THE BREATH OF LIFE 



istry to the body and soul of man. But if life, with 

 all that has come out of it, did not come by way of 

 matter and energy, by what way did it come? Must 

 we have recourse to the so-called supernatural? — as 

 Emerson's line puts it, — 



" When half-gods go, the gods arrive." 



When our traditional conception of matter as 

 essentially vulgar and obstructive and the enemy 

 of the spirit gives place to the new scientific con- 

 ception of it as at bottom electrical and all-potent, 

 we may find the poet's great line come true, and 

 that for a thing to be natural, is to be divine. For 

 my own part, I do not see how we can get intelligence 

 out of matter unless we postulate intelligence in 

 matter. Any system of philosophy that sees in the 

 organic world only a fortuitous concourse of chemi- 

 cal atoms, repels me, though the contradiction here 

 implied is not easily cleared up. The theory of life as 

 a chemical reaction and nothing more does not in- 

 terest me, but I am attracted by that conception of 

 life which, while binding it to the material order, 

 sees in the organic more than the physics and chem- 

 istry of the inorganic — call it whatever name you 

 will — vitalism, idealism, or dualism. 



In our religious moods, we may speak, as Theo- 

 dore Parker did, of the universe as a "handful of 

 dust which God enchants," or we may speak of it, 

 as Goethe did, as "the living garment of God"; 



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