The Breath of Life | Page 5

waiting to be developed, craving
development, as it were. The warmth and moisture in the soil act alike
upon the grains of sand and upon the seed-germs; the germ changes
into something else, the sand does not. These agents liberate a force in
the germ that is not in the grain of sand. The warmth of the brooding
fowl does not spend itself upon mere passive, inert matter (unless there
is a china egg in the nest), but upon matter straining upon its leash, and

in a state of expectancy. We do not know how the activity of the
molecules of the egg differs from the activity of the molecules of the
pebble, under the influence of warmth, but we know there must be a
difference between the interior movements of organized and
unorganized matter.
Life lifts inert matter up into a thousand varied and beautiful forms and
holds it there for a season,--holds it against gravity and chemical
affinity, though you may say, if you please, not without their aid,--and
then in due course lets go of it, or abandons it, and lets it fall back into
the great sea of the inorganic. Its constant tendency is to fall back;
indeed, in animal life it does fall back every moment; it rises on the one
hand, serves its purpose of life, and falls back on the other. In going
through the cycle of life the mineral elements experience some change
that chemical analysis does not disclose--they are the more readily
absorbed again by life. It is as if the elements had profited in some way
under the tutelage of life. Their experience has been a unique and
exceptional one. Only a small fraction of the sum total of the inert
matter of the globe can have this experience. It must first go through
the vegetable cycle before it can be taken up by the animal. The only
things we can take directly from the inorganic world are water and air;
and the function of water is largely a mechanical one, and the function
of air a chemical one.
I think of the vital as flowing out of the physical, just as the psychical
flows out of the vital, and just as the higher forms of animal life flow
out of the lower. It is a far cry from man to the dumb brutes, and from
the brutes to the vegetable world, and from the vegetable to inert matter;
but the germ and start of each is in the series below it. The living came
out of the not-living. If life is of physico-chemical origin, it is so by
transformations and translations that physics cannot explain. The
butterfly comes out of the grub, man came out of the brute, but, as
Darwin says, "not by his own efforts," any more than the child becomes
the man by its own efforts.
The push of life, of the evolutionary process, is back of all and in all.
We can account for it all by saying the Creative Energy is immanent in

matter, and this gives the mind something to take hold of.
II
According to the latest scientific views held on the question by such
men as Professor Loeb, the appearance of life on the globe was a purely
accidental circumstance. The proper elements just happened to come
together at the right time in the right proportions and under the right
conditions, and life was the result. It was an accident in the thermal
history of the globe. Professor Loeb has lately published a volume of
essays and addresses called "The Mechanistic Conception of Life,"
enforcing and illustrating this view. He makes war on what he terms
the metaphysical conception of a "life-principle" as the key to the
problem, and urges the scientific conception of the adequacy of
mechanico-chemical forces. In his view, we are only chemical
mechanisms; and all our activities, mental and physical alike, are only
automatic responses to the play of the blind, material forces of external
nature. All forms of life, with all their wonderful adaptations, are only
the chance happenings of the blind gropings and clashings of dead
matter: "We eat, drink, and reproduce [and, of course, think and
speculate and write books on the problems of life], not because
mankind has reached an agreement that this is desirable, but because,
machine-like, we are compelled to do so!"
He reaches the conclusion that all our inner subjective life is amenable
to physico-chemical analysis, because many cases of simple animal
instinct and will can be explained on this basis--the basis of animal
tropism. Certain animals creep or fly to the light, others to the dark,
because they cannot help it. This is tropism. He believes that the origin
of life can be traced to the same physico-chemical activities, because,
in