Page:Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life - Coleridge (1848).djvu/15

other tongues, were first employed to denote human life, that is, the duration of a human being's existence from birth to the grave. As this existence was marked by actions, many of which were common to man with other animals, those animals also were said to "live;" but the extension of the notion of Life to the vegetable creation is comparatively a recent usage, and hitherto (in this country at least) no writer before Mr. Coleridge, so far as I know, has maintained that rocks and mountains, nay, "the great globe itself," share with mankind the gift of Life. On the other hand, there are well known and energetic uses of the word "Life," to which Mr. Coleridge's speculations, as contained in the accompanying pages, are wholly inapplicable. Almost all nations, even the most savage, agree in the belief that individuals of the human race, after they have ceased to exist in this mortal life, will exist in another state, to which also the word Life is universally applied; but to this latter Mr. Coleridge's views of magnetism, electricity, &c., can hardly be thought applicable. Still less can they apply to "Life" in its spiritual sense; as, when Moses says to the Jews, "the words of the law are your life," (Deut. xxxii, 47,) and when our Saviour says, "the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life;' (John, vi, 63;) and again, "I am the resurrection and the life" (John, xi, 25.) Upon the whole, therefore, I think it would have been advisable in Mr. Coleridge to have adopted a different phraseology, in tracing the opera-

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