Page:Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life - Coleridge (1848).djvu/49

 these physical properties," ) would demonstrate that, in the truth of things, they are homogeneous, and that both the classes are but degrees and different dignities of one and the same tendency. For the latter are not subjected to the former as a lever, or walking-stick to the muscles; the more intense the life is, the less does elasticity, for instance, appear as elasticity. It sinks down into the nearest approach to its physical form by a series of degrees from the contraction and elongation of the irritable muscle to the physical hardness of the insensitive nail. The lower powers are assimilated, not merely employed, and assimilation presupposes the homogeneous nature of the thing assimilated; else it is a miracle, only not the same as that of a creation, because it would imply that additional and equal miracle of annihilation. In short, all the impossibilities which the acutest of the reformed Divines have detected in the hypothesis of transubstantiation would apply, totidem verbis et syllabis, to that of assimilation, if the objects and the agents were really heterogeneous. Unless, therefore, a thing can exhibit properties which do not belong to it, the very admission that living matter exhibits physical properties, includes the further admission, that those physical or dead properties are themselves vital in essence, really distinct but