and disease, and the like, do not
come in this sense; they arise. Life does not come to dead matter in
this sense; it arises. Day and night are not traveling round the earth,
though we view them that way; they arise from the turning of the earth
upon its axis. If we could keep up with the flying moments,--that is,
with the revolution of the earth,--we could live always at sunrise, or
sunset, or at noon, or at any other moment we cared to elect. Love or
hate does not come to our hearts; it is born there; the breath does not
come to the newborn infant; respiration arises there automatically. See
how the life of the infant is involved in that first breath, yet it is
not its life; the infant must first be alive before it can breathe. If
it is still-born, the respiratory reaction does not take place. We can
say, then, that the breath means life, and the life means breath; only
we must say the latter first. We can say in the same way that
organization means life, and life means organization. Something sets up
the organizing process in matter. We may take all the physical elements
of life known to us and jumble them together and shake them up to all
eternity, and life will not result. A little friction between solid
bodies begets heat, a little more and we get fire. But no amount of
friction begets life. Heat and life go together, but heat is the
secondary factor.

Life is always a vanishing-point, a constant becoming--an unstable
something that escapes us while we seem to analyze it. In its nature or
essence, it is a metaphysical problem, and not one of physical science.
Science cannot grasp it; it evaporates in its crucibles. And science is
compelled finally to drive it into an imaginary region--I had almost
said, metaphysical region, the region of the invisible, hypothetical
atoms of matter. Here in the mysteries of molecular attraction and
repulsion, it conceives the secret of life to lie.

"Life is a wave," says Tyndall, but does not one conceive of something,
some force or impulse in the wave that is not of the wave? What is it
that travels along lifting new water each moment up into waves? It is a
physical force communicated usually by the winds. When the wave dies
upon the shore, this force is dissipated, not lost, or is turned into
heat. Why may we not think of life as a vital force traveling through
matter and lifting up into organic life waves in the same way? But not
translatable into any other form of energy bec