128 



must depend upon its tendency to assimilate, under all its circum- 

 stances, and this latter will be fixed by its relations with the other 

 properties of the spirit. Enough is here indicated of this relation: 

 it remains to be pursued under the title of disease. 



24. But this spiritual assimilation does not comprehend the 

 entire relation between life, and the medium or material of its 

 elements. At the same time, as life is maintained in every seat in 

 the way described, it separates from the material of its own ele- 

 ments also the materials of the textures. The manner in which 

 this is accomplished has before been said to be by affinity ; but 

 this is a word expressing only the name of the relation. If it 

 were possible to make a more minute analysis of the relation we 

 should be furnished with some very important knowledge of the 

 agents engaged in the relation, and might still reserve the term 

 affinity, to designate the modes of indivisible processes. Let us 

 attempt something in the way of illustrating such an analysis. 



25. As every organic particle composing the structures is 

 first formed, and its cohesion with the rest afterwards maintained, 

 by the organic spirit, so every organic particle is a seat of the 

 spiritual properties. 



26. As the blood (which will be shewn more particularly 

 hereafter), or the fluids separated from it, is the material of nutri- 

 tion, so one condition of the agency between life and the fluids is 

 that the latter should permeate the organic particles. Thus the 

 material is exposed to the agency of life, the results of which are, 



1st, That life produces itself from the material in the way 

 described. 



2nd, That it produces the organic particles, determining their 

 arrangement, &c. as before proved; and, 



3rd, That, having produced the structures, it preserves their 

 coherence: our present business is with the two last. 



27. 1st, The alternatives with regard to the formation of the 

 structures are, 1st, whether they are necessarily attached to the 

 formation of life itself; or, 2nd, whether their formation is the 

 result of a distinct agency of the spirit upon the material. 



28. 1st, That the aggregation of the particles of the textures 

 is attached to the formation of the spirit, requires to be further 

 explained. The proposition supposes that the elements of life in 

 the material are allied with those grosser parts which become the 

 organic particles; that various forms or combinations of the pro- 

 perties of life (as has been shewn) are contained in the same ma- 

 terial; that every form of life existing in a texture assimilates its 

 own form; and that as the properties constituting this form are 

 separated from the blood, the peculiar material particles with 

 which they inhered in the blood are separated also, thus at once 

 perpetuating the living principle and aggregating the structures. 



29. Now this theory seems to agree very well with that unity 

 of operation which we perceive in every other animal process, of 

 which we have a tolerably clear understanding ; but it is irrecou- 



