PHYSIOLOGY OF LIFE. 61 



6. " It would have been interesting to have had this 

 illustration prosecuted a little further. We should have 

 been pleased to learn whether the human body is more 

 like a loadstone, a voltaic pile, or an electrical machine ; 

 whether the organs are to be regarded as Ley den jars, 

 magnetic needles, or batteries." 



7. " The truth is, there is no resemblance, no analogy, 

 between Electricity and Life ; the two orders of pheno- 

 mena are completely distinct ; they are incommensurable. 

 Electricity illustrates life no more than life illustrates 

 electricity." 1 



To avoid unnecessary description, I shall refer to the 

 passages by the numbers affixed to them, for that purpose, 

 in the margin. 



1 I apprehend that by men of a certain school it would be deemed no 

 demerit, even though they should never have condescended to look into any 

 system of Aristotelian logic. It is enough for these gentlemen that they are 

 experimentalists! Let it not, however, be supposed that they make more 

 experiments than their neighbours, who consider induction as a means and 

 not an end ; or have stronger motives for making them, unless it can be be- 

 lieved that Tycho Brahe must have been urged to repeat his sweeps of the 

 heavens with greater accuracy and industry than Herschel, for no better reason 

 than that the former flourished before the theory of gravitation was perfected. 

 No, but they have the honour of being mere experimentalists ! If, however, 

 we may not refer to logic, we may to common sense and common experience. 

 It is not improbable, however, that they have both read and studied a book of 

 hypothetical psychology on the assumptions of the crudest materialism, stolen 

 too without acknowledgment from our David Hartley's essay on Man, which 

 is well known \mder the whimsical name of Condillac's Logic. But, as Mr. 

 Brand has lately observed, " the French are a queer people," and we should 

 not be at all surprised to hear of a book of fresh importation from Paris, on 

 determinate proportions in chemistry, announced by the author in his title- 

 page as a new and improved system either of arithmetic or geometry. 



