Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/75

Rh relation by means of matter is thus accidental, and is due to a special divine institution, while their direct relation is natural and insoluble.

By combining in this way all principles of life in the whole of nature, as so many incorporeal substances, communicating with each other, partly also united with matter, we conceive of the immaterial world as a great whole, an immeasurable but unknown gradation of beings and active natures by which alone the dead matter of the corporeal world is endued with life. But to which members of nature life is extended, and which those degrees of it are which are next to utter lifelessness, can, perhaps, never be made out with certainty. Hylozoism imputes life to everything; materialism, carefully considered, kills everything. Maupertuis attributed to the organic particles of the nutriment of all animals the lowest degree of life, other philosophers see in them nothing else but dead masses which serve only to augment the lever-apparatus of animal machines. The undoubted characteristic of life in that which appeals to our external senses is, I may say, the free movement which shows that it is arbitrary, but the conclusion is not certain that, wherever this characteristic is not found, there is no degree of life. Boerhave says somewhere: The animal is a plant which has its roots in the stomach (inside). Another might, perhaps, play without censure with these conceptions by saying: The plant is an animal which has its stomach in the root (outside). The plants, therefore, may lack the organs of arbitrary