We're ill by these Grammarians us'd;
We are abus'd by Words, grossly abus'd;
From the Maternal Tomb,
To the Grave's fruitful Womb,
We call her Life, but Life's a name
That nothing here can truly claim.
COWLEY, in a note to his Pindaric Ode, whence the above lines are quoted, says:
Plato, in Timæus, makes this distinction: "That which is, but is not generated; and that which is generated, but is not." This he took from Trismegistus, whose sentence of God was written in the Egyptian temples, "I am all that was, is, or shall be.” This doctrine of Plato, that nothing truly is but God, is approved by all the Fathers. Simplicius explains it thus: That which has more degrees of privation, or not-being than of being, (which is the case of all creatures,) is not properly said to be; and again, that which is a perpetual fieri, or making, never is quite made, and therefore, never properly is.
Leaving the old "Grammarian," we pass to the science of our own times. M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire, in his Histoire Naturelle générale des Règnes Organiques, in the chapter on the definitions of Life, refutes the common mistake of supposing that vital force suspends or destroys physical action. If these vitalists had but taken the trouble of decomposing each complex question into its elements, instead of cutting the knot which they could not loosen, they would have seen their error. Thus, an animal, while living, "resists" cold, does not "obey" the physical laws of temperature, but keeps constantly above the temperature of the surrounding medium. When dead, this resistance ceases. Does this