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Vital and Cosmical Energy, 
[May, 
involved in the idea that the vital energy manifested in what 
are called spontaneous adts is independent of any antecedent 
cause. A non-vital body, it is said, never moves except in 
consequence of some impulse communicated from without. 
Even though its separate particles be unresting, the entire 
mass needs some external stimulus to disturb its equilibrium. 
But this is not less true of organic and living matter, whose 
motions invariably depend upon external stimuli, although 
the connection is not apparent to a merely superficial ob- 
server. A person who had never seen a clock wound up, or 
who had not learnt to associate the process of winding with 
its usual results, might imagine that ticking and striking 
were spontaneous adtions, solely dependent on the will and 
pleasure of the timepiece. In the same way, a person 
wholly unacquainted with physiology fails to connedt the 
functions of nutrition and respiration with the functions of 
thought, sensation, and voluntary motion. Yet it is not 
more certain that a clock will stop if not wound up, than 
that the human mechanism will cease to work if not supplied 
with food and fresh air. Even an adtion which seems per- 
fectly free and uncaused is the last term of a succession of 
internal changes which had their beginning in some impulse 
from without. When the impulse is spent the changes will 
cease. But the functions of the clock depend on its original 
structure not less than on the periodical winding up. From 
one point of view every tick may be regarded as due to the 
tools and hand of the clock-maker ; from another, to the key 
which winds it up once a week. In the same way, the energy 
which displays itself in perception and volition may be as- 
cribed to the daily transubstantiation of food, drink, and 
oxygen ; or it may be traced in imagination to the pre-natal 
period, or even followed yet farther back through a long line 
of slowly-developed ancestral forms. From any point of 
view the influences concerned in its production or evolution 
have been purely somatic. 
Just as the forces which operate in a living cell cannot be 
essentially different from those which sustain the entire body, 
so the identity of vital and cosmical energy is conclusively 
proved by the constant interchange of matter — and conse- 
quently of material force — which takes place between that 
body and its environment. Man is to the circumambient 
world as a blood-corpuscle to the organism of which it forms 
a part. It possesses no vitality distinCl from that of its 
Cosmos, the body, where its life as an individual cell begins 
and ends ; yet it moves with apparent freedom, giving and 
receiving nutriment, and (in the case of the white corpuscles) 
