Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life

That electricity, on the other hand, does not act in length merely, is clear, from the fact that every electric body is electric over its whole surface. But that electricity acts both in length and breadth, and only in length and breadth, and not in depth; in short, that the (so-called) electrical fluid in an electrified body spreads over the whole surface of that body without penetrating it, or tending ad intra, may be proved by direct experiment. Take a cylinder of wood, and bore an indefinite number of holes in it, each of them four lines in depth and four in diameter. Electrify this cylinder, and present to its superficies a small square of gold-leaf, held to it by an insulating needle of gum lac, and bring this square to an electrometer of great sensibility. The electrometer will instantly show an electricity in the gold-leaf, similar to that of the cylinder which had been brought into contact with it. The square of gold-leaf having thus been discharged of its electricity, put it carefully into one of the holes of the cylinder, so, namely, that it shall touch only the bottom of the hole, and present it again to the electrometer. It will be then found that the electrometer will exhibit no signs of electricity whatsoever. From this it follows, that the electricity which had been communicated to the cylinder had confined itself to the surface.

If the time and the limit prescribed would admit, we could multiply experiments, all tending to prove the same law; but we must be content with the barely sufficient. But that the chemical process acts in depth, and first, therefore, realizes and integrates the fluxional power of magnetism and electricity, is involved in the term composition; and this will become still more convincing when we have learnt to regard decomposition as a mere co-relative, i.e. as decomposition relatively to the body decomposed, but composition actually and in respect of the substances, into which it was decomposed. The alteration in the specific gravity of metals in their chemical amalgams, interesting as the fact is in all points, is decisive in the present; for gravity is the sole inward of inorganic bodies—it constitutes their depth.

I can now, for the first time, give to my opinions that degree of intelligibility, which is requisite for their introduction as hypotheses; the experiments above related, understood as in the common mode of thinking, prove that the magnetic influence flows in length, the electric fluid by suffusion, and that chemical agency (whatever the main agent may be) is qualitative and in intimis. Now my hypothesis demands the converse of all this. I affirm that a power, acting exclusively in length, is (wherever it be found) magnetism; that a power which acts both in length and in breadth, and only in length and breadth, is (wherever it be found) electricity; and finally, that a power which, together with length and breadth, includes depth likewise, is (wherever it be found) constructive agency. That is but one phenomenon of magnetism, to which we have appropriated and confined the term magnetism; because of all the natural bodies at present known, iron, and one or two of its nearest relatives in the family of hard yet coherent metals, are the only ones, in which all the conditions are collected, under which alone the magnetic agency can appear in and during the act itself. When, therefore, I affirm the power of reproduction in organized bodies to be magnetism, I must be understood to mean that this power, as it exists in the magnet, and which we there (to use a strong phrase) catch in the very act, is to the same kind of power, working as reproductive, what the root is to the cube of that root. We no more confound the force in the compass needle with that of reproduction, than a man can be said to confound his liver with a lichen, because he affirms that both of them grow.

The same precautions are to be repeated in the identification of electricity with irritability; and the power of depth, for which we have yet no appropriated term, with sensibility. How great the distance is in all, and that the lowest degrees are adopted as the exponent terms, not for their own sakes, but merely because they may be used with less hazard of diverting the attention from the kind by peculiar properties arising out of the degree, is evident from the third instance, unless the theorist can be supposed insane enough to apply sensation in good earnest to the effervescence of an acid or an alkali, or to sympathise with the distresses of a vat of new beer when it is working. In whatever way the subject could be treated, it must have remained unintelligible to men who, if they think of space at all, abstract their notion of it from the contents of an exhausted receiver. With this, and with an ether, such men may work wonders; as what, indeed, cannot be done with a plenum and a vacuum, when a theorist has privileged himself to assume the one, or the other, ad libitum?—in all innocence of heart, and undisturbed by the reflection that the two things cannot both be true. That both time and space are mere abstractions I am well aware; but I know with equal certainty that what is expressed by them as the identity of both is the highest reality, and the root of all power, the power to suffer, as well as the power to act. However mere an ens logicum space may be, the dimensions of space are real, and the works of Galileo, in more than one elegant passage, prove with what awe and amazement they fill the mind that worthily contemplates them. Dismissing, therefore, all facts of degrees, as introduced merely for the purposes of illustration, I would make as little reference as possible to the magnet, the charged phial, or the processes of the laboratory, and designate the three powers in the process of our animal life, each by two co-relative terms, the one expressing the form, and the other the object and product of the power. My hypothesis will, therefore, be thus expressed, that the constituent forces of life in the human living body are—first, the power of length, or REPRODUCTION; second, the power of surface (that is, length and breadth), or IRRITABILITY; third, the power of depth, or SENSIBILITY. With this observation I may conclude these remarks, only reminding the reader that Life itself is neither of these separately, but the copula of all three—that Life, as Life, supposes a positive or universal principle in Nature, with a negative principle in every particular animal, the latter, or limitative power, constantly acting to individualize, and, as it were, figure the former. Thus, then, Life itself is not a thing—a self-subsistent hypostasis—but an act and process; which, pitiable as the prejudice will appear to the forts esprits, is a great deal more than either my reason would authorise or my conscience allow me to assert—concerning the Soul, as the principle both of Reason and Conscience.

