THE BREATH OF LIFE 



in the turmoil or "scrapping" between the germ 

 and the solar forces, matter is gathered from the soil 

 and from the air and built into the special form of a 

 tree. Why not in the form of a cabbage, or a donkey, 

 or a clam? If the forces are purely automatic, why 

 not? Why should matter be gathered in at all in a 

 mechanical struggle between inorganic elements? 

 But these are not all inorganic; the seed is organic. 

 Ah! that makes the difference! That accounts for 

 the "effort." So we have to have the organic to 

 start with, then the rest is easy. No doubt the mole- 

 cules of the seed would remain in a quiescent state, 

 if they were not disturbed by external influences, 

 chemical and mechanical. But there is something 

 latent or potential in that seed that is the opposite of 

 the mechanical, namely, the vital, and in what that 

 consists, and where it came from, is the mystery. 



in 



I fancy that the difficulty which an increasing 

 number of persons find in accepting the mechanistic 

 view of life, or evolution, — the view which Herbert 

 Spencer built into such a ponderous system of phi- 

 losophy, and which such men as Huxley, Tyndall, 

 Gifford, Haeckel, Verworn, and others, have up- 

 held and illustrated, — is temperamental rather 

 than logical. The view is distasteful to a certain 

 type of mind — the flexible, imaginative, artistic, 

 and literary type — the type that loves to see itself 



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