UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
descending current balanced, a perpetual explosion, 
integration and disintegration going hand in hand. 
The effort of matter and force in the inorganic 
world is to find a stable equilibrium; their effort in 
the organic world is to find an unstable equilibrium, 
to hang forever, as it were, on the pitch of the tor- 
rent, suspended between mobility and immobility, 
constantly passing from one to the other. Life is 
an interchange of the two, the perpetual translation 
and transformation of the immobile into the mobile. 
The effort of the inorganic forces to find a stable 
equilibrium gives us all the forms of mechanical 
energy and shapes the surface of the globe; the ef- 
forts of the organic to find and hold a state of un- 
stable equilibrium give us all the forms of life. 
Gravity rules in one. What rules in and determines 
the other? 
One may think of Bergson’s conception of a living 
body under various images. I am reminded of it 
when I see at the fountain a little ball dancing in the 
air at the top of a slender column of water — the 
upward push just balancing the downward pull of 
gravity, and the ball playing and hovering perpetu- 
ally. It is mobility and stability equalized. Dimin- 
ish the force of the upward current and the ball sinks 
and sinks till it lies motionless at the bottom. So, 
when the pressure of life goes down, the living body 
fails and fails, overcome by the opposite tendency, 
till death ensues. 
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