anical combination of activities.

The mechanical conception of life repels us because of its association
in our minds with the fabrications of our own hands--the dead metal and
wood and the noise and dust of our machine-ridden and machine-produced
civilization.

But Nature makes no machines like our own. She uses mechanical
principles everywhere, in inert matter and in living bodies, but she
does not use them in the bald and literal way we do. We must divest her
mechanisms of the rigidity and angularity that pertain to the works of
our own hands. Her hooks and hinges and springs and sails and coils and
aeroplanes, all involve mechanical contrivances, but how differently
they impress us from our own application of the same principles! Even in
inert matter--in the dews, the rains, the winds, the tides, the snows,
the streams,--her mechanics and her chemistry and her hydrostatics and
pneumatics, seem much nearer akin to life than our own. We must remember
that Nature's machines are not human machines. When we place our machine
so that it is driven by the great universal currents,--the wheel in the
stream, the sail on the water,--the result is much more pleasing and
poetic than when propelled by artificial power. The more machinery we
get between ourselves and Nature, the farther off Nature seems. The
marvels of crystallization, the beautiful vegetable forms which the
frost etches upon the stone flagging of the sidewalk, and upon the
window-pane, delight us and we do not reason why. A natural bridge
pleases more than one which is the work of an engineer, yet the natural
bridge can only stand when it is based upon good engineering principles.
I found at the great Colorado Canon, that the more the monuments of
erosion were suggestive of human structures, or engineering and
architectural works, the more I was impressed by them. We are pleased
when Nature imitates man, and we are pleased when man imitates Nature,
and yet we recoil from the thought that life is only applied mechanics
and chemistry. But the thought that it is mechanics and chemistry
applied by something of which they as such, form no part, some agent or
principle which we call vitality, is welcome to us. No machine we have
ever made or seen can wind itself up, or has life, no chemical compound
from the laboratories ever develops a bit of organic matter, and
therefore we are disbelievers in the powers of these things.

V

Is gravity or chemical affinity any