Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity

Lambton Family Tradition.-Lord Bacon's Dream.-Last Sonnet
Mrs. Hemans'.-Chartley Tradition.-Lord Chesterfield.-Dr.John-
son on Death.-Latin Hymn.-Capt. Kidd and Lord Byron.-
Grimaldi's dread of Friday.-Cawnpore, Death at.-Watching for
the Dead.-Dirge by Faber.

LITERARY HISTORY OF MADMEN

267-272

"There are those to whom a sense of religion has come in storm and tempest; and there are those whom it has summoned amid scenes of revelry and idle vanity; there are those who have heard its still small voice' amid rural leisure and placid contentment. But perhaps the knowlege which cometh not to err is most frequently impressed upon the mind during seasons of affliction; and tears are the softening showers which cause the seed of heaven to spring and take root in the human heart.”—Sir Walter Scott.

MYSTERIES,

ETC.

Life and Time.

WHAT IS LIFE?

We're ill by these Grammarians us'd;
We are abus'd by Words, grossly abus'd;
From the Maternal Tomb,

To the Grave's fruitful Womb,
We call her Life, but Life's a name
That nothing here can truly claim.

COWLEY, in a note to his Pindaric Ode, whence the above lines are quoted, says:

Plato, in Timæus, makes this distinction: "That which is, but is not generated; and that which is generated, but is not." This he took from Trismegistus, whose sentence of God was written in the Egyptian temples, "I am all that was, is, or shall be." This doctrine of Plato, that nothing truly is but God, is approved by all the Fathers. Simplicius explains it thus: That which has more degrees of privation, or not-being than of being, (which is the case of all creatures,) is not properly said to be; and again, that which is a perpetual fieri, or making, never is quite made, and therefore, never properly is.

Leaving the old "Grammarian," we pass to the science of our own times. M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire, in his Histoire Naturelle générale des Règnes Organiques, in the chapter on the definitions of Life, refutes the common mistake of supposing that vital force suspends or destroys physical action. If these vitalists had but taken the trouble of decomposing each complex question into its elements, instead of cutting the knot which they could not loosen, they would have seen their error. Thus, an animal, while living, "resists" cold, does not "obey" the physical laws of temperature, but keeps constantly above the temperature of the surrounding medium. When dead, this resistance ceases. Does this

prove that vital force destroys physical action? Does it prove that the living animal is enfranchised from those physical laws which regulate the transmission of heat? Not in the least. The more complex conditions have produced a phenomenon different from that witnessed under simpler conditions; but an inorganic substance may manifest an analogous independence (or what seems such) of these laws of transmission, if it be heated by a galvanic current, or by an internal chemical reaction. Again, when we see an animal leap into the air, has he enfranchised himself from the laws of gravitation? Not more than the needle when it leaps to the magnet. *

Physiologists appear to have made this mistake in speaking of Life: they have enumerated certain functions, and have called such enumeration life; now function is not life, but the result of life; it is vital organ in action. Bichat defined life as "the sumtotal of the functions which resist death: " which amounts merely to this-that life is life. Bichat's definition of life is manifestly faulty in this-that it ignores the essential co-operation of the medium or surrounding circumstances in which organization is placed, and is, therefore, as one-sided and useless as any definition would be which might ignore the organism, and enumerate the circumstances as life; circumstances and individual are correlative, both in psychical and organic life; and man's life, mental and organic, is the result of such correlation. This is what Coleridge indicated, when, in his Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of Life, he defined life as "the Principle of Individuation." This is a plagiarism from the Germans, (in this case from Schelling,) as was most of Coleridge's philosophy.

THE AUTHOR OF OUR BEING.

Dr. Thomas Woods, of Parsonstown, observes: "If we look at the constitution of matter, the impossibility of a mass being formed, even though atoms might have been in existence, without the interference of some agency different from any at present operating; viewing its arrangements, measured out and bounded with mathematical precision, we must admit that some Being greater than any on this earth, and more powerful than the supposed laws of nature, has formed it. Seeing, also, that in all departments of creation, the object pre-eminently provided for is the welfare and preservation of man, and that the same method is everywhere manifested in carrying it out, we must likewise conclude that the same power which made the arrangements in matter is also the Author of our being.

As in the animate creation, the organization of every living thing is made from one type, so in creation generally, one plan is Saturday Review, April 25, 1857.

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