hough all our gods
totter and fall, science goes its way; though our hearts are chilled and
our lives are orphaned, science cannot turn aside, or veil its light. It
does not temper the wind to the shorn lamb.

Hence the scientific conception of the universe repels many people. They
are not equal to it. To think of life as involved in the very
constitution of matter itself is a much harder proposition than to
conceive of it as Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge do, as an independent
reality. The latter view gives the mind something more tangible to lay
hold of. Indeed, science gives the mind nothing to take hold of. Does
any chemical process give the mind any separate reality to take hold of?
Is there a spirit of fire, or of decay, or of disease, or of health?

IX

Behold a man with his wonderful body, and still more wonderful mind; try
to think of him as being fathered and mothered by the mere mechanical
and chemical forces that we see at work in the rocks and soil underfoot,
begotten by chemical affinity or the solar energy working as molecular
physic, and mothered by the warmth and moisture, by osmosis and the
colloid state--and all through the chance clashings and groupings of the
irrational physical forces. Nothing is added to them, nothing guides or
inspires them, nothing moves upon the face of the waters, nothing
breathes upon the insensate clay. The molecules or corpuscles of the
four principal elements--carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen--just
happened to come together in certain definite numbers, and in a certain
definite order, and invented or built up that most marvelous thing in
the universe, the cell. The cells put their heads, or bodies, together,
and built the tissues, the tissues formed the organs, the organs in
convention assembled organized themselves into the body, and behold! a
man, a bird, or a tree!--as chance a happening as the juxtaposition of
the grains of sand upon the shore, or the shape of the summer clouds in
the sky.

Aristotle dwells upon the internal necessity. The teeth of an animal
arise from necessity, he says; the animal must have them in order to
live. Yet it must have lived before it had them, else how would the
necessity arise? If the horns of an animal arise from the same
necessity, the changing conditions of its life begat the necessity; its
life problem became more and more complicated, till new tools arose to
meet new wants. But without some indwelling principle of developm