The difference between one man and another does not reside in his
anatomy or physiology, or in the elements of which the brains and bodies
are composed, but in something entirely beyond the reach of experimental
science to disclose. The difference is psychological, or, we may say,
philosophical, and science is none the wiser for it. The mechanics and
the chemistry of a machine are quite sufficient to account for it, plus
the man behind it. To the physics and chemistry of a living body, we are
compelled to add some intangible, unknowable principle or tendency that
physics and chemistry cannot disclose or define. One hesitates to make
such a statement lest he do violence to that oneness, that sameness,
that pervades the universe.
All trees go to the same soil for their ponderable elements, their
ashes, and to the air and the light for their imponderable,--their
carbon and their energy,--but what makes the tree, and makes one tree
differ from another? Has the career of life upon this globe, the
unfolding of the evolutionary process, been accounted for when you have
named all the physical and material elements and processes which it
involves? We take refuge in the phrase "the nature of things," but the
nature of things evidently embraces something not dreamed of in our
science.
VII
It is reported that a French scientist has discovered the secret of the
glow-worm's light. Of course it is a chemical reaction,--what else could
it be?--but it is a chemical reaction in a vital process. Our mental and
spiritual life--our emotions of art, poetry, religion--are inseparable
from physical processes in the brain and the nervous system; but is
that their final explanation? The sunlight has little effect on a
withered leaf, but see what effect it has upon the green leaf upon the
tree! The sunlight is the same, but it falls upon a new force or potency
in the chlorophyll of the leaf,--a bit of chemistry there inspired by
life,--and the heat of the sun is stored up in the carbon or woody
tissues of the plant or tree, to be given out again in our stoves or
fireplaces. And behold how much more of the solar heat is stored up in
one kind of a tree than in certain other kinds,--how much in the
hickory, oak, maple, and how little comparatively in the pine, spruce,
linden,--all through the magic of something in the leaf, or shall we say
of the spirit of the tree? If the laws of matter and force alone account
for the living organism, if we do not have to think of something that
organizes, then how do we account for the marvelous diversity of living
forms, and their still more marvelous power of adaptation to changed
conditions, since the laws of matter and force are the same everywhere?
Science can deal only with the mechanism and chemistry of life, not with
its essence; that which sets up the new activity in matter that we call
vital is beyond its analysis. It is hard to believe that we have told
the whole truth about a living body when we have enumerated all its
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