变化使生命美丽(1/3)

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has been more and more becoming the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibers, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them -- the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound -- processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces.

将所有事物和事物的原则归结为经常变化着的形态或风尚，已日益成为现代思想界的趋势。我们可以从我们的生理活动等表面的事情说起。比如我们选定在酷暑中猛然浸入滔滔清流这样一个令人感觉极其愉快的微妙时刻，在那一瞬间的所有生理活动，难道不可以说是具有科学名称的各种元素的一种化合作用吗？但是，像磷、石灰、微细的纤维等这些元素，不仅在人体中可以发现，而且在与人体没有丝毫关系的地方也能检查出它们的存在。 我们的生理活动不外乎是这些元素无休止的运动——血液的流通，眼睛中水晶体的消耗和恢复，每一道光波、每一次声浪对于脑组织所引起的变异——科学把这些运动过程还原为更为简单和基本的力量作用。