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ifie principle assimilates, though a modified identity: the state of 

 death is one in which these phenomena cease, and cannot be re- 

 newed; this is the result of the series of changes which are at 

 first latent, or in the state of predisposition, then exhibiting symp- 

 toms, or constituting disease; then a further change being at- 

 tained, the state is that of death. 



8. The history of disease is the history of death, np to that 

 point of the series in which the final change of disease into death 

 takes place. We can no more say, why predisposition should be- 

 come disease, than why disease should lapse into the state of 

 death. They are catenated processes of causation, the agents of 

 which are not objects of the senses. 



9. The history of death begins with the history of disease. 

 The origin of disease has been said to be in latent properties of the 

 spirit, which determine that course of changes indicated in our 

 sketch of the nature of progressive causation. Accordingly, our 

 divisions of the modes of disease will furnish those of death, or 

 \vill exhibit the modes by which the conditions of life, just men- 

 tioned, are infringed. The origin of the spontaneous processes, 

 which terminate in death, is in the spirit: but death may take 

 place in a seat either, 



1. From primary, or, 



2. From secondary, disease. 



10. Death happens from primary disease when changes take 

 place in the properties of the spirit belonging to the seat of death, 

 whether local or universal, the termination of which processes is 

 in an unassimilating state of life, without the influence either of a 

 modified state of the spirit in another seat, or of a modified con- 

 dition of the blood or structures. 



11. Death happens from secondary disease, either directly or 

 indirectly: directly, as when the relation of a disease or of death 

 in a primary seat is, by the intercourse of vital properties, to im- 

 pair, and finally destroy, the assimilating life of a secondary seat; 

 indirectly, as when the relation which should subsist between, 

 the life of a seat and its fluid and structural alliances, its material 

 products, is impaired or wholly frustrated by the changes which 

 the quantity or constituents of these alliances have undergone, by 

 the previous operation of disease, either in the seat of death, or in 

 one which thus, indirectly, comes to be related with it. 



12. 1. Death happening from primary disease exclusively, is 

 an occurrence, the possibility of which is conformable with our 

 general principles; but our experience of death furnishes us but 

 one apparent instance in which the existence of secondary disease 

 is not perceptible : that instance, before cited, is one of mortifica- 

 tion: as when, without previous pain or inflammation, a black spot 

 may appear upon some part of an extremity, perhaps it may be 

 discovered accidentally (this has happened) ; this spot is found to 

 have lost its sensibility, to have lost its characteristics of life. 

 From such a beginning the mortification spreads; and it appears 



