anthropomorphic way of looking at things, but are not all our ways of
looking at things anthropomorphic? How can they be any other? They
cannot be deific since we are not gods. They may be scientific. But what
is science but a kind of anthropomorphism? Kant wisely said, "It sounds
at first singular, but is none the less certain, that the understanding
does not derive its laws from nature, but prescribes them to nature."
This is the anthropomorphism of science.

If I attribute the phenomenon of life to a vital force or principle, am
I any more unscientific than I am when I give a local habitation and a
name to any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, cohesion,
osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These terms stand for certain
special activities in nature and are as much the inventions of our own
minds as are any of the rest of our ideas.

We can help ourselves out, as Haeckel does, by calling the physical
forces--such as the magnet that attracts the iron filings, the powder
that explodes, the steam that drives the locomotive, and the
like--"living inorganics," and looking upon them as acting by "living
force as much as the sensitive mimosa does when it contracts its leaves
at touch." But living force is what we are trying to differentiate from
mechanical force, and what do we gain by confounding the two? We can
only look upon a living body as a machine by forming new conceptions of
a machine--a machine utterly unmechanical, which is a contradiction of
terms.

A man may expend the same kind of force in thinking that he expends in
chopping his wood, but that fact does not put the two kinds of activity
on the same level. There is no question but that the food consumed is
the source of the energy in both cases, but in the one the energy is