DEFINITIONS OF LIFE. 35 



for life. Or if they are themselves at once both the excitant 

 and the excitability, I miss the connecting link between 

 this imaginary ether and the visible body, which then 

 becomes no otherwise distinguished from inanimate matter, 

 than by its juxtaposition in mere space, with an hetero- 

 geneous inmate, the cycle of whose actions revolves within 

 itself. Besides which I should think that I was confounding 

 metaphors and realities most absurdly, if I imagined that I 

 had a greater insight into the meaning and possibility of a 

 living alcohol, than of a living quicksilver. In short, visible 

 SURFACE and power of any kind, much more the power of 

 life, are ideas which the very forms of the human under- 

 standing make it impossible to identify. But whether 

 the powers which manifest themselves to us under certain 

 conditions in the forms of electricity, or chemical attrac- 

 tion, have any analogy to the power which manifests 

 itself in growth and organization, is altogether a different 

 question, and demands altogether a different chain of 

 reasoning : if it be indeed a tree of knowledge, it will be 

 known by its fruits, and these will depend? not on the 

 mere assertion, but on the inductions by which the position 

 is supported, and by the additions which it makes to our 

 insight into the nature of the facts it is meant to illustrate. 

 To account for Life is one thing ; to explain Life another. 

 In the first we are supposed to state something prior (if 

 not in time, yet in the order of Nature) to the thing 

 accounted for, as the ground or cause of that thing, or 

 (which comprises the meaning and force of both words) 

 as its sufficient cause } qua et facit, et subest. And to 

 this, in the question of Life, I know no possible answer, 

 but GOD. To account for a thing is to see into the 



