Human Physiology. 



These definitions define nothing. We are only told that 

 life is the opposite of death, as cold is the opposite of heat, or 

 darkness of light; that life is the mysterious, the unknown 

 cause of the phenomena of growth and reproduction in organ- 

 ised bodies ; in short, that life is life. 



In life, we have force governed or directed by intelligence 

 everywhere a wonderful adaptation of means to ends. As force 

 acts upon matter, life is something which contrives, designs^ 

 fashions, plans, orders, arranges, knows, foresees, desires, 

 determines, directs the action of force. A man, with all his 

 wonderful bodily organism, and his more wonderful intellectual 

 powers, grows from a microscopic cell which contains all he is 

 to be. In it is life; and in that life must be the spiritual force 

 and guiding intelligence which presides over the material 

 organisation. 



Materialists contend that life, or the phenomena of existence, 

 is the result of organisation. Spiritualists hold that organisation 

 is an effect of life, not the cause of life. If organisation precedes 

 life, what causes organisation? It is an effect, and must have 

 a cause, which must be anterior and superior to itself. 



An organ existing in a living animal is destroyed, as the leg 

 of a lobster; it is reproduced, showing that function, or life, 

 governs matter; that the soul, or spirit, or intelligent force 

 forms the body, and all parts of the body; and this, as I shall 

 show hereafter, is the law of all formative and reparative 

 processes. If it is said that in animals the nerve-cell secretes 

 life; what, I ask, forms the nerve-cell, and gives to it its 

 powers? 



The universe is full of force but blind force is commonly 

 destructive. We require something above force something 

 to guide force. We need intelligence and will; and as nature 

 is a grand system of harmonious parts, then must we have 

 intelligence equal to the direction, and will or power equal 

 to ihe control, of all the forces of the universe. Those forces^, 



