A recent contemptuous critic of M. Bergson’s book, Hugh S. R. Elliot, points out, as if he were triumphantly vindicating the physico-chemical theory of the nature and origin of life, what a complete machine a cabbage is for converting solar energy into chemical and vital energy—­how it takes up the raw material from the soil by a chemical and mechanical process, how these are brought into contact with the light and air through the leaves, and thus the cabbage is built up.  In like manner, a man is a machine for converting chemical energy derived from the food he eats into motion, and the like.  As if M. Bergson, or any one else, would dispute these things!  In the same way, a steam-engine is a machine for converting the energy latent in coal into motion and power; but what force lies back of the engine, and was active in the construction?

The final question of the cabbage and the man still remains—­Where did you get them?

You assume vitality to start with—­how did you get it?  Did it arise spontaneously out of dead matter?  Mechanical and chemical forces do all the work of the living body, but who or what controls and directs them, so that one compounding of the elements begets a cabbage, and another compounding of the same elements begets an oak—­one mixture of them and we have a frog, another and we have a man?  Is there not room here for something besides blind, indifferent forces?  If we make the molecules themselves creative, then we are begging the question.  The creative energy by any other name remains the same.

IV

If life itself is not a force or a form of energy, yet behold what energy it is capable of exerting!  It seems to me that Sir Oliver Lodge is a little confusing when he says in a recent essay that “life does not exert force—­not even the most microscopical force—­and certainly does not supply energy.”  Sir Oliver is thinking of life as a distinct entity—­something apart from the matter which it animates.  But even in this case can we not say that the mainspring of the energy of living bodies is the life that is in them?

Apart from the force exerted by living animal bodies, see the force exerted by living plant bodies.  I thought of the remark of Sir Oliver one day not long after reading it, while I was walking in a beech wood and noted how the sprouting beechnuts had sent their pale radicles down through the dry leaves upon which they were lying, often piercing two or three of them, and forcing their way down into the mingled soil and leaf-mould a couple of inches.  Force was certainly expended in doing this, and if the life in the sprouting nut did not exert it or expend it, what did?

When I drive a peg into the ground with my axe or mallet, is the life in my arm any more strictly the source (the secondary source) of the energy expended than is the nut in this case?  Of course, the sun is the primal source of the energy in both cases, and in all cases, but does not life exert the force, use it, bring it to bear, which it receives from the universal fount of energy?