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Chapter 3

Life as a Quality of The Living Body
And as a Quality of The Feeling Soul

61. Summing up, we may say that there are two entirely different series of phenomena. In one case, phenomena have a relationship with something different by nature from the feeling subject. We call these phenomena `extrasubjective'. In the other case, phenomena do not exceed the bounds of the feeling subject, in which they are totally contained. We call such phenomena `subjective'. The first group of phenomena constitute the sensiferous qualities of bodies, and are the cause of sensations; the second constitute the sensations themselves.(27)

The two series suppose and require two principles on which they depend: the sensiferous principle which prompts sensation, but does not feel; and the feeling principle, which feels but does not prompt sensation.

We contrasted these principles by considering them in an animal or a human being under the influence of great pain. The body of this human being, with the alterations in shape caused by the pain, falls under our senses and stimulates them to feel. It pertains therefore to the sensiferous principle. The pain by which the person is tormented does not fall under our senses, does not stimulate them, and does not provide us with new sensations. It pertains to the other person's feeling principle and is totally contained in the being of whom the pain is an act or a state.
In naming these two principles differently, as we must, we followed normal usage and called the first body and the second soul, `anima'. The principle of the animal is found in this anima. `Animal' is `that which has a soul'.

62. This shows clearly that even the merely feeling soul is not a body. It is another nature, furnished with properties entirely different from those of the body. We can also see that the body alone, without some other, different principle, could not form the animal. Taken by itself, the body is essentially extrasubjective matter. The animal, on the other hand, supposes an internal subjective principle, that is, a subject.(28)

63. We cannot, therefore, accept the definition of soul given by Aristotle, even if it is restricted to the definition of a merely feeling soul. This famous definition, later accepted by the Scholastics, spoke of the soul as `an act of an organic body'.(29) If the soul were nothing more than an act of the body, it would not be distinct from the body except to the extent that the act of something is distinct from the thing to which the act pertains. In other words, it would in the last analysis be simply a mode of being of the thing itself. But this is wholly unsatisfactory. The soul is not a mode of being of the body, but something different from the body and, moreover, of an opposite nature. While the body is merely the stimulating or excitatory principle of sensation, the soul is that which feels and possesses sensation in itself, and through the sensation establishes itself in a certain state.

64. We can say, however, that the soul brings the organic body to an act which it did not have previously. In this sense we can call it, as St. Thomas says so clearly, `the first principle of life',(30) but never, I think, the act itself of a body. It is sufficient to compare a dead with a living body to see that an organic body is given an altogether new act by the soul (the corpse is immobile and corrupt, the living body is constantly in motion, and incorrupt; colour, smell, mien, flexibility and everything perceivable differs from one to the other; the living body possesses an act absent from the dead body), but I would call this animation, never soul.(31)

65. The matter will be seen more clearly if we re-examine the distinction between our two series of extrasubjective and subjective phenomena which constitute the unchangeable difference between the feeling soul and the body. To which of the two series do those phenomena belong which, in the living body, enable me to distinguish it so easily from a corpse? They fall under my external senses. I know the distinguishable characteristics of a living body through the sensations it produces in me. My eyes see its colours and movements; my hands feel its diffused, vital heat, the flexibility of the flesh, and the beat of the heart and the pulse; my ears take in its articulate and inarticulate sounds; and further observation reveals that it eats and carries out the other animal functions required to keep it alive. All this I understand by means of the many sensations coming to me from that body.

Passing then from the signs to what is signified, I judge that this body is alive and possesses an act unknown to bodies that are not alive. In other words, the living body has singular qualities and powers which are absent from pure, simple matter. I call the complex of these powers, or rather of these phenomena which I encounter in the body, life of the body. Nevertheless, because I receive all these signs from the action that the living body exercises on my sense-organs, these signs belong to extrasubjective, not subjective phenomena. They are phenomena coming from a principle outside me, that is, from outside the feeling subject. Such a principle is not a feeling power, but a sensiferous or stimulating power present in the body acting upon me. I judge that the animation of this body has brought about an alteration in its sensiferous power because it arouses sensations in me that cannot be caused by what I call inanimate body; I judge that the sensiferous power of that body has been modified by its reception of a new act which I call life of the body; but I do not judge consequently that the life of the body is the soul, which is a principle of phenomena wholly opposed to sensi-ferous phenomena, that is, of subjective phenomena. Aristotle's confusion between life of the body and the soul that produces life had its origin here, and gave rise to a definition of soul (`act of the organic body') which is applicable only to the life of the body.

