THE NATURE OF LIFE. 



ON THE DEFINITIONS OF LIFE HITHERTO RECEIVED. HINTS 

 TOWARDS A MORE COMPREHENSIVE THEORY. 



THE attempts to explain the nature of Life, which have 

 fallen within my knowledge, presuppose the arbitrary 

 division of all that surrounds us into things with life, and 

 things without life a division grounded on a mere as- 

 sumption. At the best, it can be regarded only as a 

 hasty deduction from the first superficial notices of the 

 objects that surround us, sufficient, perhaps, for the pur- 

 pose of ordinary discrimination, but far too indeterminate 

 and diffluent to be taken unexamined by the philosophic 

 inquirer. The positions of science must be tried in the 

 jeweller's scales, not like the mixed commodities of the 

 market, on the weigh-bridge of common opinion and 

 vulgar usage. Such, however, has been the procedure in 

 the present instance, and the result has been answerable 

 to the coarseness of the process. By a comprisal of the 

 petitio principii with the argumentum in circulo, in plain 

 English, by an easy logic, which begins with begging the 

 question, and then moving in a circle, comes round to the 

 point where it began, each of the two divisions has been 

 made to define the other by a mere reassertion of their 

 assumed contrariety. The physiologist has luminously 

 explained Y plus x by informing us that it is a somewhat 

 that is the antithesis of Y minus x ; and if we ask, what 



