continuous. The disruptions and antagonisms which we fancy wesee are only the result of our limited vision; nature is not at war withitself; there is no room or need for miracle; there is no outside to theuniverse, because there are no bounds to matter or spirit; all isinside; deep beneath deep, height above height, and this mystery andmiracle that we call life must arise out of the natural order in thecourse of time as inevitably as the dew forms and the rain falls. Whenthe rains and the dews and the snows cease to fall, --a time whichscience predicts, --then life, as we know it, must inevitably vanish fromthe earth. Human life is a physical phenomenon, and though it involves, as we believe, a psychic or non-physical principle, it is still notexempt from the operation of the universal physical laws. It came bythem or through them, and it must go by them or through them. 

The rigidly scientific mind, impressed with all these things as the laymind cannot be, used to the searching laboratory methods, and familiarwith the phenomenon of life in its very roots, as it were, dealing withthe wonders of chemical compounds, and the forces that lurk in moleculesand atoms, seeing in the cosmic universe, and in the evolution of theearth, only the operation of mechanical and chemical principles; seeingthe irrefragable law of the correlation and the conservation of forces;tracing consciousness and all our changes in mental states to changes inthe brain substance; drilled in methods of proof by experimentation;knowing that the same number of ultimate atoms may be so combined ormarried as to produce compounds that differ as radically as alcohol andether, --conversant with all these things, and more, I say, --the strictlyscientific mind falls naturally and inevitably into the mechanisticconception of all life phenomena. 

Science traces the chain of cause and effect everywhere and finds nobreak. It follows down animal life till it merges in the vegetable, though it cannot put its finger or its microscope on the point where oneends and the other begins. It finds forms that partake of thecharacteristics of both. It is reasonable to expect that the vegetablemerges into the mineral by the same insensible degrees, and that the onebecomes the other without any real discontinuity. The change, if we maycall it such, probably takes place in the interior world of matter amongthe primordial atoms, where only the imagination can penetrate. In thatsleep of the ultimate corpuscle, what dreams may come, what miracles maybe wrought, what transformations take place! When I try to think of lifeas a mode of motion in matter, I seem to see the particles in a mysticdance, a whirling maze of motions, the infinitely little people takinghold of hands, changing partners, facing this way and that, doing allsorts of impossible things, like jumping down one another's throats, oroccupying one another's bodies, thrilled and vibrating at aninconceivable rate. 

The theological solution of this problem of life fails more and more tosatisfy thinking men of to-day. Living things are natural phenomena, andwe 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 theuniverse is a universe, a oneness; that its laws are continuous. Wefollow the chemistry of it to the farthest stars and there is no seriousbreak or exception; it is all of one stuff. We follow the mechanics ofit 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 theuniverse; indeed, we have no proof that there is any biology anywhereelse. But if there is, it must be similar to our own. There is only onekind of electricity (though two phases of it), only one kind of lightand heat, one kind of chemical affinity, in the universe; and hence onlyone kind of life. Looked at in its relation to the whole, life appearslike a transient phenomenon of matter. I will not say accidental; itseems inseparably bound up with the cosmic processes, but, I may say, fugitive, superficial, circumscribed. Life comes and goes; it penetratesbut a little way into the earth; it is confined to a certain range oftemperature. Beyond a certain degree of cold, on the one hand, it doesnot appear; and beyond a certain degree of heat, on the other, it is cutoff. Without water or moisture, it ceases; and without air, it is not. It has evidently disappeared from the moon, and probably from theinferior planets, and it is doubtful if it has yet appeared on any ofthe superior planets, save Mars. 

Life comes to matter as the flowers come in the spring, --when the timeis ripe for it, --and it disappears when the time is over-ripe. Manappears in due course and has his little day upon the earth, but thatday must as surely come to an end. Yet can we conceive of the end of thephysical order? the end of gravity? or of cohesion? The air maydisappear, 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 itstrue inwardness, and purges it of the coarse and brutal qualities withwhich, in our practical lives, it is associated. It has its inner worldof activities and possibilities of which our senses give us no hint. This inner world of molecules and atoms and electrons, thrilled andvibrating with energy, the infinitely little, the almost infinitelyrapid, in the bosom of the infinitely vast and distant andautomatic--what a revelation it all is! what a glimpse into "Nature'sinfinite book of secrecy"!

