INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 9 
as ‘‘individual’’ and ‘‘identity’’ would destroy the value 
of any definition. Herbert Spencer objects to the expres- 
sion ‘‘series,’ for most of the vital functions go on 
simultaneously. Lewes states in his ‘‘ Physical Basis of 
Mind,” in 1877, that, if he had not already done so, he 
would have withdrawn his definition in deference to these 
criticisms. 
Herbert Spencer himself defines life at first as “ the 
co-ordination of actions,’ but afterwards, as he says, 
that would equally apply to a description of the solar 
system, he substitutes for it, after a train of reasoning too 
long to reproduce here, the following definition.* ‘‘'The 
definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both 
simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with 
external co-existences and sequences.’’ Upon this Beale 
remarks+ that it does not exclude lifeless machines, and 
it is doubtful if it includes many things which possess 
life although apparently quiescent. Also, that Spencer 
“admits ‘the tendency to assume the specific form 
inherent in all parts of the organism’ which is pecuhar 
to living things. He does not, however, attempt to 
explain the nature of the tendency, or why living matter 
alone exhibits it.” I do not of course sympathise with 
this last sentence of Dr. Beale’s, which is inspired by the 
teleological view and the belief ina vital principle; but my 
chief objection is that Herbert Spencer’s definition does 
not distinguish between the vital and the non-vital actions 

of the individual. 
To come now to the objections common to all those 
definitions which describe life as the sum of the functions. 
What is a function? The term function differs from the 
: 
term action only as being more comprehensive, and as 
* Biology, vol. i., p. 74. 
+ Todd and Bowman, vol. i., p. 32. 
