THE BREATH OF LIFE 



none the less certain, that the understanding does 

 not derive its laws from nature, but prescribes 

 them to nature." This is the anthropomorphism of 

 science. 



If I attribute the phenomenon of life to a vital 

 force or principle, am I any more unscientific than 

 I am when I give a local habitation and a name to 

 any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, 

 cohesion, osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These 

 terms stand for certain special activities in nature, 

 and are as much the inventions of our own minds as 

 are any of the rest of our ideas. 



We can help ourselves out, as Haeckel does, by 

 calling the physical forces — such as the magnet 

 that attracts the iron filings, the powder that ex- 

 plodes, the steam that drives the locomotive, and 

 the like — "living inorganics," and looking upon 

 them as acting by " living force as much as the sen- 

 sitive mimosa does when it contracts its leaves at 

 touch." But living force is what we are trying to 

 differentiate from mechanical force, and what do we 

 gain by confounding the two? We can only look 

 upon a living body as a machine by forming new 

 conceptions of a machine — a machine utterly un- 

 mechanical, which is a contradiction of terms. 



A man may expend the same kind of force in 

 thinking that he expends in chopping his wood, but 

 that fact does not put the two kinds of activity on 

 the same level. There is no question but that the 



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