This remark, which is one that a thermometer might be expected to make if it could talk, is in Le Dantec’s mouth probably no more than a little rhetorical fling at orthodoxy, for it is really answered by his whole book. His main thesis is “the absence of all essential difference and all absolute discontinuity between living and not-living matter.” “A surface accident” can hardly be a reasonable description of a development thus prepared for in the essential nature of the substance of the world. But other physicists have lately cut deeper, and will not allow the suns of Catullus, even when cold, to set and rise again for ever. According to the very interesting and apparently well-supported speculations of Gustave Le Bon,[157] all matter is at present engaged in that process of disintegration of which radium offers the most conspicuous example. The energy which produces life and response of all kinds is explained as simply the result of this long, disintegrating process, and may be compared to the action of a released spring, seeking its state of quiescence and immobility.[158] When the process is complete, matter will be resolved into the primordial Something from which it somehow originated. And where will the saint and the sage, or anything that we can recognize as life, be then? The answer to all this rises to the mind at once when we abandon the point of view of the thermometer and place ourselves at that of rational Man. This Matter, on whose states life is supposed to be dependent, is, after all, known to us only through the fact that we are living to observe it. If it disappeared, no doubt we should cease to see it, and if it were transformed we should see it otherwise, but to make the life which sees dependent on our seeing anything exactly as it appears now on this globe is surely the wildest of assumptions. We observe that life makes use of certain conditions of matter—a certain range of temperature, the presence of certain minerals and gases—in order to express itself. We regard these conditions as the product of a Power which desires life and has produced them to obtain it. But there may be many other conditions too. All we can tell is that beyond certain physical limits our senses cannot perceive life or get responses from it. M. Le Dantec would, no doubt, treat as an illusion the belief that man can communicate with and be responded to by a Power, a Life, transcending that of which the senses inform us. I am, with the multitude of men, profoundly convinced that we can. But leaving this entirely aside, is it not evident that, even as there are invisible rays in the spectrum which are now and then discovered by some unexpected chemical or electrical action, so there may be modes of living of which none of our present senses can give us the faintest conception? Whoever may deny this possibility, and on whatever grounds, it certainly cannot be denied on any grounds that physics or biology are aware of.