The Breath of Life | Page 4

the key to Fiske's
proof of the immortality of the soul. Finding himself face to face with
an insoluble mystery, he cuts the knot, or rather, clears the chasm, by
this extra-scientific leap. Since the soul, as we know it, is inseparably
bound up with physical conditions, it seems to me that a more rational
explanation of the phenomenon of mentality is the conception that the
physical force and substance that we use up in a mental effort or
emotional experience gives rise, through some unknown kind of
molecular activity, to something which is analogous to the electric

current in a live wire, and which traverses the nerves and results in our
changing states of consciousness. This is the mechanistic explanation
of mind, consciousness, etc., but it is the only one, or kind of one, that
lends itself to scientific interpretation. Life, spirit, consciousness, may
be a mode of motion as distinct from all other modes of motion, such as
heat, light, electricity, as these are distinct from each other.
When we speak of force of mind, force of character, we of course speak
in parables, since the force here alluded to is an experience of our own
minds entirely and would not suffice to move the finest dust-particle in
the air.
There could be no vegetable or animal life without the sunbeam, yet
when we have explained or accounted for the growth of a tree in terms
of the chemistry and physics of the sunbeam, do we not have to figure
to ourselves something in the tree that avails itself of this chemistry,
that uses it and profits by it? After this mysterious something has
ceased to operate, or play its part, the chemistry of the sunbeam is no
longer effective, and the tree is dead.
Without the vibrations that we call light, there would have been no eye.
But, as Bergson happily says, it is not light passively received that
makes the eye; it is light meeting an indwelling need in the organism,
which amounts to an active creative principle, that begets the eye. With
fish in underground waters this need does not arise; hence they have no
sight. Fins and wings and legs are developed to meet some end of the
organism, but if the organism were not charged with an expansive or
developing force or impulse, would those needs arise?
Why should the vertebrate series have risen through the fish, the reptile,
the mammal, to man, unless the manward impulse was inherent in the
first vertebrate; something that struggled, that pushed on and up from
the more simple to the more complex forms? Why did not unicellular
life always remain unicellular? Could not the environment have acted
upon it endlessly without causing it to change toward higher and more
complex forms, had there not been some indwelling aboriginal
tendency toward these forms? How could natural selection, or any other
process of selection, work upon species to modify them, if there were

not something in species pushing out and on, seeking new ways, new
forms, in fact some active principle that is modifiable?
Life has risen by stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things. Why
has it risen? Why did it not keep on the same level, and go through the
cycle of change, as the inorganic does, without attaining to higher
forms? Because, it may be replied, it was life, and not mere matter and
motion--something that lifts matter and motion to a new plane.
Under the influence of the life impulse, the old routine of matter--from
compound to compound, from solid to fluid, from fluid to gaseous,
from rock to soil, the cycle always ending where it began--is broken
into, and cycles of a new order are instituted. From the stable
equilibrium which dead matter is always seeking, the same matter in
the vital circuit is always seeking the state of unstable equilibrium, or
rather is forever passing between the two, and evolving the myriad
forms of life in the passage. It is hard to think of the process as the
work of the physical and chemical forces of inorganic nature, without
supplementing them with a new and different force.
The forces of life are constructive forces, and they are operative in a
world of destructive or disintegrating forces which oppose them and
which they overcome. The physical and chemical forces of dead matter
are at war with the forces of life, till life overcomes and uses them.
The mechanical forces go on repeating or dividing through the same
cycles forever and ever, seeking a stable condition, but the vital force is
inventive and creative and constantly breaks the repose that organic
nature seeks to impose upon it.
External forces may modify a body, but they cannot develop it unless
there is something in the body