66. I foresee an objection to what has been said, but the difficulty will in fact help to throw more light on the matter. It will be objected that I have supposed the animation of the body to be known only through external, feelable signs by which the person who receives the sensations of sight, touch and sound that living bodies normally give concludes that the body is alive. But, the objection runs, the proof of the life of the body originates in what occurs in the living being itself rather than in what takes place in the external experience proper to the senses of others when applied to the living being. One who is alive, knows he is alive, and has no need of external signs to reassure him of life. He alone possesses certain proof of his life; signs that are merely external may easily be deceptive.

I agree. But these signs can be deceptive precisely because they do not permit us to experience the life in question, but only allow us to argue to our conclusion about it. When however we feel that we are alive, we perceive subjective life itself; we have no need to deduce it from signs. We cannot therefore be deceived. But the living being perceives its own life by the sensations or feelings that it receives internally from its own body, and it is here that we need to pay attention to the distinction between the two series of phenomena that we have indicated. Even in the sensations or feelings that a living being experiences in itself independently from external bodies, we have to distinguish the sensations themselves felt by that feeling subject from the agent which stimulates them in it.

We can take the matter further by considering the case of one who feels life from within and, if we wish, feels simultaneously that he carries out all his vital functions without having to appeal to his eyes or touch or other powers of external feeling. First, we can concentrate our attention solely on the feelings he experiences in himself, and ignore the agent which stimulates these feelings. In this case, we are dealing with phenomena that all take place in the feeling principle; sensations or feelings can only be referred to a feeling principle, outside of which we cannot imagine they exist. But that which feels is what we have called the subject of sensations. We are concerned, therefore, only with subjective phenomena. Second, we can go beyond the sensations by recognising that they are passive phenomena which modify or constitute the state of the being that feels, and conclude that the feeling subject must be stimulated by another principle exterior to itself whose effect is to produce the feelings in the subject. In this case, we have discovered and recognised actions done in the subject by some other agent. These actions, which cannot be confused with the sensations they produce, are the second kind of phenomena which we have called `extrasubjective', and have referred to a principle totally extraneous to the feeling subject, although it acts in this subject. Once again, therefore, we are faced with the two principles, subjective and extrasubjective, that we have already distinguished.

Each of the two series of phenomena within the feeling of the living person can now be compared with the external phenomena which, through the different sensiferous properties found in a living body, allow us to know it is alive. Without doubt we find that the extrasubjective series is more like this third series of external phenomena. As we have seen, the qualities we find in a living body through our external senses are not the sensations themselves, but actions that excite our sensations.

Let us now grant that the living being feels its life by means of internal sensations. This feeling of life is either considered to consist in the sensations themselves or in the action or impulse that the living being receives from something different from itself (which is called body). In the former case, we are dealing with the life of the subject that feels because the sensations come to fulfilment in this subject and remain within it. In the other case, we can rightly speak of the life of the body, which does not consist in sensations as the life of the spirit does, but is marked by the nature and characteristics of the life found in the living body when such life is examined with the external senses. This life does not consist in feeling, but in arousing feeling, and can be defined as an aptitude or `power to act in the feeling subject, and cause in it experiences we call feelings'. In this way the agent, which we rightly call body, always remains distinct from the subject, rightly called soul, in which it acts.

67. This gives rise to an important corollary. Through lack of analysis, naturalists are unaware that they take the word life in two very different meanings. The resultant confusion is fertile ground for much mistaken teaching. To say `the subject is alive' and `the body is alive' is to affirm different realities. The life of the feeling subject consists entirely in sensations; the life of the sensiferous body consists only in certain movements and functions that are the term or cause of sensations but are not themselves sensations.

The same happens with many words that take on different meanings through application to different objects. Health, for example, is applied to the animal and to medicine, but in very different senses. When we speak of a healthy animal, we mean that it is healthy in itself; when we call medicine healthy, we mean that it produces health, not that it has states of health and sickness.(32) Affirming that a body has life means that it possesses a power capable of causing a determined system of sensations in a feeling subject which either observes the body from without, or experiences its action from within. A body without this power is said to be dead.(33)

68. There is no doubt that this power has two different kinds of effects all of which, however, are equally subjective. The first kind are those which it causes in a subject that observes the living body from without; the second, those which it causes in the subject that experiences the action of the body from within, that is in itself. The first effects are only signs, as we said (cf. 66), from which we reason that a body is alive. We note in the body certain effects of life which are reduced to certain systems of sensations stimulated in us, the observers. The second effects, that is, the internal actions that the living body produces in the feeling subject which as it were inhabits the body are not simply signs of life; the complex or rather the operative power of these effects constitutes the very life of the animate body. The first effects are revealed and noted through external observation; the second are revealed only through experience and internal observation.

