1052 Dynamic Theory. 



distinction of individuals. Every son differs from his father, and the 

 break which separates races from each other is narrowed finally to that 

 which separates father and son. Kace distinctions are purely artificial, 

 adopted for our convenience, and do not exist in nature. Traced back- 

 ward from son to father we reach in all of them the common protoplas- 

 mic origin, where all organic nature is tied together. But equalty are 

 the distinctions of organic and inorganic artificial. We cannot discover 

 any break in causation between the two. That new modes of action re- 

 sult whenever a body is placed under the influence of new forms of 

 energy, or when a new body is formed by combinations of older ones, 

 is a statement that covers all departments of nature, joins them all to- 

 gether, and obliterates all artificial boundaries between them. 



Whenever a chlorophyll cell takes a molecule of carbon from the car- 

 bonic dioxide in the air and incorporates it with the tissues of a plant, 

 it transports a particle of matter over the imaginary boundary between 

 the inorganic and the organic. Analyze a human body, and there is 

 not a particle in it that has not been thus transported. There has been 

 no change in the constitution of matter by this transportation ; no al- 

 teration from an inorganic matter to an organic matter. A cow may 

 eat a plant, and one of the molecules of carbon contained in it, pass 

 through her milk-glands and become after awhile part of a pound of 

 butter ; next, it may become part of the brain tissue of a man ; and, 

 later, it is worked off and burnt ; that is, in the blood it meets its old 

 companion, oxygen, .again, and with it forms carbonic dioxide, and then 

 is carried into the lungs and dumped back again into the air from which 

 it came. In all this round, the molecule has not for a moment lost its 

 identity or its nature. It has formed part of first one body and then 

 another. But there is nowhere any break in causation with reference to 

 its transpositions. The forms of the bodies it has belonged to have de- 

 termined the several modes of reactions and functions in which this 

 molecule has been concerned. Even as a single molecule it is an or- 

 ganism, as pointed out on page 347, and is liable to be operated by cer- 

 tain forms of energy, and to react in ways peculiar to its constitution. 



What is said here of this element is true of all. In their simplest 

 forms they are simply organized, and react in a correspondingly simple 

 manner against simple forms of energy. As they become involved in 

 complicated combinations in the formation of more complex organisms, 

 all the conditions become more varied^ and the reactions more involved. 

 But no change of principle takes place from beginning to end. It is 

 not possible to designate any change that takes place in form or func- 

 tion as resulting from causes disconnected from physics, or to show 

 that such changes may take place in the absence of previous physical 

 causation. 



