IV

It takes some of the cold iron out of the mechanistic theory of life if

we divest it of all our associations with the machine-mad and

machine-ridden world in which we live and out of which our material

civilization came. The mechanical, the automatic, is the antithesis of

the spontaneous and the poetic, and it repels us on that account. We are

so made that the artificial systems please us far less than the natural

systems. A sailing-ship takes us more than a steamship. It is nearer

life, nearer the winged creatures. There is determinism in nature,

mechanical forces are everywhere operative, but there are no machines in

the proper sense of the word. When we call an organism a living machine

we at once take it out of the categories of the merely mechanical and

automatic and lift it into a higher order--the vital order.

Professor Le Dantec says we are mechanisms in the third degree, a

mechanism of a mechanism of a mechanism. The body is a mechanism by

virtue of its anatomy--its framework, its levers, its hinges; it is a

mechanism by virtue of its chemical activities; and it is a mechanism by

virtue of its colloid states--three kinds of mechanisms in one, and all

acting together harmoniously and as a unit--in other words, a

super-mechanical combination of activities.

The mechanical conception of life repels us because of its association

in our minds with the fabrications of our own hands--the dead metal and

wood and the noise and dust of our machine-ridden and machine-produced

civilization.

But Nature makes no machines like our own. She uses mechanical

principles everywhere, in inert matter and in living bodies, but she

does not use them in the bald and literal way we do. We must divest her

mechanisms of the rigidity and angularity that pertain to the works of

our own hands. Her hooks and hinges and springs and sails and coils and

aeroplanes, all involve mechanical contrivances, but how differently

they impress us from our own application of the same principles! Even in

inert matter--in the dews, the rains, the winds, the tides, the snows,

the streams,--her mechanics and her chemistry and her hydrostatics and

pneumatics, seem much nearer akin to life than our own. We must remember

that Nature's machines are not human machines. When we place our machine

so that it is driven by the great universal currents,--the wheel in the

stream, the sail on the water,--the result is much more pleasing and

poetic than when propelled by artificial power. The more machinery we

get between ourselves and Nature, the farther off Nature seems. The

marvels of crystallization, the beautiful vegetable forms which the

frost etches upon the stone flagging of the sidewalk, and upon the

window-pane, delight us and we do not reason why. A natural bridge

pleases more than one which is the work of an engineer, yet the natural

bridge can only stand when it is based upon good engineering principles.

I found at the great Colorado Cañon, that the more the monuments of

erosion were suggestive of human structures, or engineering and

architectural works, the more I was impressed by them. We are pleased

when Nature imitates man, and we are pleased when man imitates Nature,

and yet we recoil from the thought that life is only applied mechanics

and chemistry. But the thought that it is mechanics and chemistry

applied by something of which they as such, form no part, some agent or

principle which we call vitality, is welcome to us. No machine we have

ever made or seen can wind itself up, or has life, no chemical compound

from the laboratories ever develops a bit of organic matter, and

therefore we are disbelievers in the powers of these things.

V

Is gravity or chemical affinity any more real to the mind than vitality?

Both are names for mysteries. Something which we call life lifts matter

up, in opposition to gravity, into thousands of living forms. The tree

lifts potash, silica, and lime up one or two hundred feet into the air;

it elbows the soil away from its hole where it enters the ground; its

roots split rocks. A giant sequoia lifts tons of solid matter and water

up hundreds of feet. So will an explosion of powder or dynamite, but the

tree does it slowly and silently by the organizing power of life. The

vital is as inscrutably identified with the mechanical and chemical as

the soul is identified with the body. They are one while yet they are

two.

For purely mechanical things we can find equivalents. Arrest a purely

mechanical process, and the machine only rests or rusts; arrest a vital

process, and the machine evaporates, disintegrates, myriads of other

machines reduce it to its original mineral and gaseous elements. In the

organic world we strike a principle that is incalculable in its

operation and incommensurable in its results. The physico-chemical

forces we can bring to book; we know their orbits, their attractions and

repulsions, and just what they will and will not do; we can forecast

their movements and foresee their effects. But the vital forces

transcend all our mathematics; we cannot anticipate their behavior.

Start inert matter in motion and we know pretty nearly what will happen

to it; mix the chemical elements together and we can foresee the

results; but start processes or reactions we call life, and who can

foresee the end? We know the sap will mount in the tree and the tree

will be true to its type, but what do we or can we know of what it is

that determines its kind and size? We know that in certain plants the

leaves will always be opposite each other on the stalk, and that in

other plants the leaves will alternate; that certain plants will have

conspicuous and others inconspicuous flowers; but how can we know what

it is in the cells of the plants that determines these things? We can

graft the scion of a sour apple tree upon a sweet, and _vice versa_, and

the fruit of the scion will be true to its kind, but no analysis of the

scion or of the stock will reveal the secret, as it would in the case of

chemical compounds. In inorganic nature we meet with concretions, but

not secretions; with crystallization, but not with assimilation and

growth from within. Chemistry tells us that the composition of animal

bodies is identical with that of vegetable; that there is nothing in one

that is not in the other; and yet, behold the difference! a difference

beyond the reach of chemistry to explain. Biology can tell us all about

these differences and many other things, but it cannot tell us the

secret we are looking for,--what it is that fashions from the same

elements two bodies so unlike as a tree and a man.

Decay and disintegration in the inorganic world often lead to the

production of beautiful forms. In life the reverse is true; the vital

forces build up varied and picturesque forms which when pulled down are

shapeless and displeasing. The immense layers of sandstone and limestone

out of which the wonderful forms that fill the Grand Cañon of the

Colorado are carved were laid down in wide uniform sheets; if the waters

had deposited their material in the forms which we now see, it would

have been a miracle. We marvel and admire as we gaze upon them now; we

do more, we have to speculate as to how it was all done by the blind,

unintelligent forces. Giant stairways, enormous alcoves, dizzy, highly

wrought balustrades, massive vertical walls standing four-square like

huge foundations--how did all the unguided erosive forces do it? The

secret is in the structure of the rock, in the lines of cleavage, in the

unequal hardness, and in the impulsive, irregular, and unequal action of

the eroding agents. These agents follow the lines of least resistance;

they are active at different times and seasons, and from different

directions; they work with infinite slowness; they undermine, they

disintegrate, they dislodge, they transport; the hard streaks resist

them, the soft streaks invite them; water charged with sand and gravel

saws down; the wind, armed with fine sand, rounds off and hollows out;

and thus the sculpturing goes on. But after you have reasoned out all

these things, you still marvel at the symmetry and the structural beauty

of the forms. They look like the handiwork of barbarian gods. They are

the handiwork of physical forces which we can see and measure and in a

degree control. But what a gulf separates them from the handiwork of the

organic forces!