The Breath of Life | Page 9

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?

II
THE LIVING WAVE
I
If one attempts to reach any rational conclusion on the question of the
nature and origin of life on this planet, he soon finds himself in close
quarters with two difficulties. He must either admit of a break in the
course of nature and the introduction of a new principle, the vital
principle, which, if he is a man of science, he finds it hard to do; or he
must accept the theory of the physico-chemical origin of life, which, as
a being with a soul, he finds it equally hard to do. In other words, he

must either draw an arbitrary line between the inorganic and the
organic when he knows that drawing arbitrary lines in nature, and
fencing off