Yet to fail to see that what we must call intelligence pervades and is active in all organic nature is to be spiritually blind.  But to see it as something foreign to, or separable from, nature is to do violence to our faith in the constancy and sufficiency of the natural order.  One star differeth from another star in glory.  There are degrees of mystery in the universe.  The most mysterious thing in inorganic nature is electricity—­that disembodied energy that slumbers in the ultimate particles of matter—­unseen, unfelt, unknown, till it suddenly leaps forth with such terrible vividness and power on the face of the storm, or till we summon it through the transformation of some other form of energy.  A still higher and more inscrutable mystery is life—­that something which clothes itself in such infinitely varied and beautiful as well as unbeautiful forms of matter.  We can evoke electricity at will from many different sources, but we can evoke life only from other life; the biogenetic law is inviolable.

IV

It takes some of the cold iron out of the mechanistic theory of life if we divest it of all our associations with the machine-mad and machine-ridden world in which we live and out of which our material civilization came.  The mechanical, the automatic, is the antithesis of the spontaneous and the poetic, and it repels us on that account.  We are so made that the artificial systems please us far less than the natural systems.  A sailing-ship takes us more than a steamship.  It is nearer life, nearer the winged creatures.  There is determinism in nature, mechanical forces are everywhere operative, but there are no machines in the proper sense of the word.  When we call an organism a living machine we at once take it out of the categories of the merely mechanical and automatic and lift it into a higher order—­the vital order.

Professor Le Dantec says we are mechanisms in the third degree, a mechanism of a mechanism of a mechanism.  The body is a mechanism by virtue of its anatomy—­its framework, its levers, its hinges; it is a mechanism by virtue of its chemical activities; and it is a mechanism by virtue of its colloid states—­three kinds of mechanisms in one, and all acting together harmoniously and as a unit—­in other words, a super-mechanical combination of activities.

The mechanical conception of life repels us because of its association in our minds with the fabrications of our own hands—­the dead metal and wood and the noise and dust of our machine-ridden and machine-produced civilization.