IV

It is a significant fact that the four chief elements which in various

combinations make up living bodies are by their extreme mobility well

suited to their purpose. Three of these are gaseous; only the carbon is

a solid. This renders them facile and adaptive in the ever-changing

conditions of organic evolution. The solid carbon forms the vessel in

which the precious essence of life is carried. Without carbon we should

evaporate or flow away and escape. Much of the oxygen and hydrogen

enters into living bodies as water; nine tenths of the human body is

water; a little nitrogen and a few mineral salts make up the rest. So

that our life in its final elements is little more than a stream of

water holding in solution carbonaceous and other matter and flowing,

forever flowing, a stream of fluid and solid matter plus something else

that scientific analysis cannot reach--some force or principle that

combines and organizes these elements into the living body.

If a man could be reduced instantly into his constituent elements we

should see a pail or two of turbid fluid that would flow down the bank

and soon be lost in the soil. That which gives us our form and stability

and prevents us from slowly spilling down the slope at all times is the

mysterious vital principle or force which knits and marries these

unstable elements together and raises up a mobile but more or less

stable form out of the world of fluids. Venus rising from the sea is a

symbol of the genesis of every living thing.

Inorganic matter seeks only rest. "Let me alone," it says; "do not break

my slumbers." But as soon as life awakens in it, it says: "Give me room,

get out of my way. Ceaseless activity, ceaseless change, a thousand new

forms are what I crave." As soon as life enters matter, matter meets

with a change of heart. It is lifted to another plane, the

supermechanical plane; it behaves in a new way; its movements from being

calculable become incalculable. A straight line has direction, that is

mechanics; what direction has the circle? That is life, a change of

direction every instant. An aeroplane is built entirely on mechanical

principles, but something not so built has to sit in it and guide it; in

fact, had to build it and adjust it to its end.

Mechanical forces seek an equilibrium or a state of rest. The whole

inorganic world under the influence of gravity would flow as water

flows, if it could, till it reached a state of absolute repose. But

vital forces struggle against a state of repose, which to them means

death. They are vital by virtue of their tendency to resist the repose

of inert matter; chemical activity disintegrates a stone or other metal,

but the decay of organized matter is different in kind; living organisms

decompose it and resolve it into its original compounds.

Vital connections and mechanical connections differ in kind. You can

treat mechanical principles mathematically, but can you treat life

mathematically? Will your formulas and equations apply here? You can

figure out the eclipses of the sun and moon for centuries to come, but

who can figure out the eclipses of nations or the overthrow of parties

or the failures of great men? And it is not simply because the problem

is so vastly more complex; it is because you are in a world where

mathematical principles do not apply. Mechanical forces will determine

the place and shape of every particle of inert matter any number of

years or centuries hence, but they will not determine the place and

condition of matter imbued with the principle of life.

We can graft living matter, we can even graft a part of one animal's

body into another animal's body, but the mechanical union which we

bring about must be changed into vital union to be a success, the

spirit of the body has to second our efforts. The same in grafting a

tree or anything else: the mechanical union which we effect must become

a vital union; and this will not take place without some degree of

consanguinity, the live scion must be recognized and adapted by the

stock in which we introduce it.

Living matter may be symbolized by a stream; it is ever and never the

same; life is a constant becoming; our minds and our bodies are never

the same at any two moments of time; life is ceaseless change.

No doubt it is between the stable and the unstable condition of the

molecules of matter that life is born. The static condition to which all

things tend is death. Matter in an unstable condition tends either to

explode or to grow or to disintegrate. So that an explosion bears some

analogy to life, only it is quickly over and the static state of the

elements is restored. Life is an infinitely slower explosion, or a

prolonged explosion, during which some matter of the organism is being

constantly burned up, and thus returned to a state of inorganic repose,

while new matter is taken in and kindled and consumed by the fires of

life. One can visualize all this and make it tangible to the intellect.

