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except in the study of morals , we nowhere see this Method so strikingly illustrated as in Biology , with its " Vital Principle , " its " Nature curing herself , " and its famous notion of organized bodies being independent of chemical action . Not only are all phenomena of life more complex than chemical or physical phenomena , and hence less easily reduced to simple laws , so that because our scientific knowledge is less perfect , our metaphysical conceptions have greater scope ; but the . very fact ,, that in Method
studying Life we go at once to the source of all Metaphysical , explains the difficulty men have of not being metaphysicians in their treatment of this subject . The very men who would laugh at all attempts to discover the " principle of attraction , " the " nature of electricity , " or the " cause of affinity / 5 content as they are with recording the Laws ( Methods ) which regulate phenomena , naively investigate the " vital principle , " the " nature of Mind , " the " cause of sensation . " It is only of late years , and among the most eminent physiologists , that the study of Life has acquired
a decisively positive character . Every Science has its correspondent Art ; as in this life all our Thought has an aim in Action , or becomes sterile and fantastic without it . But although Art is necessary as a primary impulse and concurrent aim to Science , yet it is indispensable , at a certain period of advancement , that we should accurately separate them . As Comte says , their respective domains are distinct though united : to one belongs knowledge , with precision as result ; to the other power , with action as result . But as soon as Science becomes fairly constituted ; it must pursue its own development without any regard to other aims than those 1 > f knowledge . Of this the great Archimedes had a profound sentiment , when he naively apologized to posterity for having for an instant applied his genius to practical inventions . And our brilliant essayist , Macaulay , shows a profound misconception of the nature of Science in his celebrated article on Bacon—the whole purport
of which is to restrict Science to its immediate applications . The culture of any one science would have familiarized his mind with the opposite conception , and would have taught him that whatever benefits Science has derived in the waj' of stimulus and direction from the necessities of the Arts , nevertheless , almost all the great developments of Science have been due to the purely speculative character it has taken . Man does not live by bread alone , thank God ! And if the energetic lower impulses are necessary at first to stimulate our highest faculties , yet these faculties once aroused suffice unto themselves !
The object of these remarks is to point out the necessity of separating Biology from Medicine , and consequently of no longer trusting the cultivation of the science to its practical applicants , the Medical Profession . If it were proposed to confine the culture of Astronomy to Navigators alone , loud Homeric laughter would greet the proposal ; yet those very laughters would see nothing that was not perfectly rational in confiding the culture of Biology to the scanty leisure of the Medical Profession . I always notice a quiet and amusing superciliousness on the part of medical men when I talk to them of subjects on which frequently they are utterly ignorant , but which , because I am a layman , they assume I can only " dabble in . " It was reproached against my friend Herbert Spencer ' s Theory of ' Population , wherein a general law is enunciated , that his " facts were second-hand "
—as if Architects usually made their own bricks ! In vain do we insist upon the fact that Schwann , Kolliker , Henle—indeed , most of the greatest physiologists—are either not members of the medical profession , or little more so than in name—the common prejudice is , that Biology can only be successfully studied by the " profession . " But this is an evil that must spontaneously disappear before the advance of Science ; especially when men come more distinctly to understand that Biology must necessarily embrace the whole phenomena of organized beings—not simply the phenomena of human physiology—but the whole of vegetable and animal physiology , oi' which the hum tin animal is but the highest and most interesting section ; few will maintain that clinical experience constitute the pre-requisite to a correct understanding of the vegetable world .
Biology is the Science of Life . And last as to the definition of Life . Bichat , unconsciously determined by the ancient prejudice of living bodies being independent of—and antagonistic to—dead bodies ( an error I dwelt on in the preceding paper ) gave this definition , which has attained great celebrity , " Life is the sum of the functions by which death is resisted . " Coleridge properly remarks , that he can discover in it " no other meaning than that life consists in being able to live ; " , indeed , if Bichat hud only steadily considered the indispensable co-operation of the medium or surrounding circumstances in which an organization is placed , with the organization itself , if lie hud considered how a slight change in external conditions is sufficient to revive a dying animal or to destroy a living animal ,
he could never have propounded such a definition , for he would have seen that so far from organic bodies being independent of external ehcuinstaneeH they are more and more dependent on them as their organization becomes higher , so tjiat organism and a medium are the two correlative ideas of life ; while inversely , it is in proportion as we descend the scale till we arrive at the most universal of all phenomena—those of gravitation , that the independence of a surrounding medium is manifested . Every change of temperature , every chemical combination , aifeets the organic body , whereas gravitation ia in nowise disturbed by them . . For the phenoineim of attraction we only need simple atoms ; for the phenomena of life we want the whole concourse of nature , and every variation in the medium is followed by a variation iu the phenomena . If 1 insist on this dependence of the organism
on the medium , it is because I find men in their reasonings constantly attaching themselves solely to the subjective and forgetting the objective point of view thinking only of the vital force and forgetting the determinations of that force by external conditions . Another definition , which has been a favourite with a large class , is this , " Life is the result of organization . " A truly metaphysical definition ! Without pausing to inquire too narrowly how this definition suits the lower forms of life , such as the cellular plants , wherein no organs are , I simply ask , wherefore is life supposed to result from organization , rather than organization from the vital force , whatever it may be ?
