organised bodies;” and Beclard calls it “organisation in action.”[1] The merit of Aristotle’s definition, as coming from an ancient Greek philosopher, consists in its avoiding the view which would have been natural in those times—namely, that life, the vital principle or the physical soul, was a separate entity, dwelling in the body, hospes comesque corporis, “the body’s guest and friend,” as the Emperor Hadrian called it in his dying verses. Aristotle said that life, or the soul, is not a chance guest, but a function; it is to the body as sight is to the eye; it is the perfect action of all the conditions of the bodily organisation. Thus the Pythagoreans spoke vainly when they talked of the “transmigration of souls,” as if the soul of a man could migrate into the body of a beast. “You might as well,” said Aristotle, “speak of the carpenter’s art (which is the result of the carpenter’s tools) migrating into flutes, which are the tools of the musician.”
So much for his dialectical, or speculative, views of life. The following are some of his opinions in detail on the same subject, from a physical point of view, taken from the ‘Physiological Tracts:’—The primary condition of life is the “natural fire” which resides in the heart of each living creature. This fire may be extinguished by contrary forces, or smothered by excess of heat. Respiration is the process of cooling, which prevents the smothering of the vital fire. Animals require two things for existence—food and
- ↑ These definitions are quoted in Bennett’s ‘Text-book of Physiology,’ p. 184. See also Mr G. H. Lewes’s ‘Aristotle, a Page from the History of Science,’ p. 230.
