DEFINITIONS OF LIFE. 33 



against the opposite error of rejecting its aid altogether 

 as analogy, because we have repelled its ambitious claims 

 to an identity with the vital powers. 



Previously to the submitting my own ideas on the sub- 

 ject of life, and the powers into which it resolves itself, or 

 rather in which it is manifested to us, I have hazarded 

 this apparent digression from the anxiety to preclude cer- 

 tain suspicions, which the subject itself is so fitted to 

 awaken, and while I anticipate the charges, to plead in 

 answer to each a full and unequivocal not guilty ! 



In the first place, therefore, I distinctly disclaim all 

 intention of explaining life into an occult quality; and 

 retort the charge on those who can satisfy themselves 

 with defining it as the peculiar power by which death is 

 resisted. 



Secondly. Convinced by revelation, by the consenting 

 authority of all countries, and of all ages, by the impera- 

 tive voice of my own conscience, and by that wide chasm 

 between man and the noblest animals of the brute 

 creation, which no perceivable or conceivable difference 

 of organization is sufficient to overbridge that I have a 

 rational and responsible soul, I think far too reveren- 

 tially of the same to degrade it into an hypothesis, and 

 cannot be blind to the contradiction I must incur, if I 

 assign that soul which I believe to constitute the peculiar 

 nature of man as the cause of functions and properties, 

 which man possesses in common with the oyster and the 

 mushroom. 1 



1 But still less would I avail myself of its acknowledged inappropriateness 

 to the purposes of physiology, in order to cast a self-complacent sneer on the 