Our senses reveal to us but one kind of motion--mass motion--the changeof place of visible bodies. But there is another motion in all matterwhich our senses do not reveal to us as motion--molecular vibration, orthe thrill of the atoms. At the heart of the most massive rock thiswhirl of the atoms or corpuscles is going on. If our ears were fineenough to hear it, probably every rock and granite monument would sing, as did Memnon, when the sun shone upon it. This molecular vibration isrevealed to us as heat, light, sound, electricity. Heat is only a modeof this invisible motion of the particles of matter. Mass motion isquickly converted into this molecular motion when two bodies strike eachother. May not life itself be the outcome of a peculiar whirl of theultimate atoms of matter?

Says Professor Gotch, as quoted by J. Arthur Thomson in his"Introduction to Science": "To the thought of a scientific mind theuniverse with all its suns and worlds is throughout one seething welterof modes of motion, playing in space, playing in ether, playing in allexisting matter, playing in all living things, playing, therefore, inourselves. " Physical science, as Professor Thomson says, leads us fromour static way of looking at things to the dynamic way. It teaches us toregard the atom, not as a fixed and motionless structure, like thebricks in a wall, but as a centre of ever-moving energy; it sees thewhole universe is in a state of perpetual flux, a flowing stream ofcreative energy out of which life arises as one of the manifestations ofthis energy. 

When we have learned all that science can tell us about the earth, is itnot more rather than less wonderful? When we know all it can tell usabout the heavens above, or about the sea, or about our own bodies, orabout a flower, or a bird, or a tree, or a cloud, are they lessbeautiful and wonderful? The mysteries of generation, of inheritance, ofcell life, are rather enhanced by science. 

VI

When the man of science seeks to understand and explain the world inwhich we live, he guards himself against seeing double, or seeing twoworlds instead of one, as our unscientific fathers did--an immaterial orspiritual world surrounding and interpenetrating the physical world, orthe supernatural enveloping and directing the natural. He sees but oneworld, and that a world complete in itself; surrounded, it is true, byinvisible forces, and holding immeasured and immeasurable potencies; avastly more complex and wonderful world than our fathers ever dreamedof; a fruit, as it were, of the great sidereal tree, bound by natalbonds to myriads of other worlds, of one stuff with them, ahead orbehind them in its ripening, but still complete in itself, needing nomiracle to explain it, no spirits or demons to account for itsprocesses, not even its vital processes. 

In the light of what he knows of the past history of the earth, the manof science sees with his mind's eye the successive changes that havetaken place in it; he sees the globe a mass of incandescent matterrolling through space; he sees the crust cooling and hardening; he seesthe waters appear, the air and the soil appear, he sees the clouds beginto form and the rain to fall, he sees living things appear in thewaters, then upon the land, and in the air; he sees the two forms oflife arise, the vegetable and the animal, the latter standing upon theformer; he sees more and more complex forms of both vegetable and animalarise and cover the earth. They all appear in the course of the geologicages on the surface of the earth; they arise out of it; they are a partof it; they come naturally; no hand reaches down from heaven and placesthem there; they are not an addendum; they are not a sudden creation;they are an evolution; they were potential in the earth before theyarose out of it. The earth ripened, her crust mellowed, and thickened, her airs softened and cleared, her waters were purified, and in due timeher finer fruits were evolved, and, last of all, man arose. It was allone process. There was no miracle, no first day of creation; all weredays of creation. Brooded by the sun, the earth hatched her offspring;the promise and the potency of all terrestrial life was in the earthherself; her womb was fertile from the first. All that we call thespiritual, the divine, the celestial, were hers, because man is hers. Our religions and our philosophies and our literatures are hers; man isa part of the whole system of things; he is not an alien, nor anaccident, nor an interloper; he is here as the rains, the dews, theflowers, the rocks, the soil, the trees, are here. He appeared when thetime was ripe, and he will disappear when the time is over-ripe. He isof the same stuff as the ground he walks upon; there is no better stuffin the heavens above him, nor in the depths below him, than sticks tohis own ribs. The celestial and the terrestrial forces unite and worktogether in him, as in all other creatures. We cannot magnify manwithout magnifying the universe of which he is a part; and we cannotbelittle it without belittling him. 

