The Breath of Life

heir 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 e

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

ich 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 uns

n 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 mechanic

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; ch

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

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 be

he same; life is a constant becoming; our minds and our bodies are

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

nts themselves are not changed; oxygen is still oxygen and carbon still carb

in our laboratories, and no life appears. We can send an electric spark through a room full of oxyg

ate are near life; osmosis, oxidation, chemical reactions are near life; the ashes of inorganic bo

hen 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

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 a

ence 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 bloo