is only one of its aspects
or products."

What a contrast to Herbert Spencer's view of life and evolution!
"Life," says Spencer, "consists of inner action so adjusted as to
balance outer action." True enough, no doubt, but not interesting. If
the philosopher could tell us what it is that brings about the
adjustment, and that profits by it, we should at once prick up our ears.
Of course, it is life. But what is life? It is inner action so adjusted
as to balance outer action!

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