PROBLEM I. THE NATURE OF LIFE. "La Physiologie a pour but d'exposer les phénomènes de la vie humaine et les conditions d'où ils dépendent. Pour y arriver d'une manière sûre, il faut nécessairement avant tout déterminer quels sont les phénomènes qu'on désigne sous le nom de vie en général. C'est pourquoi la première chose à faire est d'étudier les propriétés générales du corps qu'on appelle organiques ou vivans."-TIEDEMANN, Traité de Physiologie de l'Homme, I. 2. "Some weak and inexperienced persons vainly seek by dialectics and farfetched arguments either to upset or establish things that are only to be founded on anatomical demonstration and believed on the evidence of the senses. He who truly desires to be informed of the question in hand must be held bound either to look for himself, or to take on trust the conclusions to which they who have looked have come." — HARVEY, Second Dissertation to Riolan. THE NATURE OF LIFE. CHAPTER I. THE PROBLEM STATED. 1. ALTHOUGH for convenience we use the terms Life and Mind as representing distinct orders of phenomena, the one objective and the other subjective, and although for centuries they have designated distinct entities, or forces having different substrata, we may now consider it sufficiently acknowledged among scientific thinkers that every problem of Mind is necessarily a problem of Life, referring to one special group of vital activities. It is enough that Mind is never manifested except in a living organism to make us seek in an analysis of organic phenomena for the material conditions of every mental fact. Mental phenomena when observed in others, although interpretable by our consciousness of what is passing in ourselves, can only be objective phenomena of the vital organism. 2. On this ground, if on this alone, an acquaintance with the general principles of structure and function is indispensable to the psychologist; although only of late. years has this been fully recognized, so that men profoundly ignorant of the organism have had no hesitation in theorizing on its highest functions. In saying that such knowledge is indispensable, I do not mean that in the absence of such knowledge a man is debarred from understanding much of the results reached by investigators, |