knowledge and health, are a form, a " specific something", a " relation," and an action, as it were, of a recipient, capable in the one case of knowing, and in the other of maintaining health (for the action of creative energies seems to be innate in the impressionable and suitably constituted subject), but the Vital Principle is that by which we live, feel and think, from life's outset; so that, although it may be the cause and form, it cannot be matter and subject. Thus, the essence has a threefold signification, as we have said, in the sense of form, of matter, and the compound of the two; and of these matter is potentiality, and form reality ; and since the living being is a compound of the two, the body is not the reality of the Vital Principle, but it, on the contrary, is the reality of a particular kind of body. On which account it is happily assumed by some that the Vital Principle can neither be without the body, nor be itself a body of any kind; for a body it is not, but yet it is something of the body, and, therefore, present innately in the body, and that peculiarly constituted. It is not, that is, in any kind of body, as the earlier writers have maintained, when they attached it to a body without in the least defining either the nature or quality of the body; although it must be against all probability that any kind of recipient should receive any thing taken by chance. But here all takes place as might
