Chapter 3
The Life Instinct
371. A general description of the life instinct, as I have called it, has already been given. This instinct has its origin in the act by which the feeling principle or soul co-operates in the production of the fundamental feeling and feels the body considered subjectively.
372. A body felt in this way is the same as a living body. The act therefore by which the feeling element intervenes actively in the production of its feeling is also the act of animation of the body.
373. Animation of the body exhibits extrasubjective phenomena, by which our external senses distinguish whether a body is animate or not. The act therefore by which the feeling element acts in feeling is the first cause of all the extrasubjective animal phenomena of the animate body.
374. Such considerations might have settled the well-known controversy between Stahl's followers and their opponents. The objectors maintained that animal movements such as circulation, irritability, etc., took place without any feeling experience in the soul, and without any co-operation on the part of the will; consequently, the soul played no part whatsoever.(174) However, the soul's lack of feeling and will in these actions does not exclude the possibility of its co-operation with the vital functions. I do not mean that the soul contributes with its will, because will presupposes knowledge of a purpose; therefore the soul must have some knowledge for the will to be activated. Moreover, the soul can withhold the co-operation of its feeling, which is generated, but not preceded by the action of the two principles we call feeling and sensiferous. But this does not remove the soul's capacity for contributing to the extrasubjective life phenomena of the body with the act by which it intervenes in the production of feeling - an act which cannot be felt by the soul itself. If, moreover, the soul intervenes in this way as co-cause of the extrasubjective life phenomena, it does so without willing or feeling the co-operation, of which it is totally unconscious.
Notes
(174) These are the kind of objections made against Robert Whytt and others by Haller in his dissertation on the sensitivity and irritability of parts of the body. Stahl's followers certainly did not defend their cause adequately by saying that irritability was explained by particles of the soul entering the irritable fibre (this makes the soul material and divisible), nor by positing an unfeelable feeling (a contradiction in terms) (cf. Whytt, Opusc., Berlin, 1790). Le-Cat's opinion, in his Dissertazione sulla sensibilità delle meningi e delle membrane ecc. (Berlin, 1765), is also inaccurate. According to him irritability is an effect of animal sensitivity, so that every part is both irritable and sensitive; the soul produces irritability and feeling, even in limbs separated from the body, although we are not conscious of this because communication of the nerves with the brain (the organ of thought, according to him, art. 6) has been severed. I shall not stop to show, as I could, that such a way of speaking is seriously deficient. On the one hand it exaggerates by its apparent spiritualism; on the other it is tainted with materialism. If, instead of speaking about consciousness, Le-Cat had said that a feeling not belonging to the animal itself can be present in the parts composing the soul, he would not have proposed something so patently untrue.