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-they cannot help admitting-that there is not a shred of evidence to show that life can ever arise except from a living being. Yet they assume that it arose from dead matter in the distant past. All science, these writers are very fond of telling us, rests on experience. But all experience proves that life never comes into being unless from antecedent life; therefore, conclude these rigorous logicians, life once sprang into existence from non-living matter. The alternative, of course, would be the admission of a Living God.

The most common scholastic definition of life was, activitas qua ens seipsum movet-the activity by which a being moves itself. The word move, however, was understood in a wide sense as equivalent to all forms of change or alteration, including the energies of sentiency and intellectual cognition as well as local motion. The feature insisted on as essential is the immanent character of the operations. That is, proceeding from an internal principle, the action does not pass into a foreign subject, but perfects the agent. All effects of non-living agents are, on the contrary, transitive. Notwithstanding the multitude of attempts made by successive philosophers and biologists, the definition of the schoolmen has not been as yet much improved upon.5

Against our teaching, defenders of Vitalism, who suppose in man a vegetative principle distinct from the rational soul, commonly object that the intellect is unconscious of the processes of growth, assimilation, &c.

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5 Bichat's definition is well known: "Life is the sum of the functions which resist death." This is not a very great advance if death can only be described as the cessation of life. Life is the sum of the phenomena peculiar to organized beings." (Béclard.) "Life is a centre of intussusceptive assimilative force capable of reproduction by spontaneous fission." (Owen.) "Life is the twofold internal movement of composition and decomposition at once general and continuous." (De Blainville, Comte, and Robin.) These definitions, starting from the physiological point of view, aim merely at summing up the phenonema of vegetative life, and exclude intellectual activity. Mr. Spencer, with his wonted lucidity, defines the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external

life as relations."

And this, it is implied, could not occur if the latter activities pertained to the same subject as the former. The reply of those who reject a plurality of souls in man is that no proof can be assigned showing why the soul ought to be conscious of all the operations or influences which it exerts. Moreover, we know from experience that many actions at first laboriously acquired ultimately grow to be performed with little or no consciousness of them.

The solution to a difficulty often raised in various forms against the doctrine of the last chapter, as well as against that of the present or of the next, may also be indicated here. It is argued that a corruptible principle must be really distinct from an incorruptible one, but sentient and vegetative souls are admittedly corruptible, therefore the rational spirit in man cannot be identical with the root of inferior life; or if it is, then it must be mortal. To this we can answer: it is quite true that a soul or vital principle capable of merely sentient or vegetative activity perishes on the destruction of the subject which it informs, and is accordingly corruptible, but this is not the case with the root of the inferior species of life in man. Sentiency and vegetation are not in him activities of a merely sentient subject. They are, on the contrary, phenomena of a rational soul endowed with certain supra-sensuous functions, but also capable of exerting lower forms of energy. There can be no reason why a superior principle cannot virtually and superabundantly contain such inferior faculties. God, it is proved in Natural Theology, possesses in an eminent degree, or rather after a manner transcending all degrees, the power of immediately executing operations sometimes performed by His creatures. Scholastic philosophers, accordingly, have always taught that the virtue of exerting organic functions is inherent in the human soul, but that these activities are necessarily suspended whilst the soul is separate from the body. In the case of man, therefore, the root of sentiency and vegetative life is not a corruptible principle.

It is sometimes urged, that the existence of a struggle between the rational and sensitive powers

shows that both proceed from diverse roots. The true inference, however, is the very opposite. The so-called "struggle" is, of course, not a combat between independent beings within a supposed arena of the mind. It is one indivisible mind which thinks, feels, desires, and governs the vegetative processes of the living being. But precisely because the subject of these several activities is the same they mutually impede each other. Violent excitement of any one kind naturally diminishes the energy available for another.

Readings. St. Thomas, Sum. i. q. 76. a. 3.4; Dressel, op. cit. Pt. II. c. 3; Gutberlet, op. cit. pp. 259-271.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE UNION OF SOUL AND BODY.

VARIOUS theories have been advanced regarding the nature of the union between soul and body. The materialist hypothesis we have examined in chapter xxii. Of spiritualist theories the most celebrated are: (1) that of Plato, (2) Occasionalism, (3) Preestablished harmony, (4) the doctrine of Matter and Form. The first three are all forms of exaggerated Dualism; the last alone recognizes the essential unity of man.

ULTRA-DUALISTIC THEORIES.-(1) According to Plato, who historically comes first, the rational soul is a pure spirit incarcerated in a body for some crime committed during a former life. Its relation to the organism is analogous to that of the rider to his horse, or of the pilot to his ship. Since it is not naturally ordained to inform the body, the soul receives nothing but hindrance from its partner. This fanciful hypothesis, it is needless to say, does not receive much favour at the present day. There is no real evidence for such a pre-natal existence; and the doctrine would make man not one, but two beings.

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(2) Geulincx and Père Malebranche explain the union of soul and body by the theory of Occasionalism or Divine Assistance. Soul and body are conceived in this system as two opposed and distinct beings between whom no real interaction can take place. It is God alone who effects changes in either. On the occasion of a modification of the soul He produces an appropriate movement in the body; and vice versa. All our sensations, thoughts, and volitions are immediate results not of the impressions of material objects upon us, but of God Himself; and similarly our actions are due not to our own, but to the Divine Will. The doctrine of Occasionalism, however, is not confined by Malebranche to the interaction of soul and body. No created things have, in his view, any real efficiency. God is the only operative cause.

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The establishment of the genuine activity of secondary causes in general, we leave to the volume on Metaphysics; 1 here it is enough to point out the error of Occasionalism within the sphere of Psychology. This theory renders purposeless the wonderfully ingenious machinery of the various senseorgans. It is in direct conflict with the testimony of consciousness to personal causality in the exercise of volition and self-control. It is refuted by an irresistible conviction, based on the experience of our whole life, that our sensations are really excited by the impressions of external objects, and that our volitions do really cause our physical movements. Finally, Occasionalism involves the gratuitous 1 Cf. pp. 308–313.

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