Post 24916
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Free or single atoms are very rare; they all quickly find their mates or partners. This eagerness of the elements to combine is one of the mysteries. If the world of visible matter were at one stroke resolved into its constituent atoms, it would practically disappear; we might smell it, or taste it, if we were left, but we could not see it, or feel it; the water would vanish, the solid ground would vanish–more than half of it into oxygen atoms, and the rest mainly into silicon atoms.
The atoms of different bodies are all alike, and presumably each holds the same amount of electric energy. One wonders, then, how the order in which they are arranged can affect them so widely as to produce bodies so unlike as, say, alcohol and ether. This brings before us again the mystery of chemical arrangement or combination, so different from anything we know among tangible bodies. It seems to imply that each atom has its own individuality. Mix up a lot of pebbles together, and the result would be hardly affected by the order of the arrangement, but mix up a lot of people, and the result would be greatly affected by the fact of who is elbowing who. It seems the same among the mysterious atoms, as if some complemented or stimulated those next them, or had an opposite effect. But can we think of the atoms in a chemical compound as being next one another, or merely in juxtaposition? Do we not rather have to think of them as identified with one another to an extent that has no parallel in the world of ponderable bodies? A kind of sympathy or affinity makes them one in a sense that we only see realized among living beings.
Chemical activity is the first step from physical activity to vital activity, but the last step is taken rarely–the other two are universal. Chemical changes involve the atom. What do vital changes involve? We do not know. We can easily bring about the chemical changes, but not so the vital changes. A chemical change destroys one or more substances and produces others totally unlike them; a vital change breaks up substances and builds up other bodies out of them; it results in new compounds that finally cover the earth with myriads of new and strange forms.