The Principle of Life

a) Meaning of Principle — b) Need of a Life-Principle — c) Character of the Life-Principle

a) Meaning of Principle

A principle is a source or a starting point. The word principle is the English form of the Latin principium which, in its simplest meaning, signifies “a beginning.” In somewhat ampler form, the definition of principle is this: “A principle is that from which anything takes its rise in any manner whatever.”

We often employ the term principle with reference to things of the mind, and so we speak of “the principles of logic,” or “the principles of mathematics.” Again, we use the word with reference to moral character or conduct, as when we say, “He is a man of principle,” or “Some politicians have no principles.” These uses of the term are justified by its definition. The principles of logic and of mathematics are the self-evident and axiomatic truths (and also truths fully demonstrated) which serve as the source or origin from which conclusions are drawn; or these principles are the laws of procedure which, in a true sense, give rise to the processes of reasoning conducted in accordance with their requirements, and to the fruits of such rightly conducted processes. Again, “a man of principle” (that is, “a man of good or admirable principle”—the expression is elliptical) means a man whose knowledge of what is right, and whose will to act in accordance with that knowledge, serve as the source or origin or well-spring of his conduct. On the other hand “one who has no principles” (the phrase is elliptical and means “one who has no proper or good principles”) is a person who lacks a noble and unfaltering will to do well, and hence does not possess the moral equipment which should be the well-spring of admirable human conduct.

A principle is that whence anything takes its rise in any manner whatever. A beginning is a principle, for a thing which begins takes its rise at that point. A law is a principle, for that which is in accordance with the law is, so to speak, guided into being by the law, and takes its rise there. A cause is a principle, for a cause contributes to the being of its effect, and the effect therefore takes its origin or rise in its cause.

In our present study we are concerned with the principle of life or the life-principle, and we wish to know the origin, source, or well-spring of vital activity. We wish to know whence life and life-activities come. We do not now ask about the Creator of life. We take the living body as it stands, and ask what makes it live, what makes it capable of life-activities, what there is in the living body that makes it a living body.

b) Need of a Life-Principle

The living body is itself the principle of its vital operations; it lives and functions. Why, then, should we seek anything further in the way of a principle of life? Will it not suffice to say that the body itself as a material substance, or as an organized substance, or as a substance characterized by the interplay of physical, chemical, and mechanical forces, is the sole and adequate principle of life-activities? No; we may not truly say so. The living body is indeed the principle of its vital operations, but it is not the first principle of these activities. As philosophical psychologists we must seek out the first, the fundamental, the basic principle of life in living bodies. And there is something in the living body,—something substantially united with it, yet not to be identified with its mass, its structure, its incidental forces, or its organic parts,—by reason of which the body is a living and functioning body. This “something” is the fundamental and substantial reality that we seek as the first principle of life in a living body.

The body is, first and foremost, a material thing; it is composed of matter, that is, of a three-dimensional corporeal substance. Can the material constitution of a living body be the basic source of its life and its vital activities? No; otherwise all bodies would be living bodies, which is not the case. There were certain philosophers in old Greece, from six to four centuries before Christ, who believed that all matter (that is, the whole bodily universe) is alive. These theorists were called hylozoists, and their doctrine hylozoism,—terms which derive from the Greek hyle “matter,” and zoe “life.” And there are some physicists to-day who hold that living and lifeless bodies are all “of a piece.” But the hylozoists, ancient and modern, have not only failed to justify their contention by anything remotely resembling a show of evidence; they have gone flatly against the requirements of reason, the testimony of experience, and the unceasingly repeated findings of laboratory tests. We need not discuss the point, for we have already proved that there is an essential difference between living and lifeless bodies. We may state our position thus: all bodies are material realities, but not all bodies are alive; therefore matter (or “materiality”) cannot be the basic principle of life in living bodies. There is need to look further for this first life-principle.

