If the gods of the inorganic elements are neither for nor against us,
but utterly indifferent to us, how came we here? Nature's method is
always from the inside, while ours is from the outside; hers is circular
while ours is direct. We think, as Bergson says, of things created, and
of a thing that creates, but things in nature are not created, they are
evolved; they grow, and the thing that grows is not separable from the
force that causes it to grow. The water turns the wheel, and can be shut
off or let on. This is the way of the mechanical world. But the wheels
in organic nature go around from something inside them, a kind of
perpetual motion, or self-supplying power. They are not turned, they
turn; they are not repaired, they repair. The nature of living things
cannot be interpreted by the laws of mechanical and chemical things,
though mechanics and chemistry play the visible, tangible part in them.
If we must discard the notion of a vital force, we may, as Professor
Hartog suggests, make use of the term "vital behavior."
Of course man tries everything by himself and his own standards. He
knows no intelligence but his own, no prudence, no love, no mercy, no
justice, no economy, but his own, no god but such a one as fits his
conception.
In view of all these things, how man got here is a problem. Why the
slender thread of his line of descent was not broken in the warrings and
upheavals of the terrible geologic ages, what power or agent took a hand
in furthering his development, is beyond the reach of our biologic
science.
Man's is the only intelligence, as we understand the word, in the
universe, and his intelligence demands something akin to intelligence in
the nature from which he sprang.
VII
LIFE AND MIND
I
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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