If life be a form or mode of energy, it might affect, guide, and direct other modes of energy, or the matter of the body (and, through it, of the inorganic world) readily enough. It would affect them, but blindly. It could have no intelligent action. If life be an energy, it must be like all other energies in this respect; it must fall within the law of conservation and be non-intelligent. Otherwise it would be something different from all other forms of energy; and so we should have energy, plus intelligence, in the case of life; and only energy for all other forms. But in that case life could not simply be converted into or derived from any other mode of energy; because we should have "intelligence" left over, in our equation--which was created _de novo_ whenever life was derived from other energies, and plunged into extinction and nothingness whenever life passed into any other mode of energy--in the course of our daily lives. But this is contrary both to experience and to all legitimate scientific thinking! Life, therefore, cannot be an intelligent or a directive energy. And so this argument also goes by the board, and we have left to us only the old materialistic conception of a non-intelligent, blind, life-force, or energy, derived from food, by a process of chemical combustion, and essentially no more mysterious than any other energy. This, therefore, is the conclusion to which we seem driven. But such a conclusion is not only contrary to M. Bergson's philosophy, but to daily observation and scientific knowledge; for we know that life _is_ directive, purposive, and progressive, and if evolution teaches us anything, it tells us that it must have been so always. We are thus driven into this dilemma: life must be an energy--but, as such, it cannot be purposive! Life _is_ purposive, yet it must be an energy--for otherwise it could not affect the bodily energies and the material world! Here then is an apparent paradox--a flat contradiction--incapable of solution or further elucidation. M. Bergson (and before him Sir Oliver Lodge and others) has attempted to meet this difficulty by supposing that the energy of the body is a "physical" energy, derived from food, and, as such, blind and subject to the law of conservation. This energy, they assert, is however manipulated and directed by the power of life or consciousness, which makes "use" of it, directs, and guides it. But this theory is, it seems to me, refuted by the arguments just advanced, which show that life and consciousness cannot affect energy in this way unless they themselves be energy; and thus we are in a "vicious circle" again, with no hope of ever getting out.