The living body is not only material in constitution, it is organic in structure; it is an organism. In other words, it is a substance composed of active, heterogeneous, interdependent, balanced parts, unified and working harmoniously together by an immanent activity which tends to the well-being of the living body as a whole. If, then, the material constitution of a living body is powerless to explain its vital activities, may not its organic structure be the basic source or first principle of these activities? It cannot be so. For the organism is the effect of life and life-activities. Life and its functions are present in the primal cell, which, by means of vital functioning, develops into the finished organic body. Certainly, then, we cannot say that what is the effect of life-activity is the principle or cause of the same activity. We should not be so unreasonable as to assert that the structure of the automobile engine makes the car go; few are likely to say that who have had the exhilarating experience of paying current prices for gasoline and oil. Yet it would be far more reasonable to ascribe the mechanical activity of an engine to the arrangement and inter-balance of its parts than to assert that the organic structure of a living body accounts for its vital functioning. For the simplest engine does not present itself to our observation as a thing developed by an inner power, of resistless drive and definite direction, once resident in a microscopic wheel or bolt. Further: if the organism were the basic principle of vital activity, life could not cease as long as the organic structure should endure. But a sudden death,—not apparent, but real death,—sometimes leaves the organic body momentarily intact. True, the organism begins to disintegrate and decompose immediately after the life-principle has departed. But how, in the circumstance here considered, could life depart if the organic structure of the body were the basic source of its life?—It may be here objected that the organism of the primal cell, and not the completed organism of the full-membered body, is the basic principle of life. The objection is a mere quibble. It simply carries the question of the life-principle from larger bodies to smaller bodies. Life in the cell or in the elephant presents the same need of explanation by a vital first principle which is neither the body-mass nor the organic structure of the living body. If you are studying the nature of wood, you do not come nearer to your goal by grinding a massive beam into minute grains of sawdust. For the nature of wood is manifested in the smallest grain of sawdust as perfectly as in the largest log. But this metaphor of beam and sawdust falls far short of the reality it illustrates in the present instance. The grains of sawdust could not develop into a log, although a log may be computed in terms of sawdust, and considered as a simple aggregate of its grains. Not so the living body with respect to its cells. What is there in the microscopic cell, or in its organic structure, to explain its development into wholly various and interdependent parts, and into the bewilderingly complex finished organism of the living body? How does the tiny cell explain its tendency to increase and multiply, to build up bone and muscle and tissue and nerve and sinew and eye and ear and stomach and heart? Nay, how does the cell or its structure account for its simple act of growth and fission, so that two cells exist where one existed before? The cell’s growth and fission, and all its further developments, are effects of life and of the activity of the life-principle; they are not the causes of life, not its principle. The cell has something by virtue of which it lives and grows and functions and develops. It has an indwelling power and drive which carries it in a definite and marvellously well-planned direction. The cell has something; it has life; and it has the substantial principle of life. And this principle is not the mere organic structure of the cell, or of the larger and more complex organism which develops from the cell. No; we must look further than organic structure in our quest for the fundamental principle of life in a living body.

Granted that material mass does not explain life; granted that organic structure is the effect of life and not its explaining principle; may we not still declare that certain physical, chemical, and mechanical forces, resident and active in the living body, are the basic principles of vital functioning? Again we answer that it cannot be so. For the specific activities of living bodies are immanent in character; physical and chemical and mechanical forces or energies are invariably transient in their action. Life-activity is manifested as a continuous tendency to movement, to self-perfecting immanent action; physical, mechanical, and chemical activity tends towards equilibrium and rest. All the widely various activities of a living body are superbly harmonized, and tend to the accomplishment of a single end,—the well-being of the living body itself. This well-being is the development, the perfection, the preservation, and the propagation of the living body. No such activity is manifested by non-living bodies or their forces. Consider just one activity of a living body,—the activity of a plant in seeking and finding a required item of nourishment. Mark Twain, speaking in Following the Equator of the “great gum trees, lean and scraggy and sorrowful” which he saw in Australia, writes, “Once a cement water-pipe underground at Stawell began gradually to reduce its output, and finally ceased altogether to deliver water. Upon examining into the matter it was found stopped up, wadded compactly with a mass of root fibers, delicate and hairlike. How this stuff had gotten into the pipe was a puzzle for some little time; finally it was discovered that it had crept in through a crack that was almost invisible to the eye. A gum tree forty feet away had tapped the pipe and was drinking the water.” Here we notice that no mere mechanical or chemical activity will explain the phenomenon recorded. It was not the roots that needed the water; it was the tree, and the well-being of the whole tree was served by the unusual growth of roots and the amazing accuracy of that growth through forty feet of soil and several inches of cement pipe. Nothing in the play of physical, chemical, or mechanical forces can even begin to explain the vital activity of the quest and absorption of nourishing elements by a living body. And if this is the case in one function of the lowest grade of living bodies, what shall be said of the much more wonderful phenomena of sensing, appetizing, conscious movement, understanding, and willing? Life is clearly not explicable in terms of physico-chemical or mechanical activity; life has not even the beginning, nor the beginning of a beginning, of an explanation in such activity. For, granted that living bodies do manifest activities of a mechanical and physico-chemical nature, these are invariably instrumental to the life function, and are under the direction and control of the life-principle which applies them to its uses; they in no wise explain the life-function itself. There is need to look further for a basic life-principle in every living body.

To sum up: the material bulk of a living body is, in one sense, a principle of the body’s activities, but it is not the first principle. The organic structure of a living body is a principle of its function, but it is not the first principle. The interplay of physical, chemical, and mechanical forces observable in a living body, is a principle of some of the body’s activities, but not the first principle. There is, and must inevitably be, in every living body, an indwelling, connatural, substantial principle,—a constituent element of the living substance itself; not something merely resident inside the living body, and using the body and its members as instruments of its action,—which makes the body live, and gives it its determinate substantial character as an organism of definite kind or type; which makes the living body a body, a living body, this kind of living body, this one substantial living body with all its capacities and operations. This principle is the first, the basic, the fundamental life-principle. It is called the psyche or the soul. Some scientists and philosophers do not like the word soul, and go to ridiculous lengths to avoid it. They call the soul the growth-force, or bathmic force, or plasmic energy, or biotic energy, or entelechy, or vital direction, or even the something over. Something over, indeed, the life-principle is; something substantial, over and above the material mass of the living body, its organic structure, and the physico-chemical and mechanical activities observed as instrumentally employed in its vital functions.

c) Character of the Life-Principle

Aristotle’s definition of the life-principle is not likely to be improved. He calls it the first act of a physical organic body. In the definition the term act means actuality or actualness; it does not mean action or operation; for, as we have seen, action or operation in a living body constitutes life in second act, and an action (which is indeed an actuality or act) presupposes the fundamental actuality of the thing which acts. The definition requires a word or two of explanation.

