he field, the drift boulders slowly creep down
the slopes; there is no doubt that the final source of the force is in
both cases the same; what we call gravity, a name for a mystery, is the
form it takes in the case of the rocks, and what we call vitality,
another name for a mystery, is the form it takes in the case of the
cattle; without the solar and stellar energy, could there be any motion
of either rock or beast?

Force is universal, it pervades all nature, one manifestation of it we
call heat, another light, another electricity, another cohesion,
chemical affinity, and so on. May not another manifestation of it be
called life, differing from all the rest more radically than they differ
from one another; bound up with all the rest and inseparable from them
and identical with them only in its ultimate source in the Creative
Energy that is immanent in the universe? I have to think of the Creative
Energy as immanent in all matter, and the final source of all the
transformations and transmutations we see in the organic and the
inorganic worlds. The very nature of our minds compels us to postulate
some power, or some principle, not as lying back of, but as active in,
all the changing forms of life and nature, and their final source and
cause.

The mind is satisfied when it finds a word that gives it a hold of a
thing or a process, or when it can picture to itself just how the thing
occurs. Thus, for instance, to account for the power generated by the
rushing together of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water, we have to
conceive of space between the atoms of these elements, and that the
force generated comes from the immense velocity with which the
infinitesimal atoms rush together across this infinitesimal space. It is
quite possible that this is not the true explanation at all, but it
satisfies the mind because it is an explanation in terms of mechanical
forces that we know.

The solar energy goes into the atoms or corpuscles one thing, and it
comes out another; it goes in as inorganic force, and it comes out as
organic and psychic. The change or transformation takes place in those
invisible laboratories of the infinitesimal atoms. It helps my mental
processes to give that change a name--vitality--and to recognize it as a
supra-mechanical force. Pasteur wanted a name for it and called it
"dissymmetric force."

We are all made of one stuff undoubtedly, vegetable and animal, man and
woman, dog and donkey, and the sec