390 THE UNDISCOVERABLE SECRET. 



If, with your apparatus, if, with the means at the disposal 

 of humanity, you should succeed in achieving all these mar- 

 vels of nature; then perhaps you might settle the great 

 problem of what life is, whether an independent force, or a 

 simple modification of an universal force, of which heat, 

 light, electricity, and magnetism, will be but different modes 

 of manifestation. 



And yet, even in such a case, you must not boast too loudly 

 of your power ; for you will find it necessary to turn and re- 

 turn the term you have arrived at, in every direction ; nor will 

 it furnish you with the relation or the cause of the formidable 

 progression whose alpha and omega, whose beginning and 

 end, escape us so absolutely. 



Whence, in all its interminable metamorphoses, whence 

 comes life ? Whither goes it ? Were our world to perish, its 

 ruins would not cease, in their apparently disorderd move- 

 ments, to obey the law of universal gravitation : they would 

 so group themselves as to form other worlds, resembling the 

 system of which they were anteriorly the framework. But this 

 force in no wise tells you why, when, and how life will make 

 its appearance on these spheroids of revolution, which, in 

 their state of ponderation, are attracted in the direct ratio of 

 their masses and in the inverse ratio of the square of their 

 distances. 



This is not all. Man justly plumes himself on having 

 arrived, by a process of experiment, at the following irrefrag- 

 able axiom : that " the matter which serves for the movements 



