If the gods of the inorganic elements are neither for nor against us, but utterly indifferent to us, how came we here?  Nature’s method is always from the inside, while ours is from the outside; hers is circular while ours is direct.  We think, as Bergson says, of things created, and of a thing that creates, but things in nature are not created, they are evolved; they grow, and the thing that grows is not separable from the force that causes it to grow.  The water turns the wheel, and can be shut off or let on.  This is the way of the mechanical world.  But the wheels in organic nature go around from something inside them, a kind of perpetual motion, or self-supplying power.  They are not turned, they turn; they are not repaired, they repair.  The nature of living things cannot be interpreted by the laws of mechanical and chemical things, though mechanics and chemistry play the visible, tangible part in them.  If we must discard the notion of a vital force, we may, as Professor Hartog suggests, make use of the term “vital behavior.”

Of course man tries everything by himself and his own standards.  He knows no intelligence but his own, no prudence, no love, no mercy, no justice, no economy, but his own, no god but such a one as fits his conception.

In view of all these things, how man got here is a problem.  Why the slender thread of his line of descent was not broken in the warrings and upheavals of the terrible geologic ages, what power or agent took a hand in furthering his development, is beyond the reach of our biologic science.

Man’s is the only intelligence, as we understand the word, in the universe, and his intelligence demands something akin to intelligence in the nature from which he sprang.

VII

LIFE AND MIND

I

There are three kinds of change in the world in which we live—­physical and mechanical change which goes on in time and place among the tangible bodies about us, chemical change which goes on in the world of hidden molecules and atoms of which bodies are composed, and vital change which involves the two former, but which also involves the mysterious principle or activity which we call life.  Life comes and goes, but the physical and chemical orders remain.  The vegetable and animal kingdoms wax and wane, or disappear entirely, but the physico-chemical forces are as indestructible as matter itself.  This fugitive and evanescent character of life, the way it uses and triumphs over the material forces, setting up new chemical activities in matter, sweeping over the land-areas of the earth like a conflagration, lifting the inorganic elements up into myriads of changing and beautiful forms, instituting a vast number of new chemical processes and compounds, defying the laboratory to reproduce it or kindle its least spark—­a flame that cannot exist without carbon and oxygen,