Note 2 — Chapter I · GENERAL DIVISION OF LIFE.[1]

The word life has been employed by physiologists in two different senses. With some, it means an imaginary being, the sole principle of all the functions which living bodies exhibit; with others, it means only the assemblage of these functions. It is in this last sense that Bichat employs it. This is what he means to say in the following sentence. Life is the assemblage of the functions which resist death. He is wrong only in allowing the idea of death to enter into it; for this idea necessarily supposes that of life. There is then really a bad circle in this definition; but in putting aside what is defective in the expression, it may be seen that Bichat considers life as a result, not as a cause.

Before and since the time of Bichat, a great number of definitions of life has been given, which are either false or incomplete. It should not be required of a definition, that it should give all the properties of the thing which it is designed to make known, this would be a description; but we have a right to expect that it should assign to this thing certain characters which belong to it alone, and thus distinguish it from every thing else.

Let us examine by this principle the definition adopted in a modern work. Life, it is said, is the assemblage of the phenomena which succeed each other, for a limited time, in an organized being. This is no doubt true of life; but, if it can also be applied to another state, it ceases to be a definition. An animal has just died; its organs from that moment are subject to the action of chemical affinities only; decomposition takes place, gases are disengaged, fluids flow out and new solid aggregates are formed. After a time every molecular motion ceases; there remains only a certain number of binary, ternary combinations, &c. Here then is an assemblage of phenomena taking place for a limited time in an organized body, and yet it is not life.