Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, June 24, 1870 (IA b22307643).pdf/18

16 matter exhibits 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 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, because it would imply that additional and equal miracle of annihilation. In short, all the impossibilities which the acutest divines have detected in transubstantiation, would apply totidem verbis et syllabis to that of assimilation, if the objects and the agents were really heterogeneous. Unless there-