If life itself is not a force or a form of energy, yet behold what
energy it is capable of exerting! It seems to me that Sir Oliver Lodge
is a little confusing when he says in a recent essay that "life does not
exert force--not even the most microscopical force--and certainly does
not supply energy." Sir Oliver is thinking of life as a distinct
entity--something apart from the matter which it animates. But even in
this case can we not say that the mainspring of the energy of living
bodies is the life that is in them?
Apart from the force exerted by living animal bodies, see the force
exerted by living plant bodies. I thought of the remark of Sir Oliver
one day not long after reading it, while I was walking in a beech wood
and noted how the sprouting beechnuts had sent their pale radicles down
through the dry leaves upon which they were lying, often piercing two
or three of them, and forcing their way down into the mingled soil and
leaf-mould a couple of inches. Force was certainly expended in doing
this, and if the life in the sprouting nut did not exert it or expend
it, what did?
When I drive a peg into the ground with my axe or mallet, is the life in
my arm any more strictly the source (the secondary source) of the energy
expended than is the nut in this case? Of course, the sun is the primal
source of the energy in both cases, and in all cases, but does not life
exert the force, use it, bring it to bear, which it receives from the
universal 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 earth
floats as in a sea. When this energy or force is manifest through a
living body, we call it vital force; when it is manifest through a
mechanical contrivance, we call it mechanical force; when it is
developed by the action and reaction of chemical compounds, we call it
chemical force; the same force in each case, but behaving so differently
in the one case from what it does in the other that we come to think of
it as a new and distinct entity. Now if Sir Oliver or any one else could
tell us what force is, this difference between the vitalists and the
mechanists might be reconciled.
Darwin measured the force of the downward growth of the radicle, such as
I have alluded to, as one quarter of a pound, and its lateral pressure
as much greater. We know that the roots of trees insert themselves into
seams in the rocks, and force the parts asunder. This force is
measurable and is often very great. Its seat seems to be in the soft,
milky substance called the cambium layer under the bark. These minute
cells when their force is combined may become regular rock-splitters.
One of the most remarkable exhibitions of plant force I ever saw was in
a Western city where I observed a species of wild sunflower forcing its
way up through the asphalt pavement; the folded and compressed leaves of
the plant, like a man's fist, had pushed against the hard but flexible
concrete till it had bulged up and then split, and let the irrepressible
plant through. The force exerted must have been many pounds. I think it
doubtful if the strongest man could have pushed his fist through such a
resisting medium. If it was not life which exerted this force, what was
it? Life activities are a kind of explosion, and the slow continued
explosions of this growing plant rent the pavement as surely as powder
would have done. It is doubtful if any cultivated plant could have
overcome such odds. It required the force of the untamed hairy plant of
the plains to accomplish this feat.
That life does not supply energy, that is, is not an independent source
of energy, seems to me obvious enough, but that it does not manifest
energy, use energy, or "exert force," is far from obvious. If a growing
plant or tree does not exert force by reason of its growing, or by
virtue of a specific kind of activity among its particles, which we name
life, and which does not take place in a stone or in a bar of iron or in
dead timber, then how can we say that any mechanical device or explosive
compound exerts force? The steam-engine does not create force, neither
does the exploding dynamite, but these things exert force. We have to
think of the sum total of the force of the universe, as of matter
itself, as a constant factor, that can neither be increased nor
diminished. 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 one
force, but of any number of manifestations of force, and of two distinct
kinds of manifestations, the organic and the inorganic, or the vital and
the physical,--the latter divisible into the chemical and the
mechanical, the former made up of these two working in infinite
complexity because drawn into new relations, and lifted to higher ends
by this something we call life.
We think of something in the organic that lifts and moves and
redistributes dead matter, and builds it up into the ten thousand new
forms which it would never assume without this something; it lifts lime
and iron and silica and potash and carbon, against gravity, up into
trees and animal forms, not by a new force, but by an old force in the
hands of a new agent.
The cattle move about the field, the drift boulders slowly creep down
the slopes; there is no doubt that the final source of the force is in
both cases the same; what we call gravity, a name for a mystery, is the
form 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 the
cattle; without the solar and stellar energy, could there be any motion
of either rock or beast?
Force is universal, it pervades all nature, one manifestation of it we
call heat, another light, another electricity, another cohesion,
chemical affinity, and so on. May not another manifestation of it be
called life, differing from all the rest more radically than they differ
from one another; bound up with all the rest and inseparable from them
and identical with them only in its ultimate source in the Creative
Energy that is immanent in the universe? I have to think of the Creative
Energy as immanent in all matter, and the final source of all the
transformations and transmutations we see in the organic and the
inorganic worlds. The very nature of our minds compels us to postulate
some 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 and
cause.
The mind is satisfied when it finds a word that gives it a hold of a
thing or a process, or when it can picture to itself just how the thing
occurs. Thus, for instance, to account for the power generated by the
rushing together of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water, we have to
conceive of space between the atoms of these elements, and that the
force generated comes from the immense velocity with which the
infinitesimal atoms rush together across this infinitesimal space. It is
quite possible that this is not the true explanation at all, but it
satisfies the mind because it is an explanation in terms of mechanical
forces that we know.
The solar energy goes into the atoms or corpuscles one thing, and it
comes out another; it goes in as inorganic force, and it comes out as
organic and psychic. The change or transformation takes place in those
invisible laboratories of the infinitesimal atoms. It helps my mental
processes to give that change a name--vitality--and to recognize it as a
supra-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 and
woman, dog and donkey, and the secret of the difference between us, and
of the passing along of the difference from generation to generation
with but slight variations, may be, so to speak, in the way the
molecules and atoms of our bodies take hold of hands and perform their
mystic dances in the inner temple of life. But one would like to know
who 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 the
substance of the nuts and becomes alive, under the influence of the
warmth and moisture of spring, and puts out a radicle that pierces the
dry leaves like an awl? The pebbles, though they contain the same
chemical 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 that
process, nor its prime cause. Start the flame of life going, and the
rest may be explained in terms of chemistry; start the human body
developing, and physiological processes explain its growth; but why it
becomes a man and not a monkey--what explains that?