CHAPTER X. 



ON THE CONNECTION OF FORCE WITH LIFE AND MIND. 



NOTHING has, I think, of late hindered us from forming 

 a clear conception of the nature of life, so much as the 

 way in which the relation of the physical forces to the 

 action of living beings has been viewed. And this has 

 mainly arisen from a want of due care in distinguishing 

 force from property, and from an exaggerated conception, 

 of the office of the former which is virtually by some 

 exalted to the rank of a semi-intelligent power, vice the 

 vital principle deposed. The fact is, that many 

 medical writers, not having gone to the root of the 

 matter for themselves but only accepting the current 

 definitions, have been unable to resist " the insuperable 

 tendency of the human mind to personify its abstrac- 

 tions," and have taken up the notion that force, or 

 energy, is a mysterious something capable of existence 

 per se, and possessing various positive, and even intel- 

 ligent (such as formative') powers. This is quite wrong. 

 Force is not an object capable of existing per se, but is 

 only the motion of matter and aether, or the pressures 

 antecedent to that motion, whichever way you choose 

 to apply the word, but, at all events, it is never any- 



