; they all quickly find their mates or
partners. This eagerness of the elements to combine is one of the
mysteries. If the world of visible matter were at one stroke resolved
into its constituent atoms, it would practically disappear; we might
smell it, or taste it, if we were left, but we could not see it, or feel
it; the water would vanish, the solid ground would vanish--more than
half of it into oxygen atoms, and the rest mainly into silicon atoms.

The atoms of different bodies are all alike, and presumably each holds
the same amount of electric energy. One wonders, then, how the order in
which they are arranged can affect them so widely as to produce bodies
so unlike as, say, alcohol and ether. This brings before us again the
mystery of chemical arrangement or combination, so different from
anything we know among tangible bodies. It seems to imply that each atom
has its own individuality. Mix up a lot of pebbles together, and the
result would be hardly affected by the order of the arrangement, but mix
up a lot of people, and the result would be greatly affected by the fact
of who is elbowing who. It seems the same among the mysterious atoms, as
if some complemented or stimulated those next them, or had an opposite
effect. But can we think of the atoms in a chemical compound as being
next one another, or merely in juxtaposition? Do we not rather have to
think of them as identified with one another to an extent that has no
parallel in the world of ponderable bodies? A kind of sympathy or
affinity makes them one in a sense that we only see realized among
living beings.

Chemical activity is the first step from physical activity to vital
activity, but the last step is taken rarely--the other two are
universal. Chemical changes involve the atom. What do vital changes
involve? We do not know. We can easily bring about the chemical
changes, but not so the vital changes. A chemical change destroys one or
more substances and produces others totally unlike them; a vital change
breaks up substances and builds up other bodies out of them; it results
in new compounds that finally cover the earth with myriads of new and
strange forms.

X

THE VITAL ORDER

I

The mechanistic theory of life--the theory that all living things can be
explained and fully accounted for on purely physico-chemical
principles--has many defenders in our day. The main aim of the foregoing
chapters is to point out the inadequacy of this view