302 Miscellaneous. 



decomposition of this tissue, where and what is that power which 

 lets loose or withholds this force, and whose action is attended by a 

 conscious effort ? It is the will — a something which directs and 

 controls force without expending it. Not only are thought and 

 forms of consciousness not forces, if the reasoning already adduced 

 be correct, but, although often moral incentives to the will, they are 

 not even motive energies in the sense in which I think we must 

 concede the will to be such. It is true that the exercise of thought 

 is followed by fatigue, yet it is not attended by a sense of effort, 

 except in so far as it is directed by an exertion of the wiU. And 

 although the former doubtless consumes tissue, have we any reason 

 for believing that the exercise of will does the same, apart from that 

 consumption which corresponds to the forces whose mode of action 

 it prescribes ? 



Thus it would appear that the metamorphosis of force, though 

 not " work done " in the mechanical sense, is the result of some 

 definite mode of causation. What this causation is, and whether it 

 is susceptible of measurement, are the next questions. In the same 

 category with this agency, or energy, or influence, the vitul prin- 

 ciple would seem to belong — directing forces while it neither 

 expends nor consumes them. In the growth of organic beings, 

 unstable combinations are formed ; and organized structures are 

 thence reared, in which, as Kant has so beautifully said, " all parts 

 are mutually ends and means." If in such organic development 

 force is consumed, disorganization without decomposition ought to 

 evolve it. Of the deposit of force in the unstable material of the 

 tissues I am not speaking, but of the vitality itself, which repre- 

 sents an energy requisite for the develoj^ment and growth of or- 

 ganisms, their dissolution being in turn attended by development 

 of inferior forms of life, which suggest that this energy may have 

 again been made available — an energy, too, which is not " force " as 

 this term has just now been defined. 



No comparison can be drawn between vitality and those mole- 

 cular forces which build the crystal. Crystalline forms arise when 

 the molecular attractions enjoy the freest scope ; and their constmc- 

 tion must be attended by an evolution of force which ought to be 

 recognizable by physical tests, and which should also be measurable 

 by an excess of their resistance to solution, over that of compara- 

 tively amorphous masses of the same material, in which equal 

 weights present equal surfaces. 



So, too, not only in that individuality which life confers and in 

 the impossibility of insulating or transferring vitality, but also in 

 its hereditary character and its apparent susceptibility of indefinite 

 increase or diminution, the vital energy violates our fundamental 

 conceptions of force, and demands a separate category, seeming to 

 belong in the same with vn)!. If will and life be forms of force, 

 their total amount must be limited by the law of conservation. If, 

 on the other hand, they are outside the realm of forces, we may 

 more readily indulge the conviction to which experience would lead, 

 that their freedom is unfettered by any restrictions within our 



