"A PROPHET OF THE SOUL" 



the adaptations." Contingent, he thinks, the way 

 life obtains the solar energy from the sun, namely 

 through the carbon of carbonic acid. It might have 

 obtained it through other chemical elements than 

 oxygen and carbon. In this case the element char- 

 acteristic of the plastic substances would probably 

 have been other than nitrogen, and the chemistry 

 of living bodies would have been radically different 

 from what it is, resulting in living forms without 

 any analogy to those we know, whose anatomy 

 would have been different, whose physiology also 

 would have been different. 



It is therefore probable that life goes on in other 

 planets, in other solar systems also, under forms of 

 which we have no idea, in physical conditions to 

 which it seems to us, from the point of view of our 

 physiology, to be absolutely opposed. All life re- 

 quires is slow acctunulation of solar energy and its 

 sudden release in action, and this accumulation may 

 take place in other systems by a chemism quite un- 

 like ours, in which the carbon of carbonic acid is 

 fixed and stored up by the chlorophyUian function 

 of plants. Life releases this energy by an act anal- 

 ogous to the pulling of a trigger, and the resultant 

 explosive is the power living bodies exert. How 

 figurative and yet concrete and seeable it all is! 

 Though man seems to be the aim and crown of 

 evolution, yet we cannot say that it was all for him. 

 It is abundantly evident that nature is not solely 

 209 



