UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
explain a rainbow, but not a rabbit.” We can pro- 
duce a rainbow at will, but only rabbits can produce 
rabbits. Yet Professor Soddy seems to think it is 
not improbable that the time will come when the 
chemist will be ‘‘able to synthesize foodstuffs apart 
from the life-process.”” If he means directly from 
the inorganic elements, I do not see why it would 
not be as easy to synthesize a rabbit as to synthesize 
a peach, or a kernel of wheat, or a beefsteak, or an 
egg, “apart from the life-process.” 
Fate and freedom play with or against each other 
in all living things; there is fate in the material con- 
ditions of life, and freedom in life itself; their inter- 
action opens the door to chance; freedom of choice 
in us makes all our mistakes and failures possible. 
Life is plastic, fluid, a flowing metamorphosis, ever 
and never the same. 
When the wind snatched my hat off my head the 
other day, and carried it down the street amid a 
cloud of dust and dry leaves, whisking it across to 
the other side and between the feet of a colored man 
bearing a big bundle of excelsior on his shoulders, 
the hat was completely in the grip of the fateful 
material forces. But the colored man who seized it 
and held it was force of another kind. The wind 
might have carried him away also had it been 
stronger, but he would at least have struggled and 
opposed his strength to it. And it is in this that the 
freedom of life consists — freedom to struggle, to 
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