PROXIMATE CONCEPTION OF LIFE. 79 



life, to recognize its significance; especially in respect of 

 comprehensiveness. As before shown, however (First Prin- 

 ciples, 56), it is objectionable; partly on the ground that it 

 refers not so much to the functional changes constituting 

 Life, as to the structural changes of those aggregates of 

 matter which manifest Life; and partly on the ground that 

 it includes under the idea Life, much that we usually exclude 

 from it : for instance crystallization. 



The definition of Richerandj " Life is a collection of 

 phenomena which succeed each other during a limited time 

 in an organized body," is liable to 'the fatal criticism, that 

 it equally applies to the decay which goes on after death. 

 For this, too, is " a collection of phenomena whiclr succeed 

 each other during a limited time in an organized body." 



" Life," according to De Blainville, " is the two-fold 

 internal movement of composition and decomposition, at once 

 general and continuous." This conception is in some re- 

 spects too narrow, and in other respects too wide. On the 

 one hand, while it expresses what physiologists distinguish 

 as vegetative life, it does not indicate those nervous and 

 muscular functions which form the most conspicuous and 

 distinctive classes of vital phenomena. On the other hand, 

 it describes not only the integrating and disintegrating pro- 

 cess going on in a living body, but it equally well describes 

 those going on in a galvanic battery; which also exhibits a 

 " two-fold internal movement of composition and decomposi- 

 tion, at once general and continuous." 



Elsewhere, I have myself proposed to define Life as " the 

 co-ordination of actions." * This definition has some advan- 

 tages. It includes all organic changes, alike of the viscera, 

 the limbs, and the brain. It excludes the great mass of 

 inorganic changes; which display little or no co-ordination. 

 By making co-ordination the specific character of vitality, it 

 involves the truths, that an arrest of co-ordination is death, 



* See Westminster Review for April, 1852. Art. IV. "A Theory of 

 Population." See Appendix A. 



