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On Vitality.
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& 4 £ On Vitality .
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This point is , I think , proved , no less philosophically than scripturally , by Dr . Priestley , in his " Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit : " where also may be seen a defence of the form and properties of that , which your Correspondent , in conformity with the popular physics , calls ** inert matter . " E .
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union attains to fne firmness of maturity ; it decreases also to the imbecility of age . It cannot stand still at any one moment of existence without corrupting ; the accessions by the secretion of the dav push off the
external particles formerly secreted as worse than useless , when they have ceased to give vigour and strength . How different is the animating principle ; this inhabitant of the house of clay continues through life ! It is this gives identity Co the body , always at home ; it recollects the
endearments and afflictions of childhood , the follies and gaities of youth , the reasonings and anxieties of manhood , and the sound determinations from the experience pf age . The loss of an eye or an ear , an arm or a leg , even a total dismemberment , whilst the vital organs are preserved , instead of reducing its powers have given
strength to its energy , and enabled it to overcome , by its more powerful exertions , that tendency to decomposition which had begun in the body before such dismemberment had taken place . Observe the opposite actions of body and of rnind . By a slow and certain progress the body attains to maturity , and by an equally markedout process it goes on progressively to decay . Durine ; the whole of this
period , physiologists observe , that there is an unceasing strife between the vital power and the powers that govern inanimate bodies . In health the contest is successful on the part of vitality : in disease it is doubtful . In death the contest is ended ; vitality is no longer able by its exertions to controul the mechanical and chymical laws of nature , though during life it had modified , influenced and altered
their effects . After full maturity has taken place on the body by a complete developement of the germ , as strength increases in the midst of this contest till corporeal maturity , from that period , for a long time , perhaps insensibly , weakness commences and keeps increasing , till the
corporeal functions are stopped for ever . Not so the mind : equally helpless with the body in infancy , it soon commences to add knowledge to consciousness , and through the longest life keeps constantly increasing in its powers of determination op
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May \ Oth , 1817-Y former letter on this sub-Mject , [ p . 210 ] , went to shew , that throughout all nature , every living body with whose origin we are acquainted , received its being by a two-fold instrumentality , and ,
that being * ab origine of a two-fold nature , and so continuing through life , the death and dissolution of the body did not necessarily involve in it a destruction of the vital animating principle . The purport of my present letter will be to shew from nature , marked distinctions between
the body and the vital principle which animates it , the conclusion from which evidence must necessarily be , that it is the animating principle or mind , and not the organized body , which constitutes the man . The commencement of all animated existence , whether animal or vegetable , is so infinitely minute to the
• r human eye , as to be wholly incapable of human observation ; yet to whatsoever magnitude the being may attain in the oak , the chesnut , the elephant or the mammoth , the whole is but the enlargement of this invisible atom , and of course but an addendum of liquid or solid matter accumulated
by the organic secretions of the animated being . In animal bodies , these are in a proportion of about one-sixth solid materials to five-sixths of liquid , and in vegetables of about threefourths solid to one-fourth liquid , and even the small proportion of solid animalization is but accidental and transient , being at first gelatinous ,
and naturally tending after death , to enter into the putrefactive fermentation and dissolve and pass away in aerial and liquid forms , to unite with its native elements , again to form other substances for fresh animation- All these transitory , solid , and liquid substances , must be necessarily con sidered as no part of vitality . Their
On Vitality.
On Vitality .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1817, page 342, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2465/page/22/
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