THE BREATH OF LIFE 



matter. A prick of a pin, or a blow from a hammer, 

 may destroy both. Unless we consider them as po- 

 tential in all matter (and who shall say that they 

 are not?) may we look upon them as of cosmic rank? 



It is often urged that it is not the eye that sees, 

 or the brain that thinks, but something in them. 

 But it is something in them that never went into 

 them; it arose in them. It is the living eye and the 

 living brain that do the seeing and the thinking. 

 When the life activity ceases, these organs cease to 

 see and to think. Their activity is kept up by cer- 

 tain physiological processes in the organs of the 

 body, and to ask what keeps up these is like the 

 puppy trying to overtake its own tail, or to run a 

 race with its own shadow. 



The brain is not merely the organ of the mind in 

 an external and mechanical sense; it is the mind. 

 When we come to living things, all such analogies 

 fail us. Life is not a thing; thought is not a thing; 

 but rather the effect of a certain activity in matter, 

 which mind alone can recognize. When we try to 

 explain or account for that which we are, it is as if 

 a man were trying to lift himself. 



Life seems like something apart. It does not seem 

 to be amenable to the law of the correlation and 

 conservation of forces. You cannot transform it into 

 heat or light or electricity. The force which a man 

 extracts from the food he eats while he is writing 

 a poem, or doing any other mental work, seems lost 



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