Post 00081
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There is this suggestive fact about these recent biological experiments of Dr. Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute: they seem to prove that the life of a man is not merely the sum of the life of the myriad cells of his body. Stab the man to death, and the cells of his body still live and will continue to live if grafted upon another live man. Probably every part of the body would continue to live and grow indefinitely, in the proper medium. That the cell life should continue after the soul life has ceased is very significant. It seems a legitimate inference from this fact that the human body is the organ or instrument of some agent that is not of the body. The functional or physiological life of the body as a whole, also seems quite independent of our conscious volitional or psychic life. That which repairs and renews the body, heals its wounds, controls and coordinates its parts, adapts it to its environment, carries on its processes during sleep, in fact in all our involuntary life, seems quite independent of the man himself. Is the spirit of a race or a nation, or of the times in which we live, another illustration of the same mysterious entity?
If the vital principle, or vital force, is a fiction, invented to give the mind something to take hold of, we are in no worse case than we are in some other matters. Science tells us that there is no such thing as heat, or light; these are only modes of activity in matter.
In the same way we seem forced to think of life, vitality, as an entity–a fact as real as electricity or light, though it may be only a mode of motion. It may be of physico-chemical origin, as much so as heat, or light; and yet it is something as distinctive as they are among material things, and is involved in the same mystery. Is magnetism or gravitation a real thing? or, in the moral world, is love, charity, or consciousness itself? The world seems to be run by nonentities. Heat, light, life, seem nonentities. That which organizes the different parts or organs of the human body into a unit, and makes of the many organs one organism, is a nonentity. That which makes an oak an oak, and a pine a pine, is a nonentity. That which makes a sheep a sheep, and an ox an ox, is to science a nonentity. To physical science the soul is a nonentity.