In California I saw an epitome of the merciless way inorganic Nature deals with life.  An old, dried, and hardened asphalt lake near Los Angeles tells a horrible tale of animal suffering and failure.  It had been a pit of horrors for long ages; it was Nature concentrated—­her wild welter of struggling and devouring forms through the geologic ages made visible and tangible in a small patch of mingled pitch and animal bones.  There was nearly as much bone as pitch.  The fate of the unlucky flies that alight upon tangle-foot fly-paper in our houses had been the fate of the victims that had perished here.  How many wild creatures had turned appealing eyes to the great unheeding void as they felt themselves helpless and sinking in this all-engulfing pitch!  In like manner how many human beings in storms and disasters at sea and in flood and fire upon land have turned the same appealing look to the unpitying heavens!  There is no power in the world of physical forces, or apart from our own kind, that heeds us or turns aside for us, or bestows one pitying glance upon us.  Life has run, and still runs, the gantlet of a long line of hostile forces, and escapes by dint of fleetness of foot, or agility in dodging, or else by toughness of fibre.

Yet here we are; here is love and charity and mercy and intelligence; the fair face of childhood, the beautiful face of youth, the clear, strong face of manhood and womanhood, and the calm, benign face of old age, seen, it is true, as against a background of their opposites, but seeming to indicate something above chance and change at the heart of Nature.  Here is life in the midst of death; but death forever playing into the hands of life; here is the organic in the midst of the inorganic, at strife with it, hourly crushed by it, yet sustained and kept going by its aid.

III

Vitality is only a word, but it marks a class of phenomena in nature that stands apart from all merely mechanical manifestations in the universe.  The cosmos is a vast machine, but in this machine—­this tremendous complex of physical forces—­there appears, at least on this earth, in the course of its evolution, this something, or this peculiar manifestation of energy, that we call vital.  Apparently it is a transient phase of activity in matter, which, unlike other chemical and physical activities, has its beginning and its ending, and out of which have arisen all the myriad forms of terrestrial life.  The merely material forces, blind and haphazard from the first, did not arise in matter; they are inseparable from it; they are as eternal as matter itself; but the activities called vital arose in time and place, and must eventually disappear as they arose, while the career of the inorganic elements goes on as if life had never visited the sphere.  Was it, or is it, a visitation—­something ab extra that implies super-mundane, or supernatural, powers?