Anthropology as an Aid to Moral Science
Appendix 6. (302).
Physiologists (who have thought up some ingenious theories about life) have not kept to the core-subject of their investigations, namely, the phenomenon of feeling, which constitutes the essential difference between animality and matter. Their concept of life, as I have already shown (cf. 61 ss.), gives too much importance to extrasubjective phenomena and too little to subjective. For example, nothing could be more ingenious and novel than Forni's Biologia, but unfortunately the whole work is founded on the reduction of all life functions to assimilation and non-assimilation. These phenomena, although complex and important, always remain extrasubjective. Consequently, everything subjective, which properly constitutes animal essence, is completely excluded and forgotten. The two functions, together with all other extrasubjective phenomena, should have been considered solely in their relationship to feeling, which is the form of the animal and the end to which all its other functions are ordered. Forni's desire for a theory of life lacks a base, and we should not be surprised if the whole of his ingenious theory leads nowhere.
The theory supposes a universal fluid diffused by nature, and a life fluid which exists as a modification of the universal fluid. This vital fluid organises matter, and is thought to be composed of heat, oxygen and light. Life, a function of this fluid, is simply combustion.
Leaving aside the novelty of the theory, and the innumerable hypotheses contained in so few words, I simply state that, granted the existence of a life fluid, we need to know 1. `the relationship of this fluid with FEELING', and 2. `if this fluid is the immediate term of feeling itself'. These questions must be discussed first; only then can we decide whether the word `life' can be applied to the life fluid. The composition and decomposition of the fluid, its properties similar or analogous to those of other weightless fluids, combustion (if this is one of its functions) and its other external functions are only findings which reveal the extrasubjective properties of the fluid; they cannot make known its internal properties, which alone, properly speaking, render it living.
I say this, bearing in mind the respect due to these great men for seeking to open new roads to knowledge.