Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The works of John Hunter / edited by James F. Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![CHAPTER II. ON THE VITAL PRINCIPLE. Difficulty of conceiving of this principle;—complex in its effects, hut simple in its essence;—not the result of any perceptible arrangement of matter; —may result from a peculiar arrangement of the ultimate particles, giving rise to a principle of preservation ;—this the simplest idea of life ■—illustrated by magnetism in iron.—Erroneous comparison of life to mechanical powers.—Action not an essential property of life.—Life without action ;—vitality of an egg;—experiments;—but action promotes the continuance of life.—Seeming exceptions to the preservative power of life;—peculiar form of putrefaction in certain bodies ;—death of a part of the body previously to general death. Animal matter is endowed with a principle called, in common language, life. This principle is, perhaps, conceived of with more difficulty than any other in nature, which arises from its being more complex in its effects than any other; and it is therefore no wonder that it is the least understood. But although life may appear very compounded in its ef- fects in a complicated animal like man, it is as simple in him as in the most simple animal, and is reducible to one simple property in every animal *. I have observed that animal matter may be in two states; in one it is endowed with the living principle, in the other it is deprived of it. From this it appears that the principle called life cannot arise from the pecu- liar modification of matter, because the same modification exists where this principle is no more. The matter abstracted from life appears at all times to be the same, as far as our senses and experiments carry us. If life arose out of this peculiar modification, it would not be destroyed until the modification was destroyed, either by spontaneous changes, as fermentation, or by some chemical processes; and were it destroyed by the last, it might sometimes be restored again by another process. Life, then, appears to be something superadded to this peculiar modifi- cation of matter; or this modification of matter is so arranged that the * [It is considered by many, and perhaps truly, that vve are not yet prepared for a generalization of so high a kind, or at least that it would be more convenient for the analysis of vital phenomena to consider life as made up of several principles differing in their nature.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21996623_0001_0251.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