(a) The soul is the first act or first actuality of the living body. In other words, the soul is what is called the substantial form of the living body. Every bodily object presents two aspects to our consideration: first of all, the object is a body; secondly, it is this kind of body. Now, all bodies are at one in being bodies. A bit of coal, a weed, a worm, a bird, a horse, a man, are all bodies; each is as truly and completely a bodily thing as the others. There is, therefore, some common basic substrate in all bodies, living and lifeless; it is that by reason of which they are bodies. This fundamental substrate does not exist apart from existing individual bodies; it does not exist by itself. It is purely potential, that is, purely capable of receiving existence in determinate actual bodies. And this fundamental bodiliness, this highly imperfect substantial reality which is the basic substrate of all bodies, is called prime matter. We must not conceive of prime matter as a definite kind of bodily substance; we must not image it as an original mass of dough out of which various body-biscuits are formed. No; a body that possesses a definite kind, exists in that kind; it is already formed; and prime matter is completely without form (i.e., without determinate being). Prime matter is purely potential; it is not determinate or actual; we may even say that prime matter is pure potentiality. For a body to exist, prime matter must be in-formed; that is, some substantial, determinate, and determining principle must join in substantial union with prime matter. By so joining (i.e., by so in-forming matter), the substantial determinant actualizes the prime matter, and a bodily being,—actual and determinate,—emerges. This determining substantial principle is called the substantial form, and, as is obvious, it is the first act, the first actualization, of the prime matter, and it bestows actual existence upon the prime matter in the bodily being so formed. Thus every bodily thing is a composite of prime matter and substantial form. All that is substantially determinate about a body must come from its substantial form; for prime matter is pure potentiality, pure indeterminateness.—In passing, we must notice here that a bodily thing has a third aspect: not only is it a body, and this kind of body, but it is this individual body of this determinate kind. It will have many marks which belong to it as an individual body, such as exact shape and size and location and temperature, and so on. And all these items are determinations, and hence forms. But they are accidental forms. An individual body has as many accidental forms as it has accidental determinations (for these are synonymous), but it is inevitably a substance of one definite essence and nature and kind, and hence has only one substantial form.—We are not concerned here with accidental forms, but with the substantial form, and with the substantial form of a living body. That which makes a body an actual, definite, determinate, substantial being of one essence, nature, and kind, is its substantial form. The substantial form is the first, the basic, the fundamental actualness in the bodily substance. It is therefore rightly called the first act of the body. Now, in living things, the first act by which the body has its being as an actual, existent body of this definite kind,—that is to say, the substantial form of the living body,—is the life-principle or soul. The soul is, therefore, rightly defined as the first act of the living body.

(b) The soul is the first act of a physical organic body. The soul does indeed make the living body a body, for the soul is the first act or the substantial form of the living body, and without it the body would not exist. But we define the soul as the first act of the physical organic body to indicate that, among substantial forms, the soul has a special character. The substantial form of a lifeless body actualizes prime matter into a body of like or homogeneous parts. The substantial form of a living body (i.e., the soul) actualizes a body of different or heterogeneous parts; and these parts are organic and constitute an organism, a composite of unified, balanced, interdependent, yet different parts. The substantial form of a lifeless body is said merely to actualize a body, or, more accurately, to actualize prime matter and in-form a body. The substantial form of a living body truly does this also (actualizes prime matter and in-forms a body) but as a soul, as a life-principle, it is accurately said to actualize the organic body or to in-form the organism,—in other words, to in-form the physical organic body.

Summary of the Article

In this Article we have studied some very important things, a few of which are involved and difficult. We have learned the meaning of principle, and, in special, of life-principle. Life is a thing to be accounted for, and we have sought its explanation vainly in the living body as a mere material substance, as a substance of organic structure, and as a substance characterized by the interplay of material forces (physical, mechanical, chemical). We have discerned the need of a basic life-principle, over and beyond these. We have recognized the need of a life-principle which is a substantial, constituent element of the living body; which makes the living body what it is, and dowers it with its capacities and functions. We have called this principle the soul, rejecting the somewhat bizarre names which certain scientists and philosophers have invented for it. We have defined the soul, and have explained the definition. Incidental to the definition of the soul, we have indicated the meaning of prime matter, substantial form, accidental form.