12 LIFE AND DEATH. 



Boullier, Tissot, and Stahl himself, does not accept 

 this distinction ; he refuses to shatter the unity of the 

 vivifying and thinking principle. He prefers to at- 

 tribute to the soul two modes of action : the one 

 which is exercised on the acts of thought, and hence 

 it proceeds consciously, with reflection, and with 

 volition ; the other exercising control over the physio- 

 logical phenomena which it governs, " by unconscious 

 impressions, and by instinctive determinations, obeying 

 primordial laws." This soul is hardly in keeping with 

 his definition of a conscious, reflecting, and voluntary 

 principle; it is a new soul, a somatic soul, singularly 

 akin to that rachidian soul which, according to 

 Pfluger, a well-known German physiologist, resides 

 in each segment of the spinal marrow, and is respon- 

 sible for reflex movements. 



Tivofold Modality of the Soul. — This twofold 

 modality of the soul, this duality admitted by Stahl 

 and his disciples, was repugnant to many thinkers, 

 and it is this repugnance that gave rise to the vitalistic 

 school. It appeared to them to be a heresy tainted 

 by materialism — and so it was. In this lay the 

 strength and the weakness of animism. It admits 

 of a unique animating principle for all the manifes- 

 tations of the living being, for the higher facts in the 

 realm of thought, and for the lower facts connected 

 with the body. It throws down the barriers which 

 separate them. It fills up the gap between the 

 different forms of human activity, and assimilates 

 them the one to the other. 



Now this is precisely what materialism does. It, 

 too, reduces to a single order the psychical and physi- 

 ological phenomena, between which it no longer 

 recognizes anything but a difference of degree. 



