y themselves with defining it as the peculiar power by which
death is resisted.

Secondly. Convinced--by revelation, by the consenting authority of all
countries, and of all ages, by the imperative voice of my own conscience,
and by that wide chasm between man and the noblest animals of the brute
creation, which no perceivable or conceivable difference of organization
is sufficient to overbridge--that I have a rational and responsible soul, I
think far too reverentially of the same to degrade it into an hypothesis,
and cannot be blind to the contradiction I must incur, if I assign that
soul which I believe to constitute the peculiar nature of man as the cause
of functions and properties, which man possesses in common with the oyster
and the mushroom.(4)

Thirdly, while I disclaim the error of Stahl in deriving the phenomena of
life from the unconscious actions of the rational soul, I repel with still
greater earnestness the assertion and even the supposition that the
functions are the offspring of the structure, and "Life(5) the result of
organization," connected with it as effect with cause. Nay, the position
seems to me little less strange, than as if a man should say, that
building with all the included handicraft, of plastering, sawing, planing,
&c. were the offspring of the house; and that the mason and carpenter were
the result of a suite of chambers, with the passages and staircases that
lead to them. To make A the offspring of B, when the very existence of B
as B presupposes the existence of A, is preposterous in the _literal_
sense of the word, and a consummate instance of the _hysteron proteron_ in
logic. But if I reject the organ as the cause of that, of which it is the
organ, though I might admit it among the _conditions_ of its actual
functions; for the same reason, I must reject _fluids_ and _ethers_ of all
kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential
thinness they may be treble distilled, and (as it were)
super-substantiated. With these, I abjure likewise all _chemical_
agencies, compositions, and decompositions, were it only that as
stimulants they suppose a stimulability _sui generis_, which is but
another paraphrase for life. Or if they are themselves at once both the
excitant and the excitability, I miss the connecting link between this
imaginary ether and the visible body, which then becomes no otherwise
distinguished from inanimate matter, than by its juxtaposition in mer