Now we can turn all this about and look upon it as mankind looked uponit 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 canthink of the earth as the footstool of some god, or the sport of somedemon; we can people the earth and the air with innumerable spirits, high and low; we can think of life as something apart from matter. Butscience will not, cannot follow us; it cannot discredit the world it hasdisclosed--I had almost said, the world it has created. Science has madeus at home in the universe. It has visited the farthest stars with itstelescope and spectroscope, and finds we are all akin. It has soundedthe depths of matter with its analysis, and it finds nothing alien toour own bodies. It sees motion everywhere, motion within motion, transformation, metamorphosis everywhere, energy everywhere, currentsand counter-currents everywhere, ceaseless change everywhere; it findsnothing in the heavens more spiritual, more mysterious, more celestial, more godlike, than it finds upon this earth. This does not imply thatevolution may not have progressed farther upon other worlds, and givenrise to a higher order of intelligences than here; it only implies thatcreation is one, and that the same forces, the same elements andpossibilities, exist everywhere. 

VII

Give free rein to our anthropomorphic tendencies, and we fill the worldwith spirits, good and bad--bad in war, famine, pestilence, disease;good in all the events and fortunes that favor us. Early man did this onall occasions; he read his own hopes and fears and passions into all theoperations of nature. Our fathers did it in many things; good people ofour own time do it in exceptional instances, and credit any good fortuneto Providence. Men high in the intellectual and philosophical world, still invoke something antithetical to matter, to account for theappearance of life on the planet. 

It may be justly urged that the effect upon our habits of thought of thelong ages during which this process has been going on, leading us todifferentiate matter and spirit and look upon them as two oppositeentities, hindering or contending with each other, --one heavenly, theother earthly, one everlasting, the other perishable, one the supremegood, the other the seat and parent of all that is evil, --the cumulativeeffect of this habit of thought in the race-mind is, I say, not easilychanged or overcome. We still think, and probably many of us always willthink, 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 aregoing to get along without it, but we solace ourselves with the thoughtthat by and by, in some other, non-material world, we shall get alongwithout it, and experience a great expansion of life by reason of ouremancipation from it. Our practical life upon this planet is more orless a struggle with gross matter; our senses apprehend it coarsely; ofits true inwardness they tell us nothing; of the perpetual change andtransformation of energy going on in bodies about us they tell usnothing; of the wonders and potencies of matter as revealed inradio-activity, in the X-ray, in chemical affinity and polarity, theytell us nothing; of the all-pervasive ether, without which we could notsee or live at all, they tell us nothing. In fact we live and move andhave our being in a complex of forces and tendencies of which, even bythe aid of science, we but see as through a glass darkly. Of theeffluence of things, the emanations from the minds and bodies of ourfriends, and from other living forms about us, from the heavens aboveand from the earth below, our daily lives tell us nothing, any more thanour eyes tell us of the invisible rays in the sun's spectrum, or thanour ears tell us of the murmurs of the life-currents in growing things. Science alone unveils the hidden wonders and sleepless activities of theworld forces that play through us and about us. It alone brings theheavens near, and reveals the brotherhood or sisterhood of worlds. Italone makes man at home in the universe, and shows us how many friendlypowers wait upon him day and night. It alone shows him the glories andthe wonders of the voyage we are making upon this ship in the stellarinfinitude, and that, whatever the port, we shall still be on familiarground--we cannot get away from home. 

There is always an activity in inert matter that we little suspect. Seethe processes going on in the stratified rocks that suggest or parodythose of life. See the particles of silica that are diffused through thelimestone, hunting out each other and coming together in concretions andforming flint or chert nodules; or see them in the process ofpetrifaction slowly building up a tree of chalcedony or onyx in place ofa tree of wood, repeating every cell, every knot, every worm-hole--deadmatter copying exactly a form of living matter; or see the phenomenon ofcrystallization everywhere; see the solution of salt mimicking, asTyndall says, the architecture of Egypt, building up miniaturepyramids, terrace upon terrace, from base to apex, forming a series ofsteps like those up which the traveler in Egypt is dragged by hisguides! We can fancy, if we like, these infinitesimal structures builtby an invisible population which swarms among the constituent molecules, controlled and coerced by some invisible matter, says Tyndall. Thismight be called literature, or poetry, or religion, but it would not bescience; science says that these salt pyramids are the result of theplay of attraction and repulsion among the salt molecules themselves;that they are self-poised and self-quarried; it goes further than thatand says that the quality we call saltness is the result of a certaindefinite arrangement of their ultimate atoms of matter; that thequalities of things as they affect our senses--hardness, softness, sweetness, bitterness--are the result of molecular motion andcombination among the ultimate atoms. All these things seem on thethreshold of life, waiting in the antechamber, as it were; to-morrowthey will be life, or, as Tyndall says, "Incipient life, as it were, manifests itself throughout the whole of what is called inorganicnature. "

