set up among these elements, but the
elements themselves are not changed; oxygen is still oxygen and carbon
still carbon, yet behold the wonder of their new workmanship under the
tutelage of life!

Life only appears when the stable passes into the unstable, yet this
change takes place all about us in our laboratories, and no life
appears. We can send an electric spark through a room full of oxygen and
hydrogen gas, and with a tremendous explosion we have water--an element
of life, but not life.

Some of the elements seem nearer life than others. Water is near life;
heat, light, the colloid state are near life; osmosis, oxidation,
chemical reactions are near life; the ashes of inorganic bodies are
nearer life than the same minerals in the rocks and soil; but none of
these things is life.

The chemical mixture of some of the elements gives us our high
explosives--gunpowder, guncotton, and the like; their organic mixture
gives a slower kind of explosive--bread, meat, milk, fruit, which, when
acted upon by the vital forces of the body, yield the force that is the
equivalent of the work the body does. But to combine them in the
laboratory so as to produce the compounds out of which the body can
extract force is impossible. We can make an unstable compound that will
hurl a ton of iron ten miles, but not one that when exploded in the
digestive tract of the human body will lift a hair.

We may follow life down to the ground, yes, under the ground, into the
very roots of matter and motion, yea, beyond the roots, into the
imaginary world of molecules and atoms, and their attractions and
repulsions and not find its secret. Indeed, science--the new
science--pursues matter to the vanishing-point, where it ceases to
become matter and becomes pure force or spirit. What takes place in that
imaginary world where ponderable matter ends and becomes disembodied
force, and where the hypothetical atoms are no longer divisible, we may
conjecture but may never know. We may fancy the infinitely little going
through a cycle of evolution like that of the infinitely great, and
solar systems developing and revolving inside of the ultimate atoms, but
the Copernicus or the Laplace of the atomic astronomy has not yet
appeared. The atom itself is an invention of science. To get the mystery
of vitality reduced to the atom is getting it in very close quarters,
but it is a very big mystery still. Just how the dead becomes alive,
even in the atom, is