some force
or principle in itself, as M. Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge do, existing
apart from the matter it animates.

Sir Oliver Lodge, famous physicist that he is, yet has a vein of
mysticism and idealism in him which sometimes makes him recoil from the
hard-and-fast interpretations of natural phenomena by physical science.
Like M. Bergson, he sees in life some tendency or impetus which arose in
matter at a definite time and place, "and which has continued to
interact with and incarnate itself in matter ever since."

If a living body is a machine, then we behold a new kind of machine with
new kinds of mechanical principles--a machine that repairs itself, that
reproduces itself, a clock that winds itself up, an engine that stokes
itself, a gun that aims itself, a machine that divides and makes two,
two unite and make four, a million or more unite and make a man or a
tree--a machine that is nine tenths water, a machine that feeds on other
machines, a machine that grows stronger with use; in fact, a machine
that does all sorts of unmechanical things and that no known combination
of mechanical and chemical principles can reproduce--a vital machine.
The idea of the vital as something different from and opposed to the
mechanical must come in. Something had to be added to the mechanical and
chemical to make the vital.

Spencer explains in terms of physics why an ox is larger than the sheep,
but he throws no light upon the subject of the individuality of these
animals--what it is that makes an ox an ox or a sheep a sheep. These
animals are built up out of the same elements by the same processes, and
they may both have had the same stem form in remote biologic time. If
so, what made them diverge and develop into such totally different
forms? After the living body is once launched many, if not all, of its
operations and economies can be explained on principles of mechanics and
chemistry, but the something that avails itself of these principles and
develops an ox in the one case and a sheep in the other--what of that?

Spencer is forced into using the terms "amount of vital capital." How
much more of it some men, some animals, some plants have than others!
What is it? What did Spencer mean by it? This capital augments from
youth to manhood, and then after a short or long state of equilibrium
slowly declines to the vanishing-point.

Again, what a man does depends upon what he is, and what he is depends
upon what he does. St