rved, all these definitions
are grounded. But it is sorry logic to take the proof of an affirmative in
one thing as the proof of the negative in another. All animals that have
lungs breathe, but it would be a childish oversight to deduce the
converse, viz. all animals that breathe have lungs. The theory in which
the French chemists organized the discoveries of Black, Cavendish,
Priestly, Scheele, and other English and German philosophers, is still,
indeed, the reigning theory, but rather, it should seem, from the absence
of a rival sufficiently popular to fill the throne in its stead, than from
the continuance of an implicit belief in its own stability. We no longer
at least cherish that intensity of faith which, before Davy commenced his
brilliant career, had not only identified it with chemistry itself, but
had substituted its nomenclature, even in common conversation, for the far
more philosophic language which the human race had abstracted from the
laboratory of Nature. I may venture to prophecy that no future Beddoes
will make it the corival of the mathematical sciences in demonstrative
evidence. I think it a matter of doubt whether, during the period of its
supposed infallibility, physiology derived more benefit from the
extension, or injury from the misdirection, of its views. Enough of the
latter is fresh in recollection to make it but an equivocal compliment to
a physiological position, that it must stand or fall with the corpuscular
philosophy, as modified by the French theory of chemistry. Yet should it
happen (and the event is not impossible, nor the supposition altogether
absurd,) that more and more decisive facts should present themselves in
confirmation of the metamorphosis of elements, the position that life
consists in assimilation would either cease to be distinctive, or fall
back into the former class as an identical proposition, namely, that Life,
meaning by the word that sort of growth which takes place by means of a
peculiar organization, consists in that sort of growth which is peculiar
to organized life. _Thirdly_, the definition involves a still more
egregious flaw in the reasoning, namely, that of _cum hoc, ergo propter
hoc_ (or the assumption of causation from mere coexistence); and this,
too, in its very worst form. For it is not _cum hoc solo, ergo propter
hoc_, which would in many cases supply a presumptive proof by induction,
but _cum hoc, et plurimis aliis, ergo propter hoc_! Shell, of some