194 DR. PHILIP ON THE NATURE OF DEATH. 



partly from their own decay, and partly from the lessened sensibility increasing the 

 difficulty of restoring the sensitive system, become incapable of this office, in conse- 

 quence of which the individual awakes no more ; for it is to be recollected that it is 

 not in the commencement, but in the progress of the last sleep that what we call death 

 takes place. In its commencement, we have seen, the sleeper may always be roused 

 by stronger stimulants than those which preceded it. 



All the other forms of death, it appears from what has been said, may be regarded 

 as more or less violent, some adventitious cause disturbing the natural process. They 

 were divided into two classes ; in the one the offending cause makes its impression on 

 the sensitive, in the other, on the vital organs. The former were divided into those cases 

 in which the debility which precedes the total loss of sensibility, arises from the excess 

 of the stimulant operation of the offending cause, and those in which it is the direct 

 effect of that cause ; the latter into those causes in which the vital powers fail in con- 

 sequence of their organs being deprived of the stimulants which excite them, and 

 those in which the offending cause makes its impression on these organs themselves, 

 the power of which, analogous to the operation of the offending cause on the sensitive 

 organs, is destroyed, either by the excess of its stimulant, or its more directly debili- 

 tating operation, according to the nature or degree of that cause. Thus are induced, 



2. The death which in its nature most nearly resembles the death of old age, that 

 from excessive exhaustion of the sensitive system from the operation of stimulants of 

 greater power than this system can bear, notwithstanding the intervals of such im- 

 perfect repose as their continued operation admits of, without the supervention of 

 disease ; which, not being capable of relief from the continued action of the vital 

 parts of the brain and spinal marrow, by sympathy spreads to them, the affection of 

 each system increasing that of the other, till all the powers of the sensitive system are 

 destroyed. 



3. The death in which disease of the sensitive system arises, not from causes over- 

 exciting, but directly debilitating it ; the debility they produce, being of the same 

 nature with that from excessive excitement, and running the same course as in the 

 second stage of the preceding form. 



4. The death which arises from the privation of the natural stimulants of the organs 

 of life ; and lastly, 



5. That which arises from diseased states of those organs, analogous to the states 

 produced in the organs of the sensitive system by the causes which make their im- 

 pression on them. 



IF the foregoing include all the modes of decay, the physiological nature of death 

 in its various forms is referable to very simple principles. In the natural decay the 

 excitability of the organs of both the sensitive and vital systems is gradually impaired 

 by stimulants, which, whether existing within our bodies or making their impression 

 from without, belong to inanimate nature; for it is by the impression of such stimu- 



