72 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP, v 



PS. 2. Shall I tell you what your great affliction hence- 

 forward will be ? It will be to hear yourself called Sr'enery 

 Roscoe by the flunkies who announce you. 



Her Ladyship will please take note of this crumpled rose 

 leaf I am sure of its annoying her. 



The following letter, with its comparison of life to a 

 whirlpool and its acknowledgment of the widespread tend- 

 ency in mankind to make idols, was written in answer to 

 some enquiries from Lady Welby : 



April 8, 1884. 



Your letter requires consideration, and I have had very little 

 leisure lately. Whether motion disintegrates or integrates is, I 

 apprehend, a question of conditions. A whirlpool in a stream 

 may remain in the same spot for any imaginable time. Yet it 

 is the effect of the motion of the particles of the water in that 

 spot which continually integrate themselves into the whirlpool 

 and disintegrate themselves from it. The whirlpool is perma- 

 nent while the conditions last, though its constituents incessantly 

 change. Living bodies are just such whirlpools. Matter sets 

 into them in the shape of food, sets out of them in the shape 

 of waste products. Their individuality lies in the constant 

 maintenance of a characteristic form, not in the preservation 

 of material identity. I do not know anything about " vitality ' 

 except as a name for certain phenomena like " electricity ' or 

 " gravitation." As you get deeper into scientific questions you 

 will find that " Name ist Schall und Rauch ' even more em- 

 phatically than Faust says it is in Theology. Most of us are 

 idolaters, and ascribe divine powers to the abstractions " Force," 

 " Gravity," " Vitality," which our own brains have created. I 

 do not know anything about " inert ' : things in nature. If we 

 reduce the world to matter and motion, the matter is not 

 " inert," inasmuch as the same amount of motion affects differ- 

 ent kinds of matter in different ways. To go back to my own 

 illustration. The fabric of the watch is not inert, every particle 

 of it is in violent and rapid motion, and the winding-up simply 

 perturbs the whole infinitely complicated system in a particular 

 fashion. Equilibrium means death, because life is a succession 

 of changes, while a changing equilibrium is a contradiction in 

 terms. I am not at all clear that a living being is comparable 

 to a machine running down. On this side of the question the 

 whirlpool affords a better parallel than the w r atch. If you dam 

 the stream above or below, the whirlpool dies; just as the living 



