kinds of manifestations, the organic and the inorganic, or the vital and
the physical,--the latter divisible into the chemical and the
mechanical, the former made up of these two working in infinite
complexity because drawn into new relations, and lifted to higher ends
by this something we call life.

We think of something in the organic that lifts and moves and
redistributes dead matter, and builds it up into the ten thousand new
forms which it would never assume without this something; it lifts lime
and iron and silica and potash and carbon, against gravity, up into
trees and animal forms, not by a new force, but by an old force in the
hands of a new agent.

The cattle move about the field, the drift boulders slowly creep down
the slopes; there is no doubt that the final source of the force is in
both cases the same; what we call gravity, a name for a mystery, is the
form it takes in the case of the rocks, and what we call vitality,
another name for a mystery, is the form it takes in the case of the
cattle; without the solar and stellar energy, could there be any motion
of either rock or beast?

Force is universal, it pervades all nature, one manifestation of it we
call heat, another light, another electricity, another cohesion,
chemical affinity, and so on. May not another manifestation of it be
called life, differing from all the rest more radically than they differ
from one another; bound up with all the rest and inseparable from them
and identical with them only in its ultimate source in the Creative
Energy that is immanent in the universe? I have to think of the Creative
Energy as immanent in all matter, and the final source of all the
transformations and transmutations we see in the organic and the