-solid, fluid, gaseous, and ethereal,--of how
little our senses take in of their total activities, and we do not feel
the need of invoking a transcendental principle to account for it.

Yet to fail to see that what we must call intelligence pervades and is
active in all organic nature is to be spiritually blind. But to see it
as something foreign to, or separable from, nature is to do violence to
our faith in the constancy and sufficiency of the natural order. One
star differeth from another star in glory. There are degrees of mystery
in the universe. The most mysterious thing in inorganic nature is
electricity--that disembodied energy that slumbers in the ultimate
particles of matter--unseen, unfelt, unknown, till it suddenly leaps
forth with such terrible vividness and power on the face of the storm,
or till we summon it through the transformation of some other form of
energy. A still higher and more inscrutable mystery is life--that
something which clothes itself in such infinitely varied and beautiful
as well as unbeautiful forms of matter. We can evoke electricity at will
from many different sources, but we can evoke life only from other life;
the biogenetic law is inviolable.

IV

It takes some of the cold iron out of the mechanistic theory of life if
we divest it of all our associations with the machine-mad and
machine-ridden world in which we live and out of which our material
civilization came. The mechanical, the automatic, is the antithesis of
the spontaneous and the poetic, and it repels us on that account. We are
so made that the artificial systems please us far less than the natural
systems. A sailing-ship takes us more than a steamship. It is nearer
life, nearer the winged creatures. There is determinism in nature,
mechanical forces are everywhere operative, but there are no machines in
the proper sense of the word. When we call an organism a living machine
we at once take it out of the categories of the merely mechanical and
automatic and lift it into a higher order--the vital order.

Professor Le Dantec says we are mechanisms in the third degree, a
mechanism of a mechanism of a mechanism. The body is a mechanism by
virtue of its anatomy--its framework, its levers, its hinges; it is a
mechanism by virtue of its chemical activities; and it is a mechanism by
virtue of its colloid states--three kinds of mechanisms in one, and all
acting together harmoniously and as a unit--in other words, a
super-mech