not change into yellow dock, or into a cabbage? What is it that is so
constant and so irrepressible, and before the summer is ended will be
lying in wait here with its ten thousand little hooks to attach itself
to every skirt or bushy tail or furry or woolly coat that comes along,
in order to get free transportation to other lawns and gardens, to green
fields and pastures new?

It is some living thing; but what is a living thing, and how does it
differ from a mechanical and non-living thing? If I smash or overturn
the sundial with my hoe, or break the hoe itself, these things stay
smashed and broken, but the burdock mends itself, renews itself, and, if
I am not on my guard, will surreptitiously mature some of the burs
before the season is passed.

Evidently a living thing is radically different from a mechanical thing;
yet modern physical science tells me that the burdock is only another
kind of machine, and manifests nothing but the activity of the
mechanical and chemical principles that we see in operation all about us
in dead matter; and that a little different mechanical arrangement of
its ultimate atoms would turn it into a yellow dock or into a cabbage,
into an oak or into a pine, into an ox or into a man.

I see that it is a machine in this respect, that it is set going by a
force exterior to itself--the warmth of the sun acting upon it, and upon
the moisture in the soil; but it is unmechanical in that it repairs
itself and grows and reproduces itself, and after it has ceased running
can never be made to run again. After I have reduced all its activities
to mechanical and chemical principles, my mind seems to see something
that chemistry and mechanics do not explain--something that avails
itself of these forces, but is not of them. This may be only my