it to have the sense of Touch; and we shall, hereafter, explain why each of those functions has been allotted. Let it suffice, for the present, to say that Vital Principle is the source of the nutritive, the sentient, cogitative and motive faculties; and that by them it has been defined.
It is easy, with respect to some of those faculties, to perceive, whether any one of them is the Vital Principle, or a part of Vital Principle, and if a part whether it is distinct from other parts substantively, or in an abstract sense only; but there are others which seem to elude investigation. Thus, as some plants appear, after having been divided, and after the parts have been separated, still to be alive, as if the living principle, in each plant, were in reality one, in potentiality more than one, so we see the same occurrence in other distinctions of the Vital Principle, as in insects which have been divided; for each of the parts manifests sensibility and locomotion, and if sensibility, then imagination and desire, as wherever there is feeling, there must be sense of pain and pleasure, and wherever these, there must, of necessity, be desire. We have nothing very certain to offer upon the subject of the mind and the reflective faculties; but the mind seems to be another kind of Vital Principle, and alone to be capable of existing apart from the body, as the everlasting exists apart from the
