THE BREATH OF LIFE 



ter? Mechanical and chemical forces do all the work 

 of the living body, but who or what controls and 

 directs them, so that one compounding of the ele- 

 ments begets a cabbage, and another compounding 

 of the same elements begets an oak — one mixture 

 of them and we have a frog, another and we have a 

 man? Is there not room here for something besides 

 blind, indifferent forces? If we make the molecules 

 themselves creative, then we are begging the ques- 

 tion. The creative energy by any other name re- 

 mains the same. 



IV 



If life itself is not a force or a form of energy, yet 

 behold what energy it is capable of exerting! It 

 seems to me that Sir Oliver Lodge is a little confus- 

 ing when he says in a recent essay that "life does 

 not exert force — not even the most microscopical 

 force — and certainly does not supply energy." Sir 

 Oliver is thinking of life as a distinct entity — some- 

 thing apart from the matter which it animates. But 

 even in this case can we not say that the mainspring 

 of the energy of living bodies is the life that is in them? 



Apart from the force exerted by living animal 

 bodies, see the force exerted by living plant bodies. 

 I thought of the remark of Sir Oliver one day not 

 long after reading it, while I was walking in a beech 

 wood and noted how the sprouting beechnuts had 

 sent their pale radicles down through the dry leaves 



17 