In that very interesting posthumous essay by Coleridge , Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life , ( our pleasure in studying which is only abated by its being a shameless plagiarism from Schelling ' s Erster Entwurf , even to its very terminology ) , there is a definition which though not wholly unobjectionable contains a point of view the student will find extremely useful if thoroughly appreciated—and the definition in this , " Life is the principle of individuation , " or that power which discloses itself from within , combining many qualities into one individual thing . To appreciate this , however , it must be studied in the commentary . I refer the reader to Schelling , Coleridge , or Herbert Spencer ' s Social Statics , pp . 436 , seq . _
If I am wandering from Comte by these remarks , I am still keeping within the necessities of an exposition of the Positive Philosophy , and the reader will now perhaps better appreciate what I am about to condense from the pages before me . The only definition which seems to Comte capable of fulfilling all the multifarious conditions required , is that proposed by De Blainville , as the twofold internal movement of composition and decomposition , at once general and continuous . " That luminous definition , " he says , " seems to me to leave nothing to be desired , unless it be a more explicit indication of the two fundamental correlative conditions inseparable from a living being , —an organism and a mediums which , however , is but a secondary
criticism . The definition thus presents the exact enunciation of the sole phenomenon rigorously common to the ensemble of living beings , considered in all their constituent parts , and in all their modes of vitality . " At first sight , it may appear that this definition does not sufficiently respect the capital distinction so much insisted on by Bichat and his followers , between vegetative life and animal life , in other words , organic life and relative life , because it seems to refer entirely to the vegetative life . But , deeply considered , this very objection leads to a recognition of the real merit of this definition , by showing how it rests upon an exact appreciation of the biological hierarchy . For it is indisputable , that , in the immense majority of organized beings , animal life is but a supplement , an additional series of
phenomena , superposed on the fundamental organic life . And if , in the progressional ascent of being , we find what was at first the mere addition , becomes , at last , the most important , so that the vegetative life in Man seems destined only to sustain the animal life , his moral and intellectual attributes becoming the highest functions of his existence , that remarkable fact does not affect the order of biological study , but points to another fundamental science , —Sociology , —which takes its rise from Biology . Thus , with reference to the Science of Life , it remains true that the earliest forms are vegetative , and to them the animal life must be subordinate ; this is so in virtue of the greater generality of vegetative life , and also , according to the remark of Bichat , because the vegetative life is continuous , whereas the functions of animal life are intermittent .
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PASSAGES FliOM A BOY'S EPIC . VI . DESTRUCTION OF THIS TEMPLE OF UACCHUH . Well pleased the Princess saw her journey end ; Before her rose a fair metropolis Shining colossal through the misty Eve , With dome , and pinnacle , and minaret , With gorgeous frontispiece and cresting towers , Temple and palace and the abodes of men , Wrought of clear marble white as drifted snow . Thro' consecrated groves the . Princess past , Wherein all statues of all forms appeared , The workmanship of wisest Da-dalus , Who moulds with silent hand our later age , When Truth with Beauty weds , and knightly Hearts Are big with the new chivalry of Work . Here Zeus Olyrnpius lookt ( . he Titans dead , With the hare potency of kingly frowns ; In marble Hen ; walkt with that grand pact ; That queens do use ; and hen ; in armour clad The maiden warrior mighty Palla . s leant Against her Olive ; an uplifted . spear Poseidon graspt to strike ; the rending earth , And summoned the white steed with fomny mane , And mouth on tremble with a fiery snort . Beside him Hermes , with his restless wand , Along the road urged the delaying Dead . All forms from plain or forest , sea or shore , Mountain and vule , all products of the mind ,
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666 THE LEADER . [ Saturday ,
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), July 10, 1852, page 666, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1942/page/22/
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