The Indiana State sentinel. [volume] (Indianapolis) 1868-1895, 1878-06-12
What Is Life =?
Scientific American.

The best our dictionaries can give in an
swer to this question is the verbal definition
of the French encyclOpedia-'Lif Is the op-
posite of death"-a form of words giving no
clue to the nature of the phenomena the ag
gregate of which we call life Language has
many pairs of similarly contrasted words,
such as up and down, high and low, hot and
cold, heavy and light, and to say that any
one of these is not its opposite adds nothing
to its definite OF our conception of
either. Are life and death, like the others
we have cited, merely relative terms? Or is
there such entity ss life, the addition of
which to not living matter makes it living;
the subtraction of which to not living mat
ter makes it dead? Is life the result of or
ganization, or is organization primarily the
result of life? What is life?
When primitive man in his hut dreamed
of war and the chase, OF journeying to dis
tant places, conversing with the dead, and
the like, his natural inference was that there
was in him special self which left the
sleeping body at will yet was forced to re-
turn on the waking of the body. And since
he saw in dreamland the counterparts of
everything he saw in waking life, he as
naturally extended TO all objects. dead as
well as living, the double existence he imag-
ined for himself.
Accordingly from the very dawn of history
the conception of lie as something super
natural, something superior to the bodily or
ganizatiOn, which left the body temporarily
In sleep and trance and the stupor of drunk
enness or disease, and permanently on dying,
has been familiar TO all thinkers. The idea
of life as the result or expression of material
combination came much later. Later still
came the compound theory OF life held by
Leibnitz and Descartes and their followers,
who believed in a physical life for the body
and purely spiritual life for the mind
From this point of view the body is a ma
chine. made up of mechanical devices and
operated by mechanical or purely physical
powers, while it is inhabited by soul which
thinks. but takes no part in the discharge of
vital functions. In the words of LeibnltZ
''The body goes on in its development
mechanically, and the laws of me-
chanics are never transgre.ssd in its
natural motions; in the soul everything
takes place as though there were no body,
and in the body everything takes place as
though there were no soul." This view
makes life the product of expression of
material combinations up to the point of
consciousness; above that the soul is the
life.
OF the three theories. the purely spiritual
isiic-that is, that life is due to the ndwell-
ing spirits at once the oldest and still the
most popular. This was the conception of
Pythagoras Plato, Aristotle and Hippo
crates 1t has always been the theory OF the
Christian church; and it underwent many
yagaries at the hands of Christian mysteries,
scholastlcs, alchemists and other speculative
writers during the middle ages. AT one time
it was believed that each and every vital
process was the work of a particular
spirit and a mans comfort and char
acter depended on the kind OF spirits
that pervaded and animated him. Such
were the teachings of Basil, Valentin,
Paracelsus, and Van Helmont. Stahl sum
marily dismissed all this infinite host Of
immaterial intelligent governing spirits save
one, the rational immortal soul. This soul,
in his view, was the very principle Of life.
There had grown up in that day school OF