The Breath of Life | Page 3

yellow dock, or into a cabbage? What is it that is so constant and
so irrepressible, and before the summer is ended will be lying in wait
here with its ten thousand little hooks to attach itself to every skirt or
bushy tail or furry or woolly coat that comes along, in order to get free
transportation to other lawns and gardens, to green fields and pastures
new?

It is some living thing; but what is a living thing, and how does it differ
from a mechanical and non-living thing? If I smash or overturn the
sundial with my hoe, or break the hoe itself, these things stay smashed
and broken, but the burdock mends itself, renews itself, and, if I am not
on my guard, will surreptitiously mature some of the burs before the
season is passed.
Evidently a living thing is radically different from a mechanical thing;
yet modern physical science tells me that the burdock is only another
kind of machine, and manifests nothing but the activity of the
mechanical and chemical principles that we see in operation all about
us in dead matter; and that a little different mechanical arrangement of
its ultimate atoms would turn it into a yellow dock or into a cabbage,
into an oak or into a pine, into an ox or into a man.
I see that it is a machine in this respect, that it is set going by a force
exterior to itself--the warmth of the sun acting upon it, and upon the
moisture in the soil; but it is unmechanical in that it repairs itself and
grows and reproduces itself, and after it has ceased running can never
be made to run again. After I have reduced all its activities to
mechanical and chemical principles, my mind seems to see something
that chemistry and mechanics do not explain--something that avails
itself of these forces, but is not of them. This may be only my
anthropomorphic way of looking at things, but are not all our ways of
looking at things anthropomorphic? How can they be any other? They
cannot be deific since we are not gods. They may be scientific. But
what is science but a kind of anthropomorphism? Kant wisely said, "It
sounds at first singular, but is none the less certain, that the
understanding does not derive its laws from nature, but prescribes them
to nature." This is the anthropomorphism of science.
If I attribute the phenomenon of life to a vital force or principle, am I
any more unscientific than I am when I give a local habitation and a
name to any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, cohesion,
osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These terms stand for certain special
activities in nature and are as much the inventions of our own minds as
are any of the rest of our ideas.

We can help ourselves out, as Haeckel does, by calling the physical
forces--such as the magnet that attracts the iron filings, the powder that
explodes, the steam that drives the locomotive, and the like--"living
inorganics," and looking upon them as acting by "living force as much
as the sensitive mimosa does when it contracts its leaves at touch." But
living force is what we are trying to differentiate from mechanical force,
and what do we gain by confounding the two? We can only look upon a
living body as a machine by forming new conceptions of a machine--a
machine utterly unmechanical, which is a contradiction of terms.
A man may expend the same kind of force in thinking that he expends
in chopping his wood, but that fact does not put the two kinds of
activity on the same level. There is no question but that the food
consumed is the source of the energy in both cases, but in the one the
energy is muscular, and in the other it is nervous. When we speak of
mental or spiritual force, we have as distinct a conception as when we
speak of physical force. It requires physical force to produce the effect
that we call mental force, though how the one can result in the other is
past understanding. The law of the correlation and conservation of
energy requires that what goes into the body as physical force must
come out in some form of physical force--heat, light, electricity, and so
forth.
Science cannot trace force into the mental realm and connect it with our
states of consciousness. It loses track of it so completely that men like
Tyndall and Huxley and Spencer pause before it as an inscrutable
mystery, while John Fiske helps himself out with the conception of the
soul as quite independent of the body, standing related to it as the
musician is related to his instrument. This idea is