of His universe as near at hand, for the very simple reason that matter has no “properties” which He has not imparted to it, and accordingly it can have no innate inertia or reluctance to act which God’s word would need to overcome in order to induce it to act, even when this word operates across the wide fields of space.  On this explanation these phenomena of “action at a distance” are at least intelligible; while to me, and I speak now as a scientist, they are intelligible in no other way.

III

There is another line of thought which has to do with living organisms, but which I shall beg leave to anticipate and bring in here at the close of this chapter, since it follows as a direct corollary from the law of the Conservation of Energy.  Indeed, we might even term it the biological aspect of that law.

As we have seen, we can neither create energy nor destroy it; though we can lose it,—­so far as this earth is concerned.  The vast fund of energy that daily comes streaming to us from the sun is transmuted back and forth in a thousand ways, though little by little it is dissipated off into space, and we are dependent upon a fresh supply from the ever replenished fountain.

Just so, though in a somewhat idealistic sense, is it with what we may term vital energy.  Cells, organisms, even whole races, are subject to degeneration and decay.  They cannot acquire higher powers, though they may gradually lose what they already have; as Bateson has recently told us that whatever evolution there is must be by loss and not by gain.  Water very easily runs down hill; but cannot go up hill in and of itself.  Just so with the types of organic life.  It was not merely an idle sneer of the witty Frenchman, that science has not yet explained how an ancestor can transmit what he has not got himself.  He cannot always transmit all that he himself actually possesses of nature’s gifts.  Vitality becomes lowered, and the type degenerates.  Weismann has emphasized this idea in his doctrine of “panmixia,” or the withdrawal of selection, which always results in degeneration.  Selection, artificial or natural, may serve to counteract this universal tendency of organic life, but only approximately.  As Sir William Dawson says, “All things left to themselves tend to degenerate.”  Little by little the endowment of vitality bestowed upon our world at the beginning has, like radiant energy, been returned to God who gave it; but, unlike the case of radiant energy, the Creator has not established any regular source of vital supply from without, no elixir of life for organic nature in general.  There is no longer within easy reach a tree of life from which we may pluck and eat and live forever.  And as the individual grows old and dies, so do species and even whole tribes degenerate and become extinct.

    “From scarped cliff and quarried stone
     She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone.’”