and intuition and, let us say, the power of killing by radiating electricity?  And might not men then turn out to have been mere explosives, in which energy was stored for convenient digestion by that superior creature?  A shocking thought, no doubt, like the thought of death, and more distressing to our vital feelings than is the pleasing assimilation of grass and mutton in our bellies.  Yet I can see no ground, except a desire to flatter oneself, for not crediting the elan vital with some such digestive intention.  M. Bergson’s system would hardly be more speculative if it entertained this possibility, and it would seem more honest.

[Footnote 6:  This argument against mechanism is a good instance of the difficulties which mythological habits of mind import unnecessarily into science.  An equilibrium would not displace itself!  But an equilibrium is a natural result, not a magical entity.  It is continually displaced, as its constituents are modified by internal movements or external agencies; and while many a time the equilibrium is thereby destroyed altogether, sometimes it is replaced by a more elaborate and perilous equilibrium; as glaciers carry many rocks down, but leave some, here and there, piled in the most unlikely pinnacles and pagodas.]

The vital impulse is certainly immortal; for if we take it in the naturalistic exoteric sense, for a force discovered in biology, it is an independent agent coming down into matter, organising it against its will, and stirring it like the angel the pool of Bethesda.  Though the ripples die down, the angel is not affected.  He has merely flown away.  And if we take the vital impulse mystically and esoterically, as the only primal force, creating matter in order to play with it, the immortality of life is even more obvious; for there is then nothing else in being that could possibly abolish it.  But when we come to immortality for the individual, all grows obscure and ambiguous.  The original tendency of life was certainly cosmic and not distinguished into persons:  we are told it was like a wireless message sent at the creation which is being read off at last by the humanity of to-day.  In the naturalistic view, the diversity of persons would seem to be due to the different material conditions under which one and the same spiritual purpose must fight its way towards realisation in different times and places.  It is quite conceivable, however, that in the mystical view the very sense of the original message should comport this variety of interpretations, and that the purpose should always have been to produce diverse individuals.