1

Mr. Abernethy.

2

Experiment, as an organ of reason, not less distinguished from the blind or dreaming industry of the alchemists, than it was successfully opposed to the barren subtleties of the schoolmen.

3

Whose own mind, however, was not comprehended in the vortex; where Kepler erred it was in the other extreme.

4

But still less would I avail myself of its acknowledged inappropriateness to the purposes of physiology, in order to cast a self-complacent sneer on the soul itself, and on all who believe in its existence. First, because in my opinion it would be impertinent; secondly, because it would be imprudent and injurious to the character of my profession; and, lastly, because it would argue an irreverence to the feelings of mankind, which I deem scarcely compatible with a good heart, and a degree of arrogance and presumption which I have never found, except in company with a corrupt taste and a shallow capacity.

5

Vide Lawrence's Lecture.

6

Joh. Bapt. a Vico, Neapol. Reg. eloq. Professor, de antiquissima Itallorum sapientia ex lingua Latina originibus aruendâ: libri tres. Neap., 1710.

7

The object I have proposed to myself, and wherein its distinction exists, may be thus illustrated. A complex machine is presented to the common view, the moving power of which is hidden. Of those who are studying and examining it, one man fixes his attention on some one application of that power, on certain effects produced by that particular application, and on a certain part of the structure evidently appropriated to the production of these effects, neither the one or other of which he had discovered in a neighbouring machine, which he at the same time asserts to be quite distinct from the former, and to be moved by a power altogether different, though many of the works and operations are, he admits, common to both machines. In this supposed peculiarity he places the essential character of the former machine, and defines it by the presence of that which is, or which he supposes to be, absent in the latter. Supposing that a stranger to both were about to visit the two machines, this peculiarity would be so far useful as that it might enable him to distinguish the one from the other, and thus to look in the proper place for whatever else he had heard remarkable concerning either; not that he or his informant would understand the machine any better or otherwise, than the common character of a whole class in the nomenclature of botany would enable a person to understand all, or any one of the plants contained in that class. But if, on the other hand, the machine in question were such as no man was a stranger to, if even the supposed peculiarity, either by its effects, or by the construction of that portion of the works which produced them, were equally well known to all men, in this case we can conceive no use at all of such a definition; for at the best it could only be admitted as a definition for the purposes of nomenclature, which never adds to knowledge, although it may often facilitate its communication. But in this instance it would be nomenclature misplaced, and without an object. Such appears to me to be the case with all those definitions which place the essence of Life in nutrition, contractility, &c. As the second instance, I will take the inventor and maker of the machine himself, who knows its moving power, or perhaps himself constitutes it, who is, as it were, the soul of the work, and in whose mind all its parts, with all their bearings and relations, had pre-existed long before the machine itself had been put together. In him therefore there would reside, what it would be presumption to attempt to acquire, or to pretend to communicate, the most perfect insight not only of the machine itself, and of all its various operations, but of its ultimate principle and its essential causes. The mysterious ground, the efficient causes of vitality, and whether different lives differ absolutely or only in degree, He alone can know who not only said, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature, the beast of the earth after his kind, and it was so;” but who said, “Let us make man in our image, who himself breathed into his nostrils the breath of Life, and man became a living soul.”

The third case which I would apply to my own attempt would be that of the inquirer, who, presuming to know nothing of the power that moves the whole machine, takes those parts of it which are presented to his view, seeks to reduce its various movements to as few and simple laws of motion as possible, and out of their separate and conjoint action proceeds to explain and appropriate the structure and relative positions of the works. In obedience to the canon,—“Principia non esse multiplicanda præter summam necessitatem cui suffragamur non ideo quia causalem in mundo unitatem vel ratione vel experientiâ perspiciamus, sed illam ipsam indagamus impulsu intellectûs, qui tantundem sibi in explicatione phænomenorum profecisse videtur quantum ab codem principio ad plurima rationata descendere ipsi concessum est.”

8

The arborescent forms on a frosty morning, to be seen on the window and pavement, must have some relation to the more perfect forms developed in the vegetable world.

9

Thus we may say that whatever is organized from without, is a product of mechanism; whatever is mechanised from within, is a production of organization.

