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CH. IX.] determining the sense in which we are to speak of the parts of Vital Principle, and in settling how many of them there may be. In one point of view, in fact, the parts appear to be infinite in number and to comprise, not only those which some speak of as the reasoning, passionate and appetitive, and others as the rational and the irrational, but other parts also, which by the distinctions employed in those classifications, are brought into notice, and are more broadly distinguished from one another than are any of those to which we have alluded. Those other parts are the nutritive, which belongs to all plants and animals, and the sentient, which cannot readily be placed among either rational or irrational parts; there is the imaginative, besides, which differs in mode of being from all the others, and yet it would be difficult to determine, amid the several parts of Vital Principle, with which of them it is identical, or from which it differs. Besides these, there is the appetitive part, which, whether considered abstractedly or functionally, would seem to differ from all others, and yet it would be absurd to separate it from them; for volition is present in the rational, as decire and passion are in the irrational part, and if the Vital Principle be made up of these three, appetite must be present in each of them.

But, to resume the more especial topic of this chapter, what is that, let us ask, which confers upon