The Breath of Life

by John Burroughs

I recall that Huxley said that there was a third reality in this universe besides matter and energy, and this third reality was consciousness. But neither the "x-entity" of Professor Ganong nor the "consciousness" of Huxley can be said to be of the same cosmic rank as matter and energy, because they do not pervade the universe as matter and energy do. These forces abound throughout all space and endure throughout all time, but life and consciousness are flitting and uncertain phenomena of matter. A prick of a pin, or a blow from a hammer, may destroy both. Unless we consider them as potential in all matter (and who shall say that they are not?) may we look upon them as of cosmic rank?

It is often urged that it is not the eye that sees, or the brain that thinks, but something in them. But it is something in them that never went into them; it arose in them. It is the living eye and the living brain that do the seeing and the thinking. When the life activity ceases, these organs cease to see and to think. Their activity is kept up by certain physiological processes in the organs of the body, and to ask what keeps up these is like the puppy trying to overtake its own tail, or to run a race with its own shadow.

The brain is not merely the organ of the mind in an external and mechanical sense; it is the mind. When we come to living things, all such analogies fail us. Life is not a thing; thought is not a thing; but rather the effect of a certain activity in matter, which mind alone can recognize. When we try to explain or account for that which we are, it is as if a man were trying to lift himself.

Life seems like something apart. It does not seem to be amenable to the law of the correlation and conservation of forces. You cannot transform it into heat or light or electricity. The force which a man extracts from the food he eats while he is writing a poem, or doing any other mental work, seems lost to the universe. The force which the engine, or any machine, uses up, reappears as work done, or as heat or light or some other physical manifestation. But the energy of foodstuffs which a man uses up in a mental effort does not appear again in the circuit of the law of the conservation of energy. A man uses up more energy in his waking moments, though his body be passive, than in his sleeping. What we call mental force cannot be accounted for in terms of physical force. The sun's energy goes into our bodies through the food we eat, and so runs our mental faculties, but how does it get back again into the physical realm? Science does not know.

It must be some sort of energy that lights the lamps of the firefly and the glow-worm, and it must be some sort or degree of energy that keeps consciousness going. The brain of a Newton, or of a Plato, must make a larger draft on the solar energy latent in food-stuffs than the brain of a day laborer, and his body less. The same amount of food-consumption, or of oxidation, results in physical force in the one case, and mental force in the other, but the mental force escapes the great law of the equivalence of the material forces.

John Fiske solves the problem when he drops his physical science and takes up his philosophy, declaring that the relation of the mind to the body is that of a musician to his instrument, and this is practically the position of Sir Oliver Lodge.

Inheritance and adaptation, says Haeckel, are sufficient to account for all the variety of animal and vegetable forms on the earth. But is there not a previous question? Do we not want inheritance and adaptation accounted for? What mysteries they hold! Does the river-bed account for the river? How can a body adapt itself to its environment unless it possess an inherent, plastic, changing, and adaptive principle? A stone does not adapt itself to its surroundings; its change is external and not internal. There is mechanical adjustment between inert bodies, but there is no adaptation without the push of life. A response to new conditions by change of form implies something actively responsive—something that profits by the change.

VII

If we could tell what determines the division of labor in the hive of bees or a colony of ants, we could tell what determines the division of labor among the cells in the body. A hive of bees and a colony of ants is a unit—a single organism. The spirit of the body, that which regulates all its economies, which directs all its functions, which coördinates its powers, which brings about all its adaptations, which adjusts it to its environment, which sees to its repairs, heals its wounds, meets its demands, provides more force when more is needed, which makes one organ help do the work of another, which wages war on disease germs by specific ferments, which renders us immune to this or that disease; in fact, which carries on all the processes of our physical life without asking leave or seeking counsel of us,—all this is on another plane from the mechanical or chemical—super-mechanical.

The human spirit, the brute spirit, the vegetable spirit—all are mere names to fill a void. The spirit of the oak, the beech, the pine, the palm—how different! how different the plan or idea or interior economies of each, though the chemical and mechanical processes are the same, the same mineral and gaseous elements build them up, the same sun is their architect! But what physical principle can account for the difference between a pine and an oak, or, for that matter, between a man and his dog, or a bird and a fish, or a crow and a lark? What play and action or interaction and reaction of purely chemical and mechanical forces can throw any light on the course evolution has taken in the animal life of the globe—why the camel is the camel, and the horse the horse? or in the development of the nervous system, or the circulatory system, or the digestive system, or of the eye, or of the ear?