etical addition. This is the philosophy of Death, and only of a dead
nature can it hold good. In Life, and in the view of a vital philosophy,
the two component counter-powers actually interpenetrate each other, and
generate a higher third, including both the former, "ita tamen ut sit alia
et major."

As a complete answer to No. 3, I refer the reader to many passages in the
preceding and following pages, in which, on far higher and more
demonstrative grounds than the mechanic system can furnish, I have exposed
the unmeaningness and absurdity of these finer fluids, as applied even to
electricity itself; unless, indeed, they are assumed as its product. But
in addition I beg leave to remind the author, that it is incomparably more
agreeable to all experience to originate the formative process in the
_fluid_, whether fine or gross, than in corporeal _atoms_, in which we are
not only deserted by all experience, but contradicted by the primary
conception of body itself.

Equally inapplicable is No. 4: and of No. 5 I can only repeat, first, that
I do not make Life _like_ magnetism, or _like_ electricity; that the
difference between magnetism and electricity, and the powers illustrated
by them, is an essential part of my system, but that the animal Life of
man is the identity of all three. To whatever other system this objection
may apply, it is utterly irrelevant to that which I have here propounded:
though from the narrow limits prescribed to me, it has been propounded
with an inadequacy painful to my own feelings.

The ridicule in No. 6 might be easily retorted; but as it could prove
nothing, I will leave it where I found it, in a page where nothing is
proved.

A similar remark might be sufficient for the bold and blank assertion (No.
7) with which the extract concludes; but that I feel some curiosity to
discover what meaning the author attaches to the term analogy. Analogy
implies a difference in sort, and not merely in degree; and it is the
sameness of the end, with the difference of the means, which constitutes
analogy. No one would say the lungs of a man were analogous to the lungs
of a monkey, but any one might say that the gills of fish and the
spiracula of insects are analogous to lungs. Now if there be any
philosophers who have asserted that electricity as electricity is the
_same_ as Life, for that reason they cannot be _analogous_ to each other;
and as no man in his senses, philosopher or not, is capable of imagi