58 THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



of the matter -moving VQV^ which as animating 

 soul, is immanent in all living beings (plants, ani- 

 mals, men), but in different degrees of amount and 

 power. In this way we see that it is the business 

 of the vovs to dispose all things, each in accordance 

 with its own nature, into a universe that shall com- 

 prehend within it the most manifold forms of exist- 

 ence, and to enter into, and identify itself with, this 

 universe as the power of individual vitality. 3 Thus 

 was initiated the ancient pantheistic notion of a 

 general soul or Spirit pervading all things a notion 

 which, with more or less of modification, not un- 

 frequently appears in our own times, and which was 

 exquisitely expressed by our poet Wordsworth in his 

 ( Excursion,' when he said : 



' To every form of being is assigned 

 An active principle : howe'er removed 

 From sense and observation, it subsists 

 In all things, in all nature, in the stars 

 Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds ; 

 In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone 

 That paves the brooks.' 



Whilst therefore the ancients looked upon the spirit 

 or the c animating principle ' of any living thing as an 

 integral part of the general c Soul of Nature,' 



' Divinae particulam aurae,' 



Paracelsus and his followers, on the contrary, in the 

 sixteenth century, regarded the c vital principle' as an 

 entity or self-existent something, altogether indepen- 

 dent and peculiar. This distinct vital principle was 