Get your fire of life started and all is easy, but how to start it is

the rub. Get your explosive compound, and something must break the

deadlock of the elements before it will explode. So in life, what is it

that sets up this slow gentle explosion that makes the machinery of our

vital economies go--that draws new matter into the vortex and casts the

used-up material out--in short, that creates and keeps up the unstable

condition, the seesaw upon which life depends? To enable the mind to

grasp it we have to invent or posit some principle, call it the vital

force, as so many have done and still do, or call it molecular force, as

Tyndall does, or the power of God, as our orthodox brethren do, it

matters not. We are on the border-land between the knowable and the

unknowable, where the mind can take no further step. There is no life

without carbon and oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, but there is a world

of these elements without life. What must be added to them to set up the

reaction we call life? Nothing that chemistry can disclose.

New tendencies and activities are set up among these elements, but the

elements themselves are not changed; oxygen is still oxygen and carbon

still carbon, yet behold the wonder of their new workmanship under the

tutelage of life!

Life only appears when the stable passes into the unstable, yet this

change takes place all about us in our laboratories, and no life

appears. We can send an electric spark through a room full of oxygen and

hydrogen gas, and with a tremendous explosion we have water--an element

of life, but not life.

Some of the elements seem nearer life than others. Water is near life;

heat, light, the colloid state are near life; osmosis, oxidation,

chemical reactions are near life; the ashes of inorganic bodies are

nearer life than the same minerals in the rocks and soil; but none of

these things is life.

The chemical mixture of some of the elements gives us our high

explosives--gunpowder, guncotton, and the like; their organic mixture

gives a slower kind of explosive--bread, meat, milk, fruit, which, when

acted upon by the vital forces of the body, yield the force that is the

equivalent of the work the body does. But to combine them in the

laboratory so as to produce the compounds out of which the body can

extract force is impossible. We can make an unstable compound that will

hurl a ton of iron ten miles, but not one that when exploded in the

digestive tract of the human body will lift a hair.

We may follow life down to the ground, yes, under the ground, into the

very roots of matter and motion, yea, beyond the roots, into the

imaginary world of molecules and atoms, and their attractions and

repulsions and not find its secret. Indeed, science--the new

science--pursues matter to the vanishing-point, where it ceases to

become matter and becomes pure force or spirit. What takes place in that

imaginary world where ponderable matter ends and becomes disembodied

force, and where the hypothetical atoms are no longer divisible, we may

conjecture but may never know. We may fancy the infinitely little going

through a cycle of evolution like that of the infinitely great, and

solar systems developing and revolving inside of the ultimate atoms, but

the Copernicus or the Laplace of the atomic astronomy has not yet

appeared. The atom itself is an invention of science. To get the mystery

of vitality reduced to the atom is getting it in very close quarters,

but it is a very big mystery still. Just how the dead becomes alive,

even in the atom, is mystery enough to stagger any scientific mind. It

is not the volume of the change; it is the quality or kind. Chemistry

and mechanics we have always known, and they always remain chemistry and

mechanics. They go into our laboratories and through our devices

chemistry and mechanics, and they come out chemistry and mechanics. They

will never come out life, conjure with them as we will, and we can get

no other result. We cannot inaugurate the mystic dance among the atoms

that will give us the least throb of life.

The psychic arises out of the organic and the organic arises out of the

inorganic, and the inorganic arises out of--what? The relation of each

to the other is as intimate as that of the soul to the body; we cannot

get between them even in thought, but the difference is one of kind and

not of degree. The vital transcends the mechanical, and the psychic

transcends the vital--is on another plane, and yet without the sun's

energy there could be neither. Thus are things knit together; thus does

one thing flow out of or bloom out of another. We date from the rocks,

and the rocks date from the fiery nebulæ, and the loom in which the

texture of our lives was woven is the great loom of vital energy about

us and in us; but what hand guided the shuttle and invented the

pattern--who knows?