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Anthropology as an Aid to Moral Science

Appendix 2. (82).

It will be helpful to point out another error resulting from the analogical use of life. The meaning of the word life (and the adjective living or vital) was not restricted to `that which feels'; it also meant `that which causes feeling'. Vital was used of colour: for example, a vital red, a vital green. Living was used of fire: for example, a living fire. It was also applied to what moves or seems to move of itself, as in the expressions `living water', `a living spring' - Politian said:

The change in the meaning of living from `that which feels, and feeling, moves' to `that which causes feeling and seems to move of itself' is an ordinary example of synecdoche, a figure of speech originating from a failure to distinguish ideas properly. In this change of meaning, we see that: 1. life as such has been confused with what is permanently joined with life as its condition and even with the material cause of life; and that 2. the sign normally indicating life is confused with what is signified.

After these changes in the meaning of the word life, human intelligence was unable to withstrain itself. If the word life is predicated of a certain disposition of parts and of certain movements, the same word can just as easily be given to any disposition of parts and to any movement. We could call life the force that causes the movements of an object and arranges the parts composing it. Indeed, the phrase living forces and dead forces was a wider application of life.

Consequently, we find ourselves saying that all forces are living when they cause motion. This is so true that modern naturalists are convinced they have made a great discovery, and proclaim all forces, even those thought of as merely material, as living forces. Ranzani explains their reasoning: for them `life is an internal activity, but wherever a force acts, an internal activity exists. Therefore wherever a force acts, life exists. And because all the beings studied in natural history are undoubtedly endowed with active forces, they conclude that all such beings are certainly living beings'. But here, one mistake follows another. After extending the meaning of life so that it is equivalent to force, and concluding that all things live, they stretch the meaning still further by saying that all things feel. In this way physiologists introduce us to a new kind of sensitivity. But this capacity for feeling feels nothing; it is called `feeling' because it moves under material stimuli.

Physiologists, having confused this new sensitivity, which does not in fact feel but gives signs of movement, with real sensitivity which does feel, now go on to claim that the two do not differ essentially (cf. 87-91). This great confusion of ideas led some materialists, after the publication of Albert Haller's well-known observations on the irritable and sensitive parts of the human body, to believe they could found their system on irritability. But scientists who understood the matter correctly, reacted against this theory. One of these, Delius, professor at Erlang (cf. Animadversiones in doctrinam de irritabilitate, tono, sensatione, et motu corporis humani), had to defend Haller's theory from the imputation of material feeling (cf. Tissot's Discours préliminaire at the beginning of his French translation of Haller's Dissertation).