UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
of the art of expression, and give us a lively sense of 
the workings of their own minds. 
Herbert Spencer, so far as I have read him, never 
breathes the air of pure literature. “Life,” says 
Spencer, “is a continuous adjustment of internal 
relations to external relations.” In other words, 
without air, water, and food our bodies would cease 
to function and life would end. Spencer’s definition 
is, of course, true so far as it goes, but it is of no more 
interest than any other statement of mere fact. It is 
like opaque and inert matter. Tyndall’s free charac- 
terization of life as a “‘wave which in no two con- 
secutive moments of existence is composed of the 
same particles” pleases much more, because the 
wave is a beautiful and suggestive object. The 
mind is at once started upon the inquiry, What is it 
that lifts the water up in the form of a wave and 
travels on, while the water stays behind? It is a 
force imparted by the wind, but where did the wind 
get it, and what is the force? The impulse we call 
life lifts the particles of the inorganic up into the 
organic, into the myriad forms of life, — plant, tree, 
bird, animal, — and, when it has run its course, 
lets them drop back again into their original ele- 
ments. 
Spencer was foreordained to the mechanistic view 
of life. His mind moves in the geometric plane. It 
is a military and engineering intellect applied to the 
problems of organic nature. How smoothly and 
188 