VIII

The question of the nature and origin of life is a kind of perpetualmotion question in biology. Life without antecedent life, so far ashuman experience goes, is an impossibility, and motion without previousmotion, is equally impossible. Yet, while science shows us that thislast is true among ponderable bodies where friction occurs, it is nottrue among the finer particles of matter, where friction does not exist. Here perpetual or spontaneous motion is the rule. The motions of themolecules of gases and liquids, and their vibrations in solids, arebeyond the reach of our unaided senses, yet they are unceasing. Byanalogy we may infer that while living bodies, as we know them, do notand cannot originate spontaneously, yet the movement that we call lifemay and probably does take place spontaneously in the ultimate particlesof matter. But can atomic energy be translated into the motion ofponderable bodies, or mass energy? In like manner can, or does, thispotential life of the world of atoms and electrons give rise toorganized living beings?

This distrust of the physical forces, or our disbelief in their abilityto give rise to life, is like a survival in us of the Calvinistic creedof our fathers. The world of inert matter is dead in trespasses and sinand must be born again before it can enter the kingdom of the organic. We must supplement the natural forces with the spiritual, or thesupernatural, to get life. The common or carnal nature, like the naturalman, must be converted, breathed upon by the non-natural or divine, before it can rise to the plane of life--the doctrine of Paul carriedinto the processes of nature. 

The scientific mind sees in nature an infinitely complex mechanismdirected to no special human ends, but working towards universal ends. It sees in the human body an infinite number of cell units building uptissues and organs, --muscles, nerves, bones, cartilage, --a livingmachine of infinite complexity; but what shapes and coördinates theparts, how the cells arose, how consciousness arose, how the mind isrelated to the body, how or why the body acts as a unit--on thesequestions science can throw no light. With all its mastery of the lawsof heredity, of cytology, and of embryology, it cannot tell why a man isa man, and a dog is a dog. No cell-analysis will give the secret; nochemical conjuring with the elements will reveal why in the one casethey 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 robsus of something--it is hard to say just what--that we do not willinglypart with; yet who can divest himself of this conception? And thescientific conception of the nature of life, hard and unfamiliar as itmay seem in its mere terms, is difficult to get away from. Life mustarise through the play and transformations of matter and energy that aretaking place all around us; though it seems a long and impossible roadfrom mere chemistry to the body and soul of man. But if life, with allthat has come out of it, did not come by way of matter and energy, bywhat way did it come? Must we have recourse to the so-calledsupernatural?--as Emerson's line puts it, --

 "When half-gods go, the gods arrive. "

When our traditional conception of matter as essentially vulgar andobstructive and the enemy of the spirit gives place to the newscientific conception of it as at bottom electrical and all-potent, wemay find the poet's great line come true, and that for a thing to benatural, is to be divine. For my own part, I do not see how we can getintelligence out of matter unless we postulate intelligence in matter. Any system of philosophy that sees in the organic world only afortuitous concourse of chemical atoms, repels me, though thecontradiction here implied is not easily cleared up. The theory of lifeas a chemical reaction and nothing more does not interest me, but I amattracted by that conception of life which, while binding it to thematerial order, sees in the organic more than the physics and chemistryof the inorganic--call it whatever name you will--vitalism, idealism, ordualism. 

In our religious moods, we may speak, as Theodore Parker did, of theuniverse as a "handful of dust which God enchants, " or we may speak ofit, as Goethe did, as "the living garment of God"; but as men ofscience we can see it only as a vast complex of forces, out of which manhas arisen, and of which he forms a part. We are not to forget that weare a part of it, and that the more we magnify ourselves, the more wemagnify it; that its glory is our glory, and our glory its glory, because we are its children. In some way utterly beyond the reach ofscience 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 theworld. As the globe has ripened and matured, life has matured; higherand higher forms--forms with larger and larger brains and more and morecomplex nerve mechanisms--have appeared. 

