26 DEFINITIONS OF LIFE. 



Now in the definition on which, as the representative 

 of a whole class, we are now animadverting, a single effect 

 is given as constituting the cause. For nutrition by di- 

 gestion is certainly necessary to life, only under certain 

 circumstances, but that life is previously necessary to 

 digestion is absolutely certain under all circumstances. 

 Besides, what other phenomenon of Life would the con- 

 ception of assimilation, per se, or as it exists in the lowest 

 order of animals, involve or explain ? How, for instance, 

 does it include sensation, locomotion, or habit ? or if the 

 two former should be taken as distinct from life, toto 

 genere, and supervenient to it, we then ask what concep- 

 tion is given of vital assimilation as contradistinguished 

 from that of the nucleus of a crystal ? 



Lastly, this definition confounds the Law of Life, or 

 the primary and universal form of vital agency, with the 

 conception, Animals. For the kind, it substitutes the 

 representative of its degrees and modifications. But the 

 first and most important office of science, physical or 

 physiological, is to contemplate the power in kind, ab- 

 stracted from the degree. The ideas of caloric, whether 

 as substance or property, and the conceptions of latent 

 heat, the heat in ice, &c., that excite the wonder or the 

 laughter of the vulgar, though susceptible of the most im- 

 portant practical applications, are the result of this ab- 

 straction ; while the only purpose to which a definition 

 like the preceding could become subservient, would be in 

 supplying a nomenclature with the character of the most 

 common species of a genus its genus generalissimum, and 

 even this would be useless in the present instance, inas- 

 much as it presupposes the knowledge of the things cha- 

 racterised. 



