UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



the tree, but it does not plant it, nor make it grow, 

 nor prescribe one form to the pine and another to 

 the oak. Do we not have to think of all these 

 things as involved in the mystery of the evolution- 

 ary impulse itself? What that impulse is, in the 

 terms of the rest of our knowledge, or whence it 

 comes, or how it adheres to matter, is one of the 

 fundamental mysteries. 



Biologists who hold to the mechanistic concep- 

 tion of life, or to its explanation in terms of chem- 

 istry and physics, lose their reckoning when con- 

 fronted by the strange power of regeneration which 

 certain low forms of animals possess, and which 

 the higher forms do not possess. The body of the 

 newt has power to grow a new eye to take the place 

 of a lost one,' and to reproduce it by a new process, 

 radically different from the process that gave it 

 the first eye. This, and other like phenomena, to 

 my mind can be interpreted only in terms of intelli- 

 gence. Such a procedure transcends all we know 

 of chemistry and physics. Something in the body 

 knows what it wants, and knows how to proceed 

 to obtain it. The impulse or organizing tendency 

 that certainly had a beginning in geologic time is 

 equally mysterious, and equally beyond the reach 

 of the chemical and physical forces as we know 

 them in the inorganic world. I am compelled to 

 think of this impulse as inherent in matter, and as 

 involved in the physicochemical forces, but I am 



268 



