The green leaf of the tree, the blade of the wheat that gives me bread—I look at them and tell myself, as many a man has told himself before, that if I could read their secrets I should know, as from the 'flower in the crannied wall,' 'what God and man is.' So I might, but only as far as their secrets go. If I could read my own I should go farther and know more. I am man and hold far greater secrets in being man. And I have the inestimable advantage of being inside myself, of being alive, besides looking on at living, of both growing and watching growth. There is no other live creature on earth who can possibly tell me as much as I can tell myself about what it means to be alive. And if the blade of wheat is wonderful beyond words, what am I?

Think of it: I have a history; indeed I am a history, I am time alive, time that accumulates and lasts. I have a past that is not past, because it is at work in my present and is writing its indelible signature on my future. There is no least action in my past that has not left its impress on me, made me different from what I should have been without it, and therefore will make my future different too. My whole history is alive, active and changing in my actions and my change. The history of my forefathers, too, is alive in me and in my character and powers. I have an inheritance from their living; I am as and what I am, in part because they were as and what they were. But I have power and I use it to create myself and recreate my inheritance through an impetus transmitted to me in the transmission to me of my life. Therefore every moment of my life is a unique and original moment of a unique and original history, mine and mine alone, never to be repeated, never to be wholly predicted, even by me. The evolutionist philosophy tells me that I endure, I last, and that all my changes and experiences endure, last, in and with me, changing in themselves and among themselves as though they were alive to influence and interpenetrate each other. Indeed they are alive in me and in my life or they could not endure. They would pass like the stages in the height of a sand heap as it grows, as the little heap it was is merged and lost in the larger heap it is. They would be lost as the flowing tide is lost when the ebb succeeds it. Such changes are mere successions, displacements and replacements; they are not history. They enter history only in sharing that of the universe which itself endures, lasts, and within which they are parts.

I, on the other hand, have a life of my own; I am a maker, shaper, creator. I am a master-worker and freeman in a world of relative necessity. Yet my wonderful living body, through which I do my work, depends for its support on the green blades of grass and corn and the green leaves of the trees. Further—every cell of the millions and millions in my body is like the amoeba and the cells of the plant in consisting of protoplasm. Further still—I began my own life as a speck of protoplasm, and if I could trace all the steps of my pedigree to the first display of life on earth, from which I am sure I am descended, I should (I dare to say) find another protoplasmic speck with which every one of the cells of the vast cellular republic whereby and wherein I live is in historical continuity. Bodily I am immensely complicated; I am a congeries and a commonwealth of cells. But the first cell was also complicated although it was but one. Nothing that lives is simple, no, not even if we carry the idea of life far beyond the arbitrary boundaries commonly set to it now. There is unplumbed mystery in the conjunction of two atoms of hydrogen with one of oxygen to make a third and different substance, water; there is unplumbed mystery in every element and every happening of the world. But some mysterious things are scientifically more complex than others, and among the most complex is this thing, protoplasm. Yet it seems that before life could be manifest in the world the molecular complexity of protoplasm must have been attained. By storing power in building up the atoms of the chemical elements from electrons, and making that power useful by the union of atoms in molecules; then, by a further delicate union between molecules (much after the fashion of widely branching, but only slightly tenacious, magnets) forming larger and ever larger groups, a condition of such plasticity of matter and ready discharge and restoring of power has been attained as makes it fit for the rank of a recognized life. The grouped and complicated molecules, each charged with power, are set as with a double-acting hair-trigger, so ready are they to let go energy in heat and work as these are wanted; so ready also for their rebuilding in the peculiar power of the life with which they are imbued.

There are examples of highly complex union to be seen in the chemist's laboratory and elsewhere which are never called living matter. The chemist speaks of some of them as colloids (we should naturally call many of these jellies, or gums) and he calls protoplasm a colloid too. They have remarkable properties, and the new bio-chemist thinks he may some day make that elaborate colloid with more remarkable properties, which we know as protoplasm. He thinks also that we do ill to confine the first production of life-jellies to the age of steaming seas and cloud-shadowed lagoons, before the Pre-Cambrian geologic times. He tells us that in his opinion it may always be going on and always have gone on since the earth was cool enough to permit of it. He thinks that if all the living creatures we are aware of were swept out of the world to-day there would still be living stuff remaining on it of which we are ignorant now; and that in the course of millenniums this would people it once more. The beginnings of the life-jelly must be so small as to be far out of the reach of our microscopes and every other tool we can bring to bear, as yet, he says. And there, doubtless, he is right.

