9.5KB
Wallace D. Wattles Ultimate Collection — Chapter-94: The Living One
- Source: /library/Wallace D. Wattles Ultimate Collection/source-file.pdf
- PDF pages: 393–397
- Pages without text: none
- Note: Work: New Science of Living and Healing, section 7 of 9.
THE LIVING ONE. Table of Contents AT THE RISK of being guilty of wearisome repetition, I must here re-state some of the things which have gone before. I want you to have them fresh in your mind, so that you will fully grasp the arguments which follow, for the point is one which is rather difficult to state. Life is a force, a form of energy, as truly as heat and electricity are forms of energy. That which performs work is force, or energy. There is no distinction to be made between the life of the body and its work-power. Life is work-power. The work-power of the body is not drawn from the food consumed; this we have proved by the following facts:
- The anatomical structure of the body, which proves that the brain, not the stomach, is the power-plant of the organism.
- The phenomena of sleep prove that the brain is charged with work-power during the period of sleep.
- It is a mechanical impossibility that the enormous amount of work-power displayed by the body should be in the food consumed. A handful of rice cannot possibly furnish power to carry two hundred pounds over twenty miles of rocky ground.
- People can fast, if properly instructed, from twenty to sixty days without material loss of strength. This would be impossible if the work-power were drawn from the daily food.
- In death by starvation the brain loses no weight. Nature preserves the power- plant intact until the last.
- The accession of strength felt after eating must come from the brain. It cannot come from the food, which is still an undigested mass in the stomach.
- In severe sickness Nature always takes away the appetite; proving that the digestion of food is work; a tax on strength, and not a source of strength.
- All the other phenomena of life point us irresistibly to the conclusion that food is merely raw material, to be used in building up the body; and that it is used by an energy which is stored up in the brain during sleep. Now, as a form of energy, life presents one peculiar characteristic; it seems to be an exception to the law of the correlation of forces. Heat, light, and electricity are convertible, each into the others; but none of them, so far as we know, is convertible into life. Every living thing came from a germ, which contained part of a preceding life, and contained it as life, and not as something else to be converted into life. Life only comes from life; we cannot originate, generate or create it as we do electricity, by changing or combining other forces. It does not appear, so far as our observation goes, that there was ever any new life, or that life has ever come into existence where there was none before. We, with all our wisdom, skill and science, can only watch life reproduce itself; we cannot originate it. It is the work-power of the life in the seed germ which produces the organism. It is the function of life to produce organisms. The life in the seed produces the plant; the plant does not produce the life. Life is not a result of organization, but is the cause of it. Living organisms are not machines which generate life; they are machines which are built and operated by life. Life is not the result of functional action, because it is the cause of functional action; it cannot be at once the effect and the cause. The external work of the body, as I have shown in a preceding chapter, cannot possibly be performed by power which is generated by its internal work; for the power which does both the internal and the external work is one and the same. There is no difference between the power which does muscular work and that which operates the heart, liver and stomach. It is all one, and comes from one source. It is, therefore, an absurdity to say that the work- power of the body is the result of the performance of its internal digestive or other functions. Life is the cause of all function, including the digestion of food, and cannot be the result of that which it causes. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that
the body receives its power from some external source. It certainly expends energy, we have seen that it does not and cannot generate this energy; it must, occasionally, be charged anew. And when we witness the phenomena of sleep we conclude that we are witnessing the vitalizing process; the sleeping organism is being charged with power. But where does the power come from? Oxygen, as we have seen, is necessary to the charging process, but oxygen is not life. It is a chemical element indispensable to functional action, and to the operations of vital power, but it is not life. Nor does it appear that there is any possible combination or recombination of the elements of the atmosphere with those of the body which can produce life. For if life be drawn by chemical processes from atmospheric air, it can only be done by internal functional processes, and we have seen that it is a mechanical impossibility that life should be the result of functional action. It is as impossible that the body should manufacture life out of air as that it should manufacture it out of food. All the arguments which I have used in the one case will apply in the other. If vital power cannot be received by the body in the form of potential energy in food, and converted into life by functional action, then it cannot be received in the form of electrical or other energy from the atmosphere, and converted into work-power by functional action. It must, therefore, be received directly as vital power, for the body is not a generator or transformer of energy. When the body receives life it must receive life; it cannot receive something else which is to be converted into life, for this would make life to be its own creator, the effect becoming its own cause. Therefore, life is not drawn from the atmosphere, for the atmosphere is a compound of dead gases. It is not drawn from the earth, for the earth is dead mineral, vegetable and animal matter. There are forms of potential and kinetic energy in both earth and air-heat and electricity, for instance—but as I have shown you, these are not life, and it is not mechanically possible for the body to convert them into life. If there is life in the air it must be there as life, and not as something else; and it must be in the air, not of the air. If there is vital power in the earth, it must be there as life, and not as some other form of force; it must be a force; separate and distinct from all other forces, and not an inherent property of matter. For, if life were inherent in all matter, death and disintegration would be impossible. The body without the spirit would not be dead, but just as much alive as ever. We cannot escape the conclusion that vital power, or life, is seen by us only in the bodies of living organisms; whatever forces we see in dead matter are not alive, nor capable of being alive; for we receive life, not something else.
If vital power is present in our material environment it is there as a living force —a living presence, a life,— not as a dead material force, which we must convert into life in order to live. There is one other supposition which we must consider briefly here, which is that life comes from the sun. This idea probably originated from observing the phenomena of the seasons; the forthputting of life in the spring, when the sun's rays penetrate air and soil, creating the right chemical conditions for the building of organisms by life. There is no evidence, however, that the life of the springtime comes from the sun. A certain amount of heat is necessary to the constructive processes of vital power, but heat in excess is destructive to all the work of life. Life does not come from fire, or work in fire, or with fire; and the sun, so far as we know, is pure fire. It is unthinkable that there should be life on, or in the sun. And, so far as the facts go, life only comes from life. If there are no germs of life in the son, then reasoning from the facts of life as I see them, I cannot accept the theory that life comes from a body where there is no life. Whence, then, does life come? I do not know. I can only say with Swedenborg that there appears to be an inflow of life into the world, which is received by all living things according to their forms; or I can say with St. Paul that there is a Living One, in whom we live and move, and whose offspring we are. But this I know by all the laws of force, that we must get our life from a living force which surrounds us. There is no escaping this conclusion. It is mechanically impossible that we should generate life, or that we should convert some other force into it; we receive it as life, and we receive it from life.
Do you remember what happens on the window pane on a cold morning when a fire is kindled? The pane acts as a condenser, changing the form of the moisture in the air; it becomes tangible. Wherever heat and cold, positive and negative, come into contact there is a precipitation. The surface of the brain is this point of contact between positive and negative, Uncreate and Create, Spirit and Matter. The positive ever acts upon the negative; the higher and finer forces upon the lower or coarser. The natural attitude of man is one of aspiration toward the Uncreate and command toward the Create; negative to the Highest, positive to all beneath. ELIZABETH TOWNE, in “Constitution of Man” (1896)