ng, and how does it
differ from a mechanical and non-living thing? If I smash or overturn
the sundial with my hoe, or break the hoe itself, these things stay
smashed and broken, but the burdock mends itself, renews itself, and, if
I am not on my guard, will surreptitiously mature some of the burs
before the season is passed.

Evidently a living thing is radically different from a mechanical thing;
yet modern physical science tells me that the burdock is only another
kind of machine, and manifests nothing but the activity of the
mechanical and chemical principles that we see in operation all about us
in dead matter; and that a little different mechanical arrangement of
its ultimate atoms would turn it into a yellow dock or into a cabbage,
into an oak or into a pine, into an ox or into a man.

I see that it is a machine in this respect, that it is set going by a
force exterior to itself--the warmth of the sun acting upon it, and upon
the moisture in the soil; but it is unmechanical in that it repairs
itself and grows and reproduces itself, and after it has ceased running
can never be made to run again. After I have reduced all its activities
to mechanical and chemical principles, my mind seems to see something
that chemistry and mechanics do not explain--something that avails
itself of these forces, but is not of them. This may be only my
anthropomorphic way of looking at things, but are not all our ways of
looking at things anthropomorphic? How can they be any other? They
cannot be deific since we are not gods. They may be scientific. But what
is science but a kind of anthropomorphism? Kant wisely said, "It sounds
at first singular, but is none the less certain, that the understanding
does not derive its laws from nature, but prescribes them to nature."
This is the anthropomorphism of science.

If I attribute the phenomenon of life to a vital force or principle, am
I any more unscientific than I am when I give a local habitation and a
name to any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, cohesion,
osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These terms stand for certain
special activities in nature and are as much the inventions of our own
minds as are any of the rest of our ideas.

We can help ourselves out, as Haeckel does, by calling the physical
forces--such as the magnet that attracts the iron filings, the powder
that explodes, the steam that drives the locomotive, and the
like--"living inorganics," and looking