Physicists teach us that the evolution of the primaryelements--hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and thelike--takes place in a solar body as the body cools. As temperaturedecreases, one after another of the chemical elements makes itsappearance, the simpler elements appearing first, and the more complexcompounds appearing last, all apparently having their origin in somesimple parent element. It appears as if the evolution of life upon theglobe had followed the same law and had waited upon the secular coolingof the earth. 

Does not a man imply a cooler planet and a greater depth and refinementof soil than a dinosaur? Only after a certain housecleaning andpurification of the elements do higher forms appear; the vastaccumulation of Silurian limestone must have hastened the age of fishes. The age of reptiles waited for the clearing of the air of the burden ofcarbon dioxide. The age of mammals awaited the deepening and theenrichment of the soil and the stability of the earth's crust. Who knowsupon what physical conditions of the earth's elements the brain of manwas dependent? Its highest development has certainly taken place in atemperate climate. There can be little doubt that beyond a certain pointthe running-down of the earth-temperature will result in a running-downof life till it finally goes out. Life is confined to a very narrowrange of temperature. If we were to translate degrees into miles andrepresent the temperature of the hottest stars, which is put at 30, 000degrees, by a line 30, 000 miles long, then the part of the line markingthe limits of life would be approximately three hundred miles. 

Life does not appear in a hard, immobile, utterly inert world, but in aworld thrilling with energy and activity, a world of ceaselesstransformations of energy, of radio-activity, of electro-magneticcurrents, of perpetual motion in its ultimate particles, a world whoseheavens are at times hung with rainbows, curtained with tremulousshifting auroras, and veined and illumined with forked lightnings, aworld of rolling rivers and heaving seas, activity, physical andchemical, everywhere. On such a world life appeared, bringing no newelement or force, but setting up a new activity in matter, an activitythat tends to check and control the natural tendency to the dissipationand degradation of energy. The question is, Did it arise through sometransformation of the existing energy, or out of the preëxistingconditions, or was it supplementary to them, an addition from someunknown source? Was it a miraculous or a natural event? We shall answeraccording to our temperaments. 

One sees with his mind's eye this stream of energy, which we name thematerial universe, flowing down the endless cycles of time; at a certainpoint in its course, a change comes over its surface; what we call lifeappears, and assumes many forms; at a point farther along in its course, life disappears, and the eternal river flows on regardless, till, atsome other point, the same changes take place again. Life is inseparablefrom this river of energy, but it is not coextensive with it, either intime or in space. 

In midsummer what river-men call "the blossoming of the water" takesplace in the Hudson River; the water is full of minute vegetableorganisms; they are seasonal and temporary; they are born of themidsummer heats. By and by the water is clear again. Life in theuniverse seems as seasonal and fugitive as this blossoming of thewater. More and more does science hold us to the view of the unity ofnature--that the universe of life and matter and force is all natural orall supernatural, it matters little which you call it, but it is notboth. One need not go away from his own doorstep to find mysteriesenough to last him a lifetime, but he will find them in his own body, inthe ground upon which he stands, not less than in his mind, and in theinvisible forces that play around him. We may marvel how the delicatecolor and perfume of the flower could come by way of the root and stalkof the plant, or how the crude mussel could give birth to therainbow-tinted pearl, or how the precious metals and stones arise fromthe flux of the baser elements, or how the ugly worm wakes up and findsitself a winged creature of the air; yet we do not invoke thesupernatural to account for these things. 

