more real to the mind than vitality?
Both are names for mysteries. Something which we call life lifts matter
up, in opposition to gravity, into thousands of living forms. The tree
lifts potash, silica, and lime up one or two hundred feet into the air;
it elbows the soil away from its hole where it enters the ground; its
roots split rocks. A giant sequoia lifts tons of solid matter and water
up hundreds of feet. So will an explosion of powder or dynamite, but the
tree does it slowly and silently by the organizing power of life. The
vital is as inscrutably identified with the mechanical and chemical as
the soul is identified with the body. They are one while yet they are
two.

For purely mechanical things we can find equivalents. Arrest a purely
mechanical process, and the machine only rests or rusts; arrest a vital
process, and the machine evaporates, disintegrates, myriads of other
machines reduce it to its original mineral and gaseous elements. In the
organic world we strike a principle that is incalculable in its
operation and incommensurable in its results. The physico-chemical
forces we can bring to book; we know their orbits, their attractions and
repulsions, and just what they will and will not do; we can forecast
their movements and foresee their effects. But the vital forces
transcend all our mathematics; we cannot anticipate their behavior.
Start inert matter in motion and we know pretty nearly what will happen
to it; mix the chemical elements together and we can foresee the
results; but start processes or reactions we call life, and who can
foresee the end? We know the sap will mount in the tree and the tree
will be true to its type, but what do we or can we know of what it is
that determines its kind and size? We know that in certain plants the
leaves will always be opposite each other on the stalk, and that in
other plants the leaves will alternate; that certain plants will have
conspicuous and others inconspicuous flowers; but how can we know what
it is in the cells of the plants that determines these things? We can
graft the scion of a sour apple tree upon a sweet, and _vice versa_, and
the fruit of the scion will be true to its kind, but no analysis of the
scion or of the stock will reveal the secret, as it would in the case of
chemical compounds. In inorganic nature we meet with concretions, but
not secretions; with crystallization, but not with assimilation and
growth from within. Chemistry tells us th