ncurs the risk of being denominated jargon, I should at the same time
have borrowed a scholastic _term_, and defined life _absolutely_, as the
principle of unity in _multeity_, as far as the former, the unity to wit,
is produced _ab intra_; but _eminently_ (_sensu eminenti_), I define life
as _the principle of individuation_, or the power which unites a given
_all_ into a _whole_ that is presupposed by all its parts. The link that
combines the two, and acts throughout both, will, of course, be defined by
the _tendency_ to _individuation_. Thus, from its utmost _latency_, in
which life is one with the elementary powers of mechanism, that is, with
the powers of mechanism considered as qualitative and actually synthetic,
to its highest manifestation, (in which, as the _vis vitae vivida_, or life
_as_ life, it subordinates and modifies these powers, becoming
contra-distinguished from mechanism,(9) _ab extra_, under the form of
organization,) there is an ascending series of intermediate classes, and
of analogous gradations in each class. To a reflecting mind, indeed, the
very fact that the powers peculiar to life in living animals _include_
cohesion, elasticity, &c. (or, in the words of a late publication, "that
living matter exhibits these physical properties,"(10)) would demonstrate
that, in the truth of things, they are homogeneous, and that both the
classes are but degrees and different dignities of one and the same
tendency. For the latter are not subjected to the former as a lever, or
walking-stick to the muscles; the more intense the life is, the less does
_elasticity_, for instance, appear _as_ elasticity. It sinks down into the
nearest approach to its _physical_ form by a series of degrees from the
contraction and elongation of the irritable muscle to the physical
hardness of the insensitive nail. The lower powers are _assimilated_, not
merely _employed_, and assimilation presupposes the homogeneous nature of
the thing assimilated; else it is a miracle, only not the same as that of
a _creation_, because it would imply that additional and equal miracle of
annihilation. In short, all the impossibilities which the acutest of the
reformed Divines have detected in the hypothesis of transubstantiation
would apply, _totidem verbis et syllabis_, to that of assimilation, if the
objects and the agents were really heterogeneous. Unless, therefore, a
thing can exhibit properties which do not belong to it, the very admission
that l