Post 23509
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Life appears like the introduction of a new element or force or tendency into the cosmos. Henceforth the elements go new ways, form new compounds, build up new forms, and change the face of nature. Rivers flow where they never would have flowed without it, mountains fall in a space of time during which they never would have fallen; barriers arise, rough ways are made smooth, a new world appears–the world of man’s physical and mental activities.
If the gods of the inorganic elements are neither for nor against us, but utterly indifferent to us, how came we here? Nature’s method is always from the inside, while ours is from the outside; hers is circular while ours is direct. We think, as Bergson says, of things created, and of a thing that creates, but things in nature are not created, they are evolved; they grow, and the thing that grows is not separable from the force that causes it to grow. The water turns the wheel, and can be shut off or let on. This is the way of the mechanical world. But the wheels in organic nature go around from something inside them, a kind of perpetual motion, or self-supplying power. They are not turned, they turn; they are not repaired, they repair. The nature of living things cannot be interpreted by the laws of mechanical and chemical things, though mechanics and chemistry play the visible, tangible part in them. If we must discard the notion of a vital force, we may, as Professor Hartog suggests, make use of the term “vital behavior.”
Of course man tries everything by himself and his own standards. He knows no intelligence but his own, no prudence, no love, no mercy, no justice, no economy, but his own, no god but such a one as fits his conception.