Page:Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life - Coleridge (1848).djvu/40

 Thirdly, while I disclaim the error of Stahl in deriving the phenomena of life from the unconscious actions of the rational soul, I repel with still greater earnestness the assertion and even the supposition that the functions are the offspring of the structure, and "Life the result of organization," connected with it as effect with cause. Nay, the position seems to me little less strange, than as if a man should say, that building with all the included handicraft, of plastering, sawing, planing, &c. were the offspring of the house; and that the mason and carpenter were the result of a suite of chambers, with the passages and staircases that lead to them. To make the offspring of, when the very existence of  as  presupposes the existence of , is preposterous in the literal sense of the word, and a consummate instance of the hysteron proteron in logic. But if I reject the organ as the cause of that, of which it is the organ, though I might admit it among the conditions of its actual functions; for the same reason, I must reject fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential thinness they may be treble distilled, and (as it were) super-substantiated. With these, I abjure likewise all chemical agencies, compositions, and decompositions, were it only that as stimulants they suppose a stimulability sui generis, which is but another paraphrase