424 
ORGANIZATION AND LIFE. 
/ 
of a science are those elementary facts and conceptions which 
form its foundation. In another sense, a princijile is a first 
cause. We likewise find that principle is often used to 
signify not a sense, but a nonsense, and thus we hear of the 
electrical principle the caloric jirinciple,” the vital 
principle,’^ or any similar phrase intended to give ignorance 
a learned look. If we take life to mean all the acts and 
properties exhibited by living beings, our first business is to 
separate them, and study each class in an appropriate way. 
The phenomena that belong to physical science will have a 
physical cause for their appearance; and a physical cause is 
not a volition, or an intelligent power, but simply a condition, 
or assemblage of conditions, that are invariably followed by 
another state of things that we call an effect. If we ask why 
there is this invariable link between certain antecedents and 
certain consequents, physical science cannot tell; and it is a 
metaphysical science that resolves the difficulty by pointing 
to that intelligence which is the great cause of all. 
Those who are curious to study the history of opinion on 
the question of vital manifestations will find it ably traced 
in Barclay's ‘Life and Organization,’ and it is interesting to 
note that, so early as Empedocles, a bold effort was made to 
avoid the confusion into which investigators are still apt to 
fall. According to that philosopher, every animal possessed 
a rational and a sentient soul, the former derived from the 
gods, the latter from the four elements of which it was 
imagined that the universe was composed. In this rude 
hypothesis there is an attempt to separate the phenomena of 
organic life from those of consciousness, which we do not 
find in M. Bouchut, the latest writer on the same subject, 
who tells us that “ by vital force matter feels, moves, and 
assumes /bmj more and more complicated, from the creation 
of vivifiable organic matter to the most completely organized 
being.” This same “ vital force ” which has bewildered so 
many subtle heads, M. Bouchut considers he has “demon¬ 
strated” to be “extra-organic,” and he calls it “an inter¬ 
mediary of the soulf^ whose mysterious union with the body 
represents the entire being. Plunging thus headlong into 
conjectural metaphysics, we are not surprised to be told that 
“life creates in each species of creatures the special organs 
that are to serve as tlie instruments of its activity. The 
functions create the organs, and after that all goes on by the 
mediation of physical laws.” We hope this learned professor 
does not represent the condition of French intellect dwarfed 
* “ Intennediaire de fame.” 
