THE BREATH OF LIFE 



tably as the dew forms and the rain falls. When the 

 rains and the dews and the snows cease to fall, — 

 a time which science predicts, — then life, as we 

 know it, must inevitably vanish from the earth. 

 Human life is a physical phenomenon, and though 

 it involves, as we believe, a psychic or non-physical 

 principle, it is still not exempt from the operation 

 of the universal physical laws. It came by them or 

 through them, and it must go by them or through 

 them. 



The rigidly scientific mind, impressed with all 

 these things as the lay mind cannot be, used to the 

 searching laboratory methods, and familiar with 

 the phenomenon of life in its very roots, as it were, 

 dealing with the wonders of chemical compounds, 

 and the forces that lurk in molecules and atoms, 

 seeing in the cosmic universe, and in the evolution 

 of the earth, only the operation of mechanical and 

 chemical principles; seeing the irrefragable law of 

 the correlation and the conservation of forces ; trac- 

 ing consciousness and all our changes in mental 

 states to changes in the brain substance; drilled in 

 methods of proof by experimentation; knowing that 

 the same number of ultimate atoms may be so com- 

 bined or married as to produce compounds that differ 

 as radically as alcohol and ether, — conversant with 

 all these things, and more, I say, — the strictly scien- 

 tific mind falls naturally and inevitably into the 

 mechanistic conception of all life phenomena. 



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