69. These considerations help us to evaluate correctly the common definitions of life offered by naturalists. We now see that these definitions indicate only a complex of signs enabling us to know where life exists. In fact, naturalists normally define the life of the body only through those effects which fall under external observation (which are only signs of life), not through the experience caused by the body to the feeling subject that inhabits it (where the life of the body is properly to be found).

70. The value of this observation can be seen if we consider the two following definitions of life.

According to B. Cuvier:

Ranzani describes life as follows:

71. A glance at these and similar definitions and descriptions of the life of bodies is sufficient to show that they refer only to extrasubjective phenomena, and are based on external observation of the living body. They do not truly define life, therefore, but are simply collections of external signs which enable the presence or absence of life to be argued. And it should be carefully noted that I am not referring to life as applied to the soul, but to life in so far as it can be applied to the body. As we said, life, even taken in the sense applied to the body, does not consist in phenomena supplied to us by external observation (these phenomena are only effects and signs of life), but consists solely in phenomena which, although they may be extrasubjective, are supplied by internal experience and observation. Life consists in the power the body has, or rather in the act with which the body acts on the subject that inhabits the body to produce the multiple feeling predicated of life.(36)

Notes

(27) In OT, 640-646, where we distinguished feelable qualities from sensations, we used the phrase feelable qualities instead of the more correct sensi-ferous qualities in order to avoid unnecessary scientific neologisms. But now that we have to deal ex professo with animality and analyse sensations more closely, we are forced to distinguish what is feelable from what is sensiferous. Our need for such a word to provide clear, distinct ideas will be seen to be justified as the work proceeds.

(28) Cf. OT, 989-995, for an extremely simple, but irrefutable confutation of materialism deduced from the two essentially distinct series of extrasubjective and subjective phenomena. The historical origin of materialism is also accounted for in this way. The two series of phenomena are continually united, as we can see from the example of someone in pain. The sufferer manifests himself to us as an extrasubjective principle although in himself he is an altogether subjective principle in which take place phenomena of pain that cannot be observed externally. But it is very easy to confuse the two series and meld them, persuading oneself that all these phenomena are of the same nature. This is the essence of materialism, a system based upon defective observation.

(29) De Anim., bk. 3 (text. 4 and 5). `The soul is the act of a physical, organic body having life in potency'.

(30) S.T., I, q. 75, 1.

(31) The Platonists were right therefore to distinguish animation from soul whatever their blunders in other matters.

(32) Philosophers must simultaneously adhere faithfully to the common use of words, and make every effort to distinguish the unique, proper use of a word from its derived, multiple uses. Separating the different meanings of words is often extremely difficult, if not impossible, and gives rise to errors in those who want to employ semantics as a means of discovering the basic opinions of mankind. We can know the true opinion of common sense only through the proper meaning of the word we are studying. - The principal object of dictionaries is first to establish and illustrate the proper meaning of each word, and then to indicate its derivations according to their proximity to the proper meaning. But this principle has not yet been employed in the composition of dictionaries.

(33) Bichat's definition of life merits attention only as an example of the ignorance of logic often found in famous modern writers on medicine. He says: `Life is the union of functions which resist death' (p. 1, art. 1). To understand this definition, we need to know the meaning of death. But what is death if not the cessation of life? Life, according to this author, is therefore the union of the functions which withstand the cessation of life!

(34) Le règne animal distribué d'après son organisation, Introduct.

(35) Readers who wish to test the truth of our observation by applying it to the principal definitions of life given by the best authors will find a collection of these in L. Martini's Fisiologia, less. 33. The definitions include those of Stahl, De-Sauvages, Boerhaave, Hoffmann, Gaubio, Leroy, Gregory, Cullen, Vrignauld, Goodwing, Kant, Baumes, Erhard, Caldani, Dumas, Crevisano, Schmidt, Gallini, Girtanner, Chaptal, Humboldt, Sementini, Lamark, Virey, Richerand, Hufeland, Darwin, Cuvier, Morgan, Cabanis, Bichat, Adelon, Moion, Sprengel, Brown, and of Martini himself.

(36) Paolo Ruffini, the celebrated Modanese doctor, noted with his usual perspicacity that the word life was misused by modern naturalists. He wrote about their habit of changing the meaning of the word: `It is impossible to reach an exact definition of life, incapable of leading to error, as long as life is considered too generically or taken univocally (as modern philosophers tend to do) in the case of vegetable, brute and human life.'