The Breath of Life

The Breath of Life

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Title: The Breath of Life
Author: John Burroughs
Release Date: May 7, 2006 [EBook #18335]
Language: English
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[Illustration]

THE

BREATH OF LIFE
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY JOHN BURROUGHS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published May 1915

PREFACE
As life nears its end with me, I find myself meditating more and more
upon the mystery of its nature and origin, yet without the least hope
that I can find out the ways of the Eternal in this or in any other world.
In these studies I fancy I am about as far from mastering the mystery as
the ant which I saw this morning industriously exploring a small
section of the garden walk is from getting a clear idea of the geography
of the North American Continent. But the ant was occupied and was
apparently happy, and she must have learned something about a small
fraction of that part of the earth's surface.
I have passed many pleasant summer days in my hay-barn study, or
under the apple trees, exploring these questions, and though I have not
solved them, I am satisfied with the clearer view I have given myself of
the mystery that envelops them. I have set down in these pages all the
thoughts that have come to me on this subject. I have not aimed so
much at consistency as at clearness and definiteness of statement,
letting my mind drift as upon a shoreless sea. Indeed, what are such

questions, and all other ultimate questions, but shoreless seas whereon
the chief reward of the navigator is the joy of the adventure?
Sir Thomas Browne said, over two hundred years ago, that in
philosophy truth seemed double-faced, by which I fancy he meant that
there was always more than one point of view of all great problems,
often contradictory points of view, from which truth is revealed. In the
following pages I am aware that two ideas, or principles, struggle in my
mind for mastery. One is the idea of the super-mechanical and the
super-chemical character of living things; the other is the idea of the
supremacy and universality of what we call natural law. The first
probably springs from my inborn idealism and literary habit of mind;
the second from my love of nature and my scientific bent. It is hard for
me to reduce the life impulse to a level with common material forces
that shape and control the world of inert matter, and it is equally hard
for me to reconcile my reason to the introduction of a new principle, or
to see anything in natural processes that savors of the ab-extra. It is the
working of these two different ideas in my mind that seems to give rise
to the obvious contradictions that crop out here and there throughout
this volume. An explanation of life phenomena that savors of the
laboratory and chemism repels me, and an explanation that savors of
the theological point of view is equally distasteful to me. I crave and
seek a natural explanation of all phenomena upon this earth, but the
word "natural" to me implies more than mere chemistry and physics.
The birth of a baby, and the blooming of a flower, are natural events,
but the laboratory methods forever fail to give us the key to the secret
of either.
I am forced to conclude that my passion for nature and for all open-air
life, though tinged and stimulated by science, is not a passion for pure
science, but for literature and philosophy. My imagination and
ingrained humanism are appealed to by the facts and methods of natural
history. I find something akin to poetry and religion (using the latter
word in its non-mythological sense, as indicating the sum of mystery
and reverence we feel in the presence of the great facts of life and death)
in the shows of day and night, and in my excursions to fields and
woods. The love of nature is a different thing from the love of science,

though the two may go together. The Wordsworthian sense in nature,
of "something far more deeply interfused" than the principles of exact
science, is probably the source