PHYSIOLOGY OF LIFE. 



magnetism and electricity, and the powers illustrated by 

 them, is an essential part of my system, but that the 

 animal Life of man is the identity of all three. To what- 

 ever other system this objection may apply, it is utterly 

 irrelevant to that which I have here propounded : though 

 from the narrow limits prescribed to me, it has been pro- 

 pounded with an inadequacy painful to my own feelings. 



The ridicule in No. 6 might be easily retorted ; but as 

 it could prove nothing, I will leave it where I found it, in 

 a page where nothing is proved. 



A similar remark might be sufficient for the bold and 

 blank assertion (No. 7) with which the extract concludes ; 

 but that I feel some curiosity to discover what meaning 

 the author attaches to the term analogy. Analogy implies 

 a difference in sort, and not merely in degree ; and it is 

 the sameness of the end, with the difference of the means, 

 which constitutes analogy. No one would say the lungs 

 of a man were analogous to the lungs of a monkey, but 

 ariy one might say that the gills of fish and the spiracula 

 of insects are analogous to lungs. Now if there be any 

 philosophers who have asserted that electricity as electricity 

 is the same as Life, for that reason they cannot be ana- 

 logous to each other ; and as no man in his senses, phi- 

 losopher or not, is capable of imagining that the lightning 

 which destroys a sheep, was a means to the same end with 

 the principle of its organization ; for this reason, too, the 

 two powers cannot be represented as analogous. Indeed 

 I know of no system in which the word, as thus applied, 

 would admit of an endurable meaning, but that which 

 teaches us, that a mass of marrow in the skull is analo- 

 gous to the rational soul, which Plato and Bacon, equally 





