Post 24656
Created:
Modified:
If I attribute the phenomenon of life to a vital force or principle, am I any more unscientific than I am when I give a local habitation and a name to any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, cohesion, osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These terms stand for certain special activities in nature and are as much the inventions of our own minds as are any of the rest of our ideas.
We can help ourselves out, as Haeckel does, by calling the physical forces–such as the magnet that attracts the iron filings, the powder that explodes, the steam that drives the locomotive, and the like–“living inorganics,” and looking upon them as acting by “living force as much as the sensitive mimosa does when it contracts its leaves at touch.” But living force is what we are trying to differentiate from mechanical force, and what do we gain by confounding the two? We can only look upon a living body as a machine by forming new conceptions of a machine–a machine utterly unmechanical, which is a contradiction of terms.
A man may expend the same kind of force in thinking that he expends in chopping his wood, but that fact does not put the two kinds of activity on the same level. There is no question but that the food consumed is the source of the energy in both cases, but in the one the energy is muscular, and in the other it is nervous. When we speak of mental or spiritual force, we have as distinct a conception as when we speak of physical force. It requires physical force to produce the effect that we call mental force, though how the one can result in the other is past understanding. The law of the correlation and conservation of energy requires that what goes into the body as physical force must come out in some form of physical force–heat, light, electricity, and so forth.