“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 accumulation 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 chlorophyllian 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 
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