The Breath of Life

burdocks that send out their broad leaves along the edge of my garden or lawn, I often ask myself, "What is this thing tha

repressible, and before the summer is ended will be lying in wait here with its ten thousand little hooks to attach itself to every skirt or bush

h or overturn the sundial with my hoe, or break the hoe itself, these things stay smashed and broken, but the burdock mends i

e, and manifests nothing but the activity of the mechanical and chemical principles that we see in operation all about us in dead matter; and that a little d

its activities to mechanical and chemical principles, my mind seems to see something that chemistry and mechanics do not explain-something that avails itself of these forces, but is not of them. This may be only my anthropomorphic way of looking at things, but are not all our ways of looking at things anthropomorphic? How can they be any

ation and a name to any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, cohesion, osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These term

g inorganics," and looking upon them as acting by "living force as much as the sensitive mimosa does when it contracts its leaves at touch." But living force is what we are trying to differentiate from mechani

in the one the energy is muscular, and in the other it is nervous. When we speak of mental or spiritual force, we have as distinct a conception as when we speak of physical force. It requires physical force to produce the effect that we call mental force, t

himself face to face with an insoluble mystery, he cuts the knot, or rather, clears the chasm, by this extra-scientific leap. Since the soul, as we know it, is inseparably bound up with physical conditions, it seems to me that a more rational explanation of the phenomenon of mentality is the conception that the physical force and substance that we use up in a mental effort or emotional experience gives rise, through some unknown kind of molecular activity, to somet

arables, since the force here alluded to is an experience of our own minds

y and physics of the sunbeam, do we not have to figure to ourselves something in the tree that avails itself of this chemistry, that uses it and profits

dwelling need in the organism, which amounts to an active creative principle, that begets the eye. With fish in underground waters this need does not arise; hence they have no sight.

forms? Why did not unicellular life always remain unicellular? Could not the environment have acted upon it endlessly without causing it to change toward higher and more complex forms, had there not been some indwelling aboriginal tendency toward

ame level, and go through the cycle of change, as the inorganic does, without attaining to higher forms? Because, i

of a new order are instituted. From the stable equilibrium which dead matter is always seeking, the same matter in the vital circuit is always seeking the state of unstable equilibrium, or rather is forever passing between

or disintegrating forces which oppose them and which they overcome. The physical and chemical

and ever, seeking a stable condition, but the vital force is inventive and creat

hing 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

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

rutes 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 transfo

n all. We can account for it all by saying the Creative Energy is i