RELATIONS OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES. 3 
inorganic nature, however, soon learns to recognize the fact that all matter is instinct with 
activities, and finds that a great number of those processes which were formerly regarded 
as functions of organized bodies are really common to these and to inorganic matter. The 
phenomena of gravitation, of light and of electricity, the diffusion and transpiration of gases 
and liquids, the crystallogenic process, and the peculiar relations of colloids, are all, when 
rightly understood, manifestations of energies and activities which forbid us to speak of 
matter as dead. To all of these dynamical (or as they are generally called, physical) activities 
of matter, supervene those processes which we name chemical, and which give rise to new 
and specifically distinct inorganic forms. The attaining of individuality by matter, which 
has always seemed to me the greatest step in the progress of nature, is first seen in the crystal ; 
but therein the forces of matter are in a statical condition, except so far as certain dynamical 
relations are concerned. It is not until solid matter rises from the crystalline to the higher 
condition of the colloid, that it becomes capable of absorption, diffusion, and even of assimi- 
lation : that, in a word, it assumes relations to the external world which show that it 
possesses an individuality higher than the crystal, and is, in fact, endowed with many of 
the activities belonging to those masses of colloidal matter which biologists have agreed to 
call living. 
In these phenomena we have the first developments of individuality and of organization, 
and I think that the careful student, who endeavors with a strong mental grasp to seize the 
true relations of things, will see that we have here to do, not with a new activity from 
without, but with a new and higher development of a force which is inherent in matter, 
and thus manifests itself at a certain stage in its chemical development. He will then, in 
the words of a philosophic poet, 
“See through this air, this ocean, and this earth, 
All matter quick and bursting into birth.” 
The adjective, quick, is here to be understood in its primitive sense of living, as 
opposed to dead, and aptly defines the notion which I have endeavored to convey. All 
the energies seen in nature are, in this view, but manifestations of the essential life or quick- 
ness of matter, whether displayed in the domain of what are called dynamical or physical 
activities, in chemical processes, or in the phenomena of irritability, assimilation, growth 
and reproduction, which we may comprehensively designate as biotical.* 

*This view, upon which I have insisted in the essay on “The Domain of Physiology,” cited below, was well 
set forth by Rosmini. According to him, in the words of his interpreter, Davidson, “the ultimate particles of 
matter are animate, each atom haying united with it, and forming its unity or atomicity, a sensitive principle. 
When atoms chemically combine, their sensitive principles become one. . . . The unit of natural existence is 
neither force nor matter, but sentience, and through this all the material and dynamical phenomena of nature 
may be explained.” From the unifications of these sensitive principles, or elementary souls, which take place in 
the combinations of matter, higher and higher manifestations of sentience appear, constituting the various activi- 
ties displayed in crystals, in plants, and in animals. From these elementary souls, organic souls are built up, 
and “when these are resolved into the elementary ones through the dissolution of the organized bodies, the 
existence of the souls does not cease, but is merely transformed.” [See “The Philosophical System of Rosmini,” 
by Thomas Davidson, pp. 284-301.] This volume was unpublished, and these views of Rosmini were unknown to 
me, at the time of writing the above pages. 
The eminent biophysiologist, William B. Carpenter, in an essay on “ Life,” published in 1847, contends that 
organization and biotical functions arise from the natural operation of forces inherent in elemental matter.— 
[Todd’s “ Cyclopedia of Anatomy and Physiology,” Vol. III., p. 151.] 
