Page:The Philosophy of Creation.djvu/291

 the current of life through the parent oak. Its maturity consists in the completion of its form so that it need no longer receive life from the tree, but is able to receive life from the general sphere of plant life.

When the ripened acorn drops from the tree, it is a consolidated form in which plant life abides, because the very structure within the hardened kernel is a form which is the natural outbirth of plant life with which it has ever been in Correspondence. When the seed was in the milk, it was all active with the flow of life. When coagulated its particles are relatively quiescent, not because the form is destroyed or that lifeforce has left it, but since the fluids are very largely extracted and the substances so consolidated, they can not so fully respond to the gentle pulsations of plant life that centers in it. The endeavor resides within, but its purpose is restrained by the hardened kernel. That the seed might become such a form, it was surrounded by a coarse bur to protect the more delicate matter from injury. Inside the bur is a shell finer than the outer bur, but tougher than the kernel, which acted as a covering to the milky substances within while the plant life forces were shaping them into a suitable receptacle where they might dwell. Within the kernel plant life-forces in