Physiological Researches upon Life and Death

Answers

• Q07LIFE

  Does living activity require a principle beyond physical and chemical processes?

  Yes. vital properties differ in kind from physical laws. Vital powers vary constantly in intensity while physical laws are fixed and uniform, so living bodies must be studied by different principles from inanimate ones.

  In considering under this head the vital laws, the first view which they offer, is the remarkable difference which distinguishes them from physical laws. The one constantly varying in their intenseness, energy, and development, often pass with rapidity from the lowest degree of prostration to the highest point of exaltation, accumulate and diminish in the organs alternately, and assume, from the influence of the slightest causes, a thousand different modifications. Sleep, watching, exercise, rest, digestion, hunger, the passions, and the action of surrounding bodies, &c. expose them at every instant to numerous revolutions. The others, on the contrary, fixed, invariable, and constantly the same at all times, are the source of a series of phenomena always uniform. Compare the vital faculty of feeling, to the physical faculty of attracting, you will see that the attraction is always in proportion to the mass of rough body in which it is observed, while the sensibility changes its proportion incessantly in the same organic part and in the same mass of matter. The invariability of the laws which govern physical phenomena, permits us to calculate all the sciences which are the object of them; while applied to the actions of life mathematics can offer no general rules.

  OCR corrected

  Part I, Article VII, §I 'Difference of vital powers with the physical laws' · Downloaded archive.org OCR of the 1809 Watkins translation; Article VII §I heading and text found. Archive.org also holds French editions (1805 and later). First edition 1800 (an VIII).