Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/270

 *sition to lifeless or inorganic, organic nature appears to be self-determining." (Henle, Allgemeine Anatomie, 1841, S. 216-219). The difficulty of satisfactorily referring the vital phenomena of organic life to physical and chemical laws, consists chiefly (almost as in the question of predicting meteorological processes in the atmosphere), in the complication of the phænomena, and in the multiplicity of simultaneously acting forces and of the conditions of their activity.

I have remained faithful in "Kosmos" to the same mode of viewing and representing what are called "Lebenskräfte," vital forces, and vital affinities, (Pulteney, in the Transact. of the Royal Soc. of Edinburgh, vol. xvi. p. 305), the formation-impulse, and the active principle in organisation. I have said, in Kosmos, Bd. i. S. 67, (English Ed. vol. i. p. 62), "The myths of imponderable matter and of vital forces peculiar to each organism have complicated and perplexed the view of nature. Under different conditions and forms of recognition the prodigious mass of our experimental knowledge has progressively accumulated, and is now enlarging with increased rapidity. Investigating reason essays from time to time with varying success to break through ancient forms and symbols, invented to effect the subjection of rebellions matter, as it were, to mechanical constructions," Farther on in the same volume, (p. 339 English, and 367 of the original,) I have said, "In a physical description of the universe, it should still be noticed that the same substances which compose the organic forms of plants and animals are also found in the inorganic crust