66 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



energies of animal life. Electricity, as we have said, may 

 make the dead body move, and the dead stomach digest ; but 

 it cannot make the blood circulate, or the dead pulse 

 throb. Instead of re-energizing the blood it destroys it. 

 A shock of electricity passed through the blood after death, 

 so far from vivifying, separates that fluid into its three 

 component and subordinate elements the red globular 

 colouring matter, the gummy serum, and the watery 

 serum, and renders it altogether unfit for the purposes 

 of vital circulation. But not so with regard to those 

 motions with which animals are endowed, as distinguished 

 from and in addition to the vital energies they possess in 

 common with vegetable life. These motions may be pro- 

 duced after life has departed from the members, and they 

 are thence, we may warrantably conclude, separate and dis- 

 tinct from what we have considered as the vital actions. 

 If electricity may produce every kind of physical motion 

 but vital action, as we find it can in the dead, are we 

 warranted in concluding that anything in addition to 

 electric agency is required or employed to produce such 

 physical motion in the living? Unless we can charge 

 nature in some department of her operations with super- 

 fluity, we are not entitled to assume superfluity here by 

 the only light of reasoning we have to aid us in our 

 determination of this question the light of analogy. 

 Nature is nowhere chargeable with superfluity that we 

 positively know of, and we are excluded by that fact 

 from gratuitously assuming that she may be chargeable 

 with superfluity here. In the living, as in the dead, 

 physical motion may be produced by electricity, and we 

 are warranted by all analogy of nature in concluding that 

 it is produced by that agency alone the Life and the 

 Consciousness having merely a presiding and directing 

 power over it. But a little study of the anatomical 

 structure of animal bodies will lead very much to the 



