THE DEFINITION OF LIFE. 



511 



tice. My sole care has been that the potency of 

 truth should be vindicated ; and no denier of the 

 potency of matter could labor more strenuously 

 than I have done to demonstrate its impotence as 

 regards spontaneous generation. While express- 

 ing, therefore, unshaken " belief" in that form of 

 " materialism " to which I have already given ut- 

 terance, I here affirm that no shred of trustworthy 

 experimental testimony exists to prove that life, 

 in our day, has ever appeared independently of 

 antecedent life. 



The present condition of this question is such 

 .'.iat no medical man, seeking clearly to realize 

 and effectually to remove the causes of epidemic 

 disease, need have his mind troubled by a doubt 

 as to the derivation of those organisms to which 

 modern physiology, with ever-increasing empha- 



sis, assigns such momentous functions. Clearly 

 assured that they are not spontaneously gener- 

 ated, his efforts will be directed to the discovery 

 and the destruction of the germinal matter from 

 which they spring. Here, as I have stated in an- 

 other place, the intelligent cooperation of the 

 public with the physician is absolutely essential 

 to success. For their sakes I have spared no 

 pains to render my demonstrations so clear that 

 no amount of verbal " effluence " will be able to 

 obscure them. This accomplished, the contro- 

 versy comes to a natural end. Neither honor to 

 the individual nor usefulness to the public is like- 

 ly to accrue from its continuance, and life is too 

 serious to be spent in hunting down in detail the 

 Protean errors of Dr. Bastian. 



— Nineteenth Century. 



THE DEFINITION OF LIFE. 1 



By CLAUDE BEBNAKD. 



SINCE the earliest days of antiquity, famous 

 philosophers or physicians have viewed those 

 phenomena which pass through their phases in 

 living beings as resulting from the action of some 

 higher and immaterial principle upon passive and 

 yielding matter. This is the conception of Py- 

 thagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and Hippocrates, the 

 received belief, at a later time, among the philos- 

 ophers and learned mystics of the middle ages, 

 held by Paracelsus and Van Helmont, and by the 

 scholastic doctors. In the course of the eighteenth 

 century this idea reached its highest point of ac- 

 ceptance and control in that eminent physician, 

 Stahl, who added to its distinctness of form by 

 the conception of animism. The spirituality of 

 life found its extravagant expression in animism. 

 Stahl was the resolute and most positive sup- 

 porter of those conceptions which had prevailed 

 since Aristotle's time. It may be said, too, that 

 he was their last representative ; the modern mind 

 refused to welcome a doctrine that had grown 

 into too glaring an opposition to science. 



On the other hand, in contradiction to the 

 ideas just noted, even before physics and chem- 

 istry had gained an organized form, before the 



1 Translated from the Revue des Deux Mondes, by 

 A. R. Macdonough. 



phenomena of dead matter were understood, we 

 perceive that, in anticipation of the facts, the 

 movement of philosophy tended toward the at- 

 tempt at proving the identity of phenomena in 

 inorganic substance with those of living bodies. 

 This notion is the basis of atomism, as held by 

 Democritus and Epicurus. The atomists admit 

 no governing intelligence; for them the world 

 from everlasting moves of its own force. They 

 conceive of one kind of matter only, the elements 

 of which possess, by means of their forms, the 

 property of entering into combinations in endless 

 diversity, through their mutual connections, and 

 of composing inorganic and lifeless bodies, as 

 well as organized living and feeling beings like 

 animals, or rational and volitional ones such as 

 man. 



The latter hypothesis thus assumed, at its ori- 

 gin, an exclusively materialistic shape ; but it 

 must be noted as singular that those philosophers 

 most profoundly convinced of the spirituality of 

 the soul, as Descartes and Leibnitz, for instance, 

 did not hesitate to adopt a view of a very similar 

 kind which accounted for all those manifestations 

 of life in action which are presented to the senses 

 by the operation of unintelligent forces. The 

 ground of this seeming contradiction is to be 

 found in the almost absolute severance between 

 the body and the soul which they insisted on. 



