On Animal Instinct : in its Relation to the Mind of Man. 335 



intimately connected with a material apparatus, and from that aspect 

 of our own bodies in which they are regarded as one in structure with 

 the bodies of the brutes. The significance of it as establishing Plan's 

 place in the unity of Nature is altogether independent of any theory or 

 couclu.-ion as to those processes of creation by which his body has been 

 fashioned on a plan which is common to him, and to so many of the 

 animals beneath him. Whether Man has been separately created out 

 of the inorganic elements of which his body has been composed, or 

 whether it was created out of matter pieviously organized .in lower 

 forms, this community of form must equally indicate a corresponding 

 community of relations with external things, and some antecedent ne- 

 cessity deeply seated in the very nature of those things, why his bodily 

 frame should be like to theirs. 



And, indeed, when we consider the matter, it is sufficiently appar- 

 ent that the relationship of Man's body to the bodies of the lower ani- 

 mals is only a subordinate part and consequence of that higher and 

 more general relationship which prevails between all livuig things and 

 those elementary forces of Nature which play in them, and around 

 them, and upon them. If we could only know what that relationship 

 is in its real nature, and in its full extent, we should know one of the 

 most inscrutable of all secrets, for that secret is no other than the ul- 

 timate nature of life. The great matter is to keep the little knowledge 

 of it which we possess safe from the effect of deceptive definitions. At- 

 tempts to define life are generally worse than useless, because they 

 almost always involve a deUberate attempt to shut out from view some 

 one or more of the elements which are es:7ential to our own knowledge 

 of its attributes. The real unities of Nature will never be reached by 

 confounding her distinctions. It may be legitimate to reduce the phe- 

 nomena of life to its lowest terms, in order the better to conceive its 

 relations with other things. But in doing so we must take care not to 

 drop out of those terms anything really essential to the very idea of 

 life. It is very easy to deceive ourselves in this way — very easy by 

 mere artifices of language to obliterate the most absolute distinctions 

 which cau exist in thought. Between the living and the not-living 

 there is a great gulf fixed, and the indissoluble connection which 

 nevertheless exists between them is, like the other unities of Nature, 

 not founded upon sameness, but, on the contrary, rather upon differ- 

 ence, and even upon antagonisms. Only the forces which are thus 

 different and opposed are subject to a power of co-ordination and ad- 

 justment. But this is the fundamental conception of a machine. For 

 we must not fail to notice the kind of unity which is impUcd in the 

 words co-ordination and adjustment ; and, above all others, in the spe- 