10

“The matter that surrounds us is divided into two great classes, living and dead; the latter is governed by physical laws, such as attraction, gravitation, chemical affinity; and it exhibits physical properties, such as cohesion, elasticity, divisibility, &c. Living matter also exhibits these properties, and is subject, in great measure, to physical laws. But living bodies are endowed moreover with a set of properties altogether different from these, and contrasting with them very remarkably.” (Vide Lawrence's Lectures, p. 121.)

11

Much against my will I repeat this scholastic term, multeity, but I have sought in vain for an unequivocal word of a less repulsive character, that would convey the notion in a positive and not comparative sense in kind, as opposed to the unum et simplex, not in degree, as contracted with the few. We can conceive no reason that can be adduced in justification of the word caloric, as invented to distinguish the external cause of the sensation heat, which would not equally authorise the introduction of a technical term in this instance.

12

For abstractions are the conditions and only subject of all abstract sciences. Thus the theorist (vide Dalton's Theory), who reduces the chemical process to the positions of atoms, would doubtless thereby render chemistry calculable, but that he commences by destroying the chemical process itself, and substitutes for it a mote dance of abstractions; for even the powers which he appears to leave real, those of attraction and repulsion, he immediately unrealizes by representing them as diverse and separable properties. We can abstract the quantities and the quantitative motion from masses, passing over or leaving for other sciences the question of what constitutes the masses, and thus apply not to the masses themselves, but to the abstractions therefrom,—the laws of geometry and universal arithmetic. And where the quantities are the infallible signs of real powers, and our chief concern with the masses is as SIGNS, sciences may be founded thereon of the highest use and dignity. Such, for instance, is the sublime science of astronomy, having for its objects the vast masses which “God placed in the firmament of the heaven to be for signs and for seasons, for days and years.” For the whole doctrine of physics may be reduced to three great divisions: First, quantitative motion, which is proportioned to the quantity of matter exclusively. This is the science of weight or statics. Secondly, relative motion, as communicated to bodies externally by impact. This is the science of mechanics. Thirdly, qualitative motion, or that which is accordant to properties of matter. And this is chemistry. Now it is evident that the first two sciences presuppose that which forms the exclusive object of the third, namely, quality; for all quantity in nature is either itself derived, or at least derives its powers from some quality, as that of weight, specific cohesion, hardness, &c.; and therefore the attempt to reduce to the distances or impacts of atoms, under the assumptions of two powers, which are themselves declared to be no more than mere general terms for those quantities of motion and impact (the atom itself being a fiction formed by abstraction, and in truth a third occult quality for the purpose of explaining hardness and density), amounts to an attempt to destroy chemistry itself, and at the same time to exclude the sole reality and only positive contents of the very science into which that of chemistry is to be degraded. Now what qualities are to chemistry, productiveness is to the science of Life; and this being excluded, physiology or zoonomy would sink into chemistry, chemistry by the same process into mechanics, while mechanics themselves would lose the substantial principle, which, bending the lower extreme towards its apex, produces the organic circle of the sciences, and elevates them all into different arcs or stations of the one absolute science of Life.

This explanation, which in appearance only is a digression, was indispensably requisite to prevent the idea of polarity, which has been given as the universal law of Life, from being misunderstood as a mere refinement on those mechanical systems of physiology, which it has been my main object to explode.

13

I apprehend that by men of a certain school it would be deemed no demerit, even though they should never have condescended to look into any system of Aristotelian logic. It is enough for these gentlemen that they are experimentalists! Let it not, however, be supposed that they make more experiments than their neighbours, who consider induction as a means and not an end; or have stronger motives for making them, unless it can be believed that Tycho Brähe must have been urged to repeat his sweeps of the heavens with greater accuracy and industry than Herschel, for no better reason than that the former flourished before the theory of gravitation was perfected. No, but they have the honour of being mere experimentalists! If, however, we may not refer to logic, we may to common sense and common experience. It is not improbable, however, that they have both read and studied a book of hypothetical psychology on the assumptions of the crudest materialism, stolen too without acknowledgment from our David Hartley's essay on Man, which is well known under the whimsical name of Condillac's Logic. But, as Mr. Brand has lately observed, “the French are a queer people,” and we should not be at all surprised to hear of a book of fresh importation from Paris, on determinate proportions in chemistry, announced by the author in his title-page as a new and improved system either of arithmetic or geometry.

14

Such is the interpretation given by Lord Bacon. To which of the two gigantic intellects, the poet's or philosophic commentator's, the allegory belongs, I shall not presume to decide. Its extraordinary beauty and appropriateness remains the same in either case.

15

The Anatomical Demonstrations of the Brain, by Dr. Spurzheim, which I have seen, presented to me the most satisfactory proof of this.

16

The remark on the feeling of the antennæ, compared with the touch of man, or even of the half-reasoning elephant, is yet more applicable to the taste, which in these gelatinous animals might, perhaps not inappropriately, be entitled the gastric sense.