_ If those
words express more than ignorance, they express the love of it. Even
if the vitalists were right in despairing of further scientific
discoveries, they would be wrong in offering their verbiage as a
substitute. Nature may possibly have only a very loose hazy
constitution, to be watched and understood as sailors watch and
understand the weather; but Neptune and AEolus are not thereby proved
to be the authors of storms. Yet M. Bergson thinks if life could only
be safely shown to arise unaccountably, that would prove the invisible
efficacy of a mighty tendency to life. But would the ultimate
contexture and miracle of things be made less arbitrary, and less a
matter of brute fact, by the presence behind them of an actual and
arbitrary effort that such should be their nature? If this word
"effort" is not a mere figure of rhetoric, a name for a movement in
things of which the end happens to interest us more than the
beginning, if it is meant to be an effort actually and consciously
existing, then we must proceed to ask: Why did this effort exist? Why
did it choose that particular end to strive for? How did it reach the
conception of that end, which had never been realised before, and
which no existent nature demanded for its fulfilment? How did the
effort, once made specific, select the particular matter it was to
transform? Why did this matter respond to the disembodied effort that
it should change its habits? Not one of these questions is easier to
answer than the question why nature is living or animals have eyes.
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