they merely utilise available energy like any other machine, live
things are able to direct inorganic terrestrial energy along new and
special paths, so as to achieve results which without such living
agency could not have occurred--_e.g._ forests, ant-hills, birds'
nests, Forth bridge, sonatas, cathedrals.

I have never taught, nor for a moment thought, that "vital force is
akin to physical force, but that it needs guidance" (p. 747); the
phrase sounds to me nonsense. I perceive, not as a theory, but as a
fact, that life is _itself_ a guiding principle, a controlling agency,
_i.e._ that a live animal or plant can and does guide or influence the
elements of inorganic nature. The fact of an organism possessing life
enables it to build up material particles into many notable forms--oak,
eagle, man,--which material aggregates last until they are abandoned by
the guiding principle, when they more or less speedily fall into decay,
or become resolved into their elements, until utilised by a fresh
incarnation; and hence I say that whatever life is or is not, it is
certainly this: it is a guiding and controlling entity which interacts
with our world according to laws so partially known that we have to say
they are practically unknown, and therefore appear in some respects
mysterious. If it be thought that I mean by this something
superstitious, and for ever inexplicable or unintelligible, I have no
such meaning. I believe in the ultimate intelligibility of the
universe, though our present brains may require considerable
improvement before we can grasp the deepest things by their aid; but
this matter of "vitality" is probably not hopelessly beyond us; and it
does not follow, because we have no theory of life or death now, that
we shall be equally ignorant a century hence.

My chief objection to Professor Haeckel's literary work is that he is
dogmatic on such points as these, and would have people believe, what
doubtless he believes himself, that he already knows the answer to a
number of questions in the realms of physical nature and of philosophy.
He writes in so forcible and positive and determined a fashion, from
the vantage ground of scientific knowledge, that he exerts an undue
influence on the uncultured among his readers, and causes them to fancy
that only benighted fools or credulous dupes can really disagree with
the historical criticisms, the speculative opinions, and philosophical,
or perhaps unphilosophical, conje