the energies of the body (derived from food) _very
slightly_ by a sort of "hair-trigger" action, which releases a vast
amount of energy, quite disproportionate to the energy of direction
applied. But surely this is a mere begging of the question! One is
reminded of Marryat's character, who asked to have her illegitimate baby
excused "because it was such a little one!" No matter how _slight_ the
amount of energy may be, if it is capable of affecting energy at all, it
_is_ energy, and hence subject to the law of conservation. Life, as
energy, must lie wholly outside the law (in which case all talk of
"control" and "guidance" must go by the board), or it must lie wholly
within it (in which case life becomes a purely "physical" energy, like
any other, and cannot well be thought to exercise this "guidance").[15]

We have thus seen that the second of our two alternatives (that life is
no-energy) is untenable. Let us now return to the first--that life _is_
energy--and see whither it leads us.

If life be a form or mode of energy, it might affect, guide, and direct
other modes of energy, or the matter of the body (and, through it, of
the inorganic world) readily enough. It would affect them, but blindly.
It could have no intelligent action. If life be an energy, it must be
like all other energies in this respect; it must fall within the law of
conservation and be non-intelligent. Otherwise it would be something
different from all other forms of energy; and so we should have energy,
plus intelligence, in the case of life; and only energy for all other
forms. But in that case life could not simply be converted into or
derived from any other mode of energy; because we should have
"intelligence" left over, in our equation--which was created _de novo_
whenever life was derived from other energies, and plunged into
extinction and nothingness whenever life passed into any other mode of
energy--in the course of our daily lives. But this is contrary both to
experience and to all legitimate scientific thinking! Life, therefore,
cannot be an intelligent or a directive energy. And so this argument
also goes by the board, and we have left to us only the old
materialistic conception of a non-intelligent, blind, life-force, or
energy, derived from food, by a process of chemical combustion, and
essentially no more mysterious than any other energy. This, therefore,
is the conclusion to which we seem driven.

But such a conclusion is not only