you get them?

You assume vitality to start with--how did you get it? Did it arise
spontaneously out of dead matter? Mechanical and chemical forces do all
the work of the living body, but who or what controls and directs them,
so that one compounding of the elements begets a cabbage, and another
compounding of the same elements begets an oak--one mixture of them and
we have a frog, another and we have a man? Is there not room here for
something besides blind, indifferent forces? If we make the molecules
themselves creative, then we are begging the question. The creative
energy by any other name remains the same.


IV

If life itself is not a force or a form of energy, yet behold what
energy it is capable of exerting! It seems to me that Sir Oliver Lodge
is a little confusing when he says in a recent essay that "life does not
exert force--not even the most microscopical force--and certainly does
not supply energy." Sir Oliver is thinking of life as a distinct
entity--something apart from the matter which it animates. But even in
this case can we not say that the mainspring of the energy of living
bodies is the life that is in them?

Apart from the force exerted by living animal bodies, see the force
exerted by living plant bodies. I thought of the remark of Sir Oliver
one day not long after reading it, while I was walking in a beech wood
and noted how the sprouting beechnuts had sent their pale radicles down
through the dry leaves upon which they were lying, often piercing two
or three of them, and forcing their way down into the mingled soil and