It is certain that in the human scale of values the spirituality of manfar transcends anything in the animal or physical world, but that eventhat came by the road of evolution, is, indeed, the flowering of ruderand cruder powers and attributes of the life below us, I cannot for amoment doubt. Call it a transmutation or a metamorphosis, if you will;it is still within the domain of the natural. The spiritual always hasits root and genesis in the physical. We do not degrade the spiritual insuch a conception; we open our eyes to the spirituality of thephysical. And this is what science has always been doing and is doingmore and more--making us familiar with marvelous and transcendent powersthat hedge us about and enter into every act of our lives. The more weknow matter, the more we know mind; the more we know nature, the more weknow God; the more familiar we are with the earth forces, the moreintimate 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 notthinking of the far cry it is from man to inorganic nature? When we getdown to the lowest organism, is the gulf so impressive? Under thescrutiny of biologic science the gulf that separates the animal from thevegetable all but vanishes, and the two seem to run together. The chasmbetween the lowest vegetable forms and unorganized matter is evidently aslight affair. The state of unorganized protoplasm which Haeckel namedthe Monera, that precedes the development of that architect of life, thecell, can hardly be more than one remove from inert matter. Byinsensible molecular changes and transformations of energy, the miracleof living matter takes place. We can conceive of life arising onlythrough these minute avenues, or in the invisible, molecularconstitution of matter itself. What part the atoms and electrons, andthe energy they bear, play in it we shall never know. Even if we eversucceed in bringing the elements together in our laboratories so thatthere 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 allthe myriad forms of life that swarm upon the earth? How are we going toget man with physics and chemistry alone? How are we going to get thistremendous drama of evolution out of mere protoplasm from the bottom ofthe old geologic seas? Of course, only by making protoplasm creative, only by conceiving as potential in it all that we behold coming out ofit. We imagine it equal to the task we set before it; the task isaccomplished; therefore protoplasm was all-sufficient. I am notpostulating any extra-mundane power or influence; I am only stating thedifficulties which the idealist experiences when he tries to see life inits nature and origin as the scientific mind sees it. Animal life andvegetable life have a common physical basis in protoplasm, and all theirdifferent forms are mere aggregations of cells which are constitutedalike and behave alike in each, and yet in the one case they give riseto trees, and in the other they give rise to man. Science is powerlessto penetrate this mystery, and philosophy can only give its own elasticinterpretation. Why consciousness should be born of cell structure inone form of life and not in another, who shall tell us? Why matter inthe brain should think, and in the cabbage only grow, is a question. 

The naturalist has not the slightest doubt that the mind of man wasevolved from some order of animals below him that had less mind, andthat the mind of this order was evolved from that of a still lowerorder, and so on down the scale till we reach a point where the animaland vegetable meet and blend, and the vegetable mind, if we may call itsuch, passed into the animal, and still downward till the vegetable isevolved from the mineral. If to believe this is to be a monist, thenscience is monistic; it accepts the transformation or metamorphosis ofthe lower into the higher from the bottom of creation to the top, andwithout 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 roseout of the inorganic, we can form no mental image; the intellect cannotbridge 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 wemay call the vital force, physical force transformed and heightened, asjustifiably as we can postulate a chemical force latent in matter. Thechemical force underlies and is the basis of the vital force. There isno life without chemism, but there is chemism without life. 

We have to have a name for the action and reaction of the primaryelements upon one another and we call it chemical affinity; we have tohave a name for their behavior in building up organic bodies, and wecall it vitality or vitalism. 

The rigidly scientific man sees no need of the conception of a new formor kind of force; the physico-chemical forces as we see them in actionall about us are adequate to do the work, so that it seems like adispute about names. But my mind has to form a new conception of theseforces to bridge the chasm between the organic and the inorganic; not aquantitative but a qualitative change is demanded, like the change inthe animal mind to make it the human mind, an unfolding into a higherplane. 

Whether the evolution of the human mind from the animal was byinsensible gradations, or by a few sudden leaps, who knows? The animalbrain began to increase in size in Tertiary times, and seems to havedone so suddenly, but the geologic ages were so long that a change inone hundred thousand years would seem sudden. "The brains of somespecies increase one hundred per cent. " The mammal brain greatlyoutstripped the reptile brain. Was Nature getting ready for man?

The air begins at once to act chemically upon the blood in the lungs ofthe newly born, and the gastric juices to act chemically upon the foodas soon as there is any in the stomach of the newly born, and breathingand swallowing are both mechanical acts; but what is it that breathesand swallows, and profits by it? a machine?

Maybe the development of life, and its upward tendency toward higher andhigher 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 notalone, it is not like a single apple on a tree; there are many apples onthe 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 Créatrice, " 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 Cañon 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, Félix 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. Schäfer'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. 

Schäfer, 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'. ]