476 REMARKS ON MR. LOCKE'S ESSAY. ist, Perhaps it would be too hard to ask this'aatlrorE to explain with great exactness what he means here by life and vi- tality; the saine life in a plant cannot signify the saine juice or nutritive particles ; for it may be transplanted from clay to chalk, or from a bed of earth to a bottle of water, and still it is the saine plant. Nor can life mean the same tubes or the saine channels betwixt the fibres, for they may by degrees be obstructed, and new ones found or formed till the old are narrowed, withered, and grown impervious to the juice. Nor can life mean the same method of motion of that juice through the plant ; for if you bend the head of a plant down to the earth, and let, its top take root, as may be done to vines or brambles, then cut oil' theold stalk near its first root, and the passage of the nourishing juice will be just contrary, and yet perhaps it is the sause plant still. I would ask further, when the graft of a. pearmain has grown three months, or seven years, upon the stock of a crab; is it the same tree ? Iias it the same life, or has it not ? Or when did it change ? I might say the like concerning the life of animals. It can- not be the same blood that is the same life ; for in a few months perhaps we have few of the same particles of blood as before ; however, by Dr, Lower'sexperiment of transfusion, it may be all changed in an hour. Nor can the same veins, or vessels, make the same life, for they are the saine when the animal is dead, or they may be.changed in life-time. Nor is it the saine motion of the blood and juices, that makes the sause life; for in- dividual motion cannot be communicat.n! to successive parts of matter, since it is perishing every moment, as his 2d section as- sures us. Besides, 24, if a tree, or animal, be dead for some time, and by almighty power new life and vital motion be given to the same matter, it is a different life according to this author ; for it is not the same continued life, yet it seems to be the same plant and the same animal. ,idly, In the end of his 8th section the author asserts, that the same successive body not shifted all at once, and the saine immaterial spirit, united to it, goes to make the same man. Mere I would ask, Whether it would be the same man if it were shifted all at once ? If Goliah at a month old should have all at once received that vast addition to his bulk which increased by degrees in forty or fifty years, it is a doubt whether he would have been the same man or no : and yet why should the whole change in one - moment hinder that to be the same thing which the distanc. of forty years would necessarily make the same? And generally nearness to the saine time and place makes more toward the sameness of a thing, than distance of place- and time. S The author was Lying when this was written.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=