acted to their places?

L. Cover a piece of paper with spots, at equal intervals; and then
imagine any kind of attraction you choose, or any law of attraction, to
exist between the spots, and try how, on that permitted supposition, you
can attract them into the figure of a Maltese cross, in the middle of
the paper.

MARY (_having tried it_). Yes; I see that I cannot:--one would need all
kinds of attractions, in different ways, at different places. But you do
not mean that the atoms are alive?

L. What is it to be alive?

DORA. There now; you're going to be provoking, I know.

L. I do not see why it should be provoking to be asked what it is to be
alive. Do you think you don't know whether you are alive or not?

(ISABEL _skips to the end of the room and back._)

L. Yes, Isabel, that's all very fine; and you and I may call that being
alive: but a modern philosopher calls it being in a 'mode of motion.' It
requires a certain quantity of heat to take you to the sideboard; and
exactly the same quantity to bring you back again. That's all.

ISABEL. No, it isn't. And besides, I'm not hot.

L. I am, sometimes, at the way they talk. However, you know, Isabel, you
might have been a particle of a mineral, and yet have been carried round
the room, or anywhere else, by chemical forces, in the liveliest way.

ISABEL. Yes; but I wasn't carried: I carried myself.

L. The fact is, mousie, the difficulty is not so much to say what makes
a thing alive, as what makes it a Self. As soon as you are shut off from
the rest of the universe into a Self, you begin to be alive.

VIOLET (_indignant_). Oh, surely--surely that cannot be so. Is not all
the life of the soul in communion, not separation?

L. There can be no communion where there is no distinction. But we shall
be in an abyss of metaphysics presently, if we don't look out; and
besides, we must not be too grand, to-day, for the younger children.
We'll be grand, some day, by ourselves, if we must. (_The younger
children are not pleased, and prepare to remonstrate; but, knowing by
experience, that all conversations in which the word 'communion' occurs,
are unintelligible, think better of it._) Meantime, for broad answer
about the atoms. I do not think we should use the word 'life,' of any
energy which does not belong to a given form. A seed, or an egg, or a
young animal are properly called 'alive' with respect to the force
belonging to those forms, which consistently deve