426 
ORGANIZATION AND LIFE. 
Bouchut followed the Baconian advice_, he would not have 
told us that the three attributes common to everything 
endowed with life are—(1) impressibility, or the unconscious 
faculty of feeling external impressions without any participa¬ 
tion of the nervous system; (2) corpuscular movement, 
automatic movement, or mitocynesy, that is to say, the faculty 
possessed by the elements of living matter to move themselves 
in order to form species, and to do this without dependence 
on the properties of any structure (3) promorphosis, or 
faculty of giving to amorphous elements a form determined 
beforehand, and conformable with the type of the species.’^ 
An ^'^unconscious faculty of feeling is not intelligible; a 
faculty or facility, for the words are the same in origin and 
meaning, can be neither conscious nor unconscious, and an 
unconscious feeling is no feeling at all. In describing the 
second alleged property of every living thing there is equal 
confusion. What is meant by the elements of living 
matter Are the atoms of oxygen, carbon, and so forth, 
declared to possess an automatic power, independent of the 
structure to which they belong, to move themselves in 
order to form species’^? Impressibility’^ is affirmed to be 
^^an attribute of life which exists in all tissues, which it 
animates independently of their textures/’ The physiologist 
does not know life apart from some living thing, and when a 
writer addresses us like M. Bouchut he is substituting meta¬ 
physical guess-work for scientific fact. 
Life, as we know it, consists in actions that are obviously 
physical, and in operations that bear no analogy to any 
physical process. It is probably a complete mistake to 
represent life as controlling or resisting mechanical, chemical, 
or electrical forces. While an animal lives, its tissues are 
built up and taken to pieces according to a regulated method 
which is compatible with its continued existence, but all the 
physical operations of its life proceed in strict accordance 
with physical laws. If its albumen does not coagulate at a 
temperature that causes other albumen to undergo that 
change, it is not because a mysterious principle ” determines 
otherwise, but because the chemical conditions of coagulation 
exist in one case and not in the otlier. The power of main¬ 
taining heat is purely physical, and combustion follows the 
same laws in the body of the man as in the furnace of the 
locomotive. The power of resisting heat is equally physical, 
resulting from evaporation and other processes which 
experimental science can trace. When the body is dead, the 
♦ “ En dehors de toute propri^te de structiue.” 
