THE VITAL ORDER 



Yet to fail to see that what we must call intelli- 

 gence pervades and is active in all organic nature is 

 to be spiritually blind. But to see it as something 

 foreign to, or separable from, nature is to do violence 

 to our faith in the constancy and sufficiency of the 

 natural order. One star differeth from another star 

 in glory. There are degrees of mystery in the uni- 

 verse. The most mysterious thing in inorganic na- 

 ture is electricity — that disembodied energy that 

 slumbers in the ultimate particles of matter — un- 

 seen, unfelt, unknown, till it suddenly leaps forth 

 with such terrible vividness and power on the face 

 of the storm, or till we summon it through the trans- 

 formation of some other form of energy. A still 

 higher and more inscrutable mystery is life — that 

 something which clothes itself in such infinitely 

 varied and beautiful as well as unbeautiful forms 

 of matter. We can evoke electricity at will from 

 many different sources, but we can evoke life only 

 from other life; the biogenetic law is inviolable. 



IV 



It takes some of the cold iron out of the mechan- 

 istic theory of life if we divest it of all our associa- 

 tions with the machine-mad and machine-ridden 

 world in which we live and out of which our material 

 civilization came. The mechanical, the automatic, 

 is the antithesis of the spontaneous and the poetic, 

 and it repels us on that account. We are so made 



223 



