THE BREATH OF LIFE 



of which carbon and oxygen do not hold the secret, 

 a fire reversed, building up instead of pulling down, 

 in the vegetable with power to absorb and trans- 

 mute the inorganic elements into leaves and fruit 

 and tissue; in the animal with power to change the 

 vegetable products into bone and muscle and nerve 

 and brain, and finally into thought and conscious- 

 ness; run by the solar energy and dependent upon 

 it, yet involving something which the sunlight can- 

 not give us; in short, an activity in matter, or in 

 a limited part of matter, as real as the physico- 

 chemical activity, but, unlike it, defying all analysis 

 and explanation and all our attempts at synthesis. 

 It is this character of life, I say, that so easily leads 

 us to look upon it as something ab extra, or super- 

 added to matter, and not an evolution from it. It 

 has led Sir Oliver Lodge to conceive of life as a dis- 

 tinct entity, existing independent of matter, and it 

 is this conception that gives the key to Henri Berg- 

 son's wonderful book, "Creative Evolution." 



There is possibly or probably a fourth change in 

 matter, physical in its nature, but much more subtle 

 and mysterious than any of the physical changes 

 which our senses reveal to us. I refer to radioactive 

 change, or to the atomic transformation of one ele- 

 ment into another, such as the change of radium 

 into helium, and the change of helium into lead — a 

 subject that takes us to the borderland between phy- 

 sics and chemistry where is still debatable ground. 



132 



