THE
BREATH OF LIFE
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1915,
BY JOHN BURROUGHS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published May 1915
PREFACE
As life nears its end with me, I find myself meditatingmore and more upon the mystery of itsnature and origin, yet without the least hope that Ican find out the ways of the Eternal in this or in anyother world. In these studies I fancy I am about asfar from mastering the mystery as the ant which Isaw this morning industriously exploring a smallsection of the garden walk is from getting a clearidea of the geography of the North American Continent.But the ant was occupied and was apparentlyhappy, and she must have learned somethingabout a small fraction of that part of the earth'ssurface.
I have passed many pleasant summer days in myhay-barn study, or under the apple trees, exploringthese questions, and though I have not solved them,I am satisfied with the clearer view I have givenmyself of the mystery that envelops them. I haveset down in these pages all the thoughts that havecome to me on this subject. I have not aimed somuch at consistency as at clearness and definitenessof statement, letting my mind drift as upon a shorelesssea. Indeed, what are such questions, and allother ultimate questions, but shoreless seas whereon[Pg vi]the chief reward of the navigator is the joy of theadventure?
Sir Thomas Browne said, over two hundred yearsago, that in philosophy truth seemed double-faced,by which I fancy he meant that there was alwaysmore than one point of view of all great problems,often contradictory points of view, from which truthis revealed. In the following pages I am aware thattwo ideas, or principles, struggle in my mind for mastery.One is the idea of the super-mechanical and thesuper-chemical character of living things; the otheris the idea of the supremacy and universality of whatwe call natural law. The first probably springs frommy inborn idealism and literary habit of mind; thesecond from my love of nature and my scientificbent. It is hard for me to reduce the life impulse toa level with common material forces that shape andcontrol the world of inert matter, and it is equallyhard for me to reconcile my reason to the introductionof a new principle, or to see anything in naturalprocesses that savors of the ab-extra. It is the workingof these two different ideas in my mind thatseems to give rise to the obvious contradictions thatcrop out here and there throughout this volume.An explanation of life phenomena that savors of thelaboratory and chemism repels me, and an explanationthat savors of the theological point of view isequally distasteful to me. I crave and seek a naturalexplanation of all phenomena upon this earth,[Pg vii]but the word "natural" to me implies more thanmere chemistry and physics. The birth of a baby,and the blooming of a flower, are natural events,but the laboratory methods forever fail to give usthe key to the secret of either.
I am forced to conclude that my passion for natureand for all open-air life, though tinged and stimulatedby science, is not a passion for pure science,b