358 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP, xv 



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 permanent 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 emphatically 

 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 different 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 whirl- 

 pool affords a better parallel than the watch. If you 

 dam the stream above or below, the whirlpool dies ; just 