Let us suppose that he is right, too, in his main contention. Let us look at inorganic matter with a new eye, seeing in its evolutionary change the forerunner of greater change and greater evolution, the preparer of the narrow pathway by which life approaches to its display, and at last enters on possession of a body that in union with it shall be the germ of lives to come—enters the realm of physical forces and the relative necessity of material things, where and by use of those forces it will subdue necessity to the purposes of freedom. This indeed seems to be the manner and purposing of life as it extends from the single cell to the assemblage of cells that constitutes my body. There is continuity from first to last; and yet the differences between me and the primitive jelly-speck are even more striking than the resemblances. Students of the cell itself and students of my body as merely composed of cells are, naturally, cytologists, histologists, physiologists, embryologists, and the like. But unless there are others, unless students of psychology, ethics, aesthetics, social science, history, and many more, bring their minds to bear on me, I am studied to little sense and in small part. I am obliged to regard myself as not only physical but psychical; I seek after, and sometimes find, goodness and truth and beauty. I admire, I hate or love. I am a hero or a criminal, or both. I sin. In the advance of life from the minute and primitive colloid lump to me amazing things have happened. When I see life making its humble appearance by that speck of jelly, I must in my mind's eye connect it with what I am, and see there in its almost inchoate wonders the promise of myself. And still I must look behind even that first living thing and consider matter as well as life; for the physical potency of that thing was long of building up; and this physical potency has its place in me. The material pathway of life is the pathway of my powers, and it stretches far back into cosmic happenings smaller or (it depends how you look at these high matters and what you see in them) greater still.

We have no need to stretch imagination unaided; we may watch changes going on which indicate or, maybe, reproduce, stages in the creation of our own world and of its very elements. There are stars in which material elements are being either made or destroyed; it is hard for us to say which. In the constellation Argo there are two suns—furnaces of immeasurable heat—in which hydrogen, the lightest and simplest of our elements, is either being born or disintegrated before our eyes. There are other stars where hydrogen is in the same state as that in which we know it here, and more complex elements (for the elements of the chemist are in reality complex; they are only elements for him, because he cannot disintegrate them) are being born or, again, are being destroyed. There are stars in all stages up to the stage of our own sun and beyond, in age and powers; and there are elements of many degrees of complexity. In the series of those stars there is a series of changes which, taken together, mark for us either an ascent of matter from the immaterial, or a descent towards it. There is iron in its very infancy to be seen in some—proto-iron we call it—which we are able to produce ourselves by exposing ordinary iron to the intense heat of the electric vacuum spark and there disrupting it into a simpler mode which the spectroscope detects as it detects it in a star. We are entitled to say that in these changes material elements declare themselves to be things that somewhere and somehow are born and grow, whether in any one stage that we watch they are moving in one direction or another, from birth or down towards death. Indeed the most probable thing is that in the solar furnace-fires both movements are going on together; elements are being born and elements annulled. They have an origin, these elements. Some scientific men suggest to us that they issue from the universal ether that fills the interstellar spaces and the spaces of the stars themselves, of our own bodies, of all things in all worlds. Here the first stones of the pathway on which life travels may have (in their belief) been shaped. And neither chemist nor physicist can even guess at anything beyond. We stop here, as men of science only. It is at a place full of marvels that we are arrested. This ether is so marvellous that some rash men have deemed it competent to replace God. They have asked what need we have of any other God. And, truly, if the creations of worlds that are no more than physical were all a God was needed for, this amazing source of worlds would seem, not so unreasonably, to be enough. Whether the ether is immaterial or not, we might say the same. There are those who hold that it is the first and finest of the elements of matter. For men who know most about it, it is no kind of matter. But its power and fertility remain, however this may be; it is held to be the medium of communication everywhere, between small and great, distant and near; and the womb of the worlds. Undoubtedly it may serve the pseudo-physicist-philosopher in place of God, while he is no more than that.

The pathway for life has been traced back and back to the utmost of the regressive journey of science. We have seen (perhaps) the first stones being fashioned in the fires of the suns; at least we may believe that in some such place and way they have been and are being fashioned. We know—radium has shown us and the proto-iron—how chemical elements can be disintegrated and brought down to lower states of material complexity. In radio-active matter there is more than a hint that they may be brought lower still, returned to the fecund mother from which they came, restored, let us say, to the ether.

We may have learnt—that depends on our prepossessions—we may have learnt in studying this regress to see in what the chemist calls the 'affinity' of one element for another, and in its 'valency' (that is, its ability to grip one or another and even several to itself and take part in building up compounds), a likeness or a congruity with living stuff. And we have seen a living thing as compounded physically of the compounds of the chemist, though not, as yet, compounded by him. Unless our prepossessions form in us irrational prejudice we may gladly follow the clue science puts in our hands, and confess a continuous advance in order upon order of nature from the womb of the ether to ourselves.