186 DR. PHILIP ON THE NATURE OF DEATH. 



the brain and spinal marrow with the external world is maintained^ it is evident that 

 the organs of the external senses are excited by inanimate agents external to our 

 bodies, and that the muscles of voluntary motion are capable of influencing those 

 agents ; and we know that the impressions made on the external senses are propa- 

 gated, and the muscles of voluntary motion excited, by the nerves, whose powers, as 

 appears from the experiments just referred to, depend on an inanimate agent. 



While the results of these experiments remain undisputed, if we assert that the 

 nervous influence is a vital power, we must allow that such a power may exist in a 

 mechanism wholly different from that to which it belongs in the living animal, and 

 that all the functions of a living power may be performed by an agent which operates 

 in inanimate nature ; positions, which I believe no man, acquainted with the laws 

 of the living animal, will be hardy enough to maintain. 



Such, then, it would appear, is the nature of our frame. The sensitive parts of the 

 brain and spinal marrow which are at once the immediate organs of enjoyment, the 

 end of our being, and the source of those powers on which our intercourse with the 

 external world depends, are maintained by a set of organs, the functions of which are 

 excited by certain agents which belong to inanimate nature, and operate by other 

 sets of organs which are capable of influencing, and being influenced by, every object 

 around us, the functions of which are also excited by an agent of the same description. 

 And these inferences are in no slight degree strengthened by another and distinct set 

 of experiments, to which I referred in an early part of this paper, namely, those relating 

 to the order in which the functions cease in the act of dying ; for the whole of the phe- 

 nomena traced by these experiments, as will more clearly appear from what I shall 

 have occasion to say a little lower, tend to the same conclusions. Why do the nervous 

 and muscular survive the sensorial functions ? Why are the failing powers of life 

 maintained in the organs of the two former classes of functions, after all trace of them 

 is lost in the last class ? 



To the same conclusions, also, I cannot help thinking the following very simple 

 train of reasoning might, without the aid of experiment, have led us. Although a 

 single fact is often sufficient to establish the truth, when it is once arrived at, we 

 almost always find others ready to give it their aid. 



The phenomena of the three classes of functions above enumerated, namely, those 

 by which our bodies are maintained, those by which the sensorial organs are in- 

 fluenced by the external world, and those by which they influence it, appear themselves 

 sufficient to evince that the agents employed in their production partake of the nature 

 of that world. Were not this the case, is it possible that the analogy between them 

 and its phenomena could be such as we find it ? Can we conceive a stronger analogy 

 than the phenomena of inanimate nature bear to the propagation of an impulse along 

 a nerve ? Do not a thousand inanimate agents excite the muscular fibre in precisely 

 the same way as the nervous influence does*? and it would be difficult to believe that 



* See the first of my papers in the Philosophical Transactions for 1833. 



