*So ourmedical writers commonly translate Professor Blumenbach's Bildungstrieb,[1]the vis plastica, or vis vitÊformatrix of the elder physiologists, and the life or living principleOf JOHN HUNTER, [2]the profoundest, we had almost said the only, physiological philosopherof the latter half of the preceding century. For in what othersense can we understand either his assertion, that thisprinciple or agent is "independent of organization, [3] which yet itanimates, sustains, and repairs, or the purport of that magnificentcommentary on his system, the Hunterian MusÊum, in Lincoln'sInn Fields. [4]The Hunterian idea of a life or vital principle, "independentof the organization," yet in each organ working instinctivelytowards its preservation, as the ants or termites in repairingthe nests of their own fabrication, demonstrates that John Hunterdid not, as Stahl and others had done, individualize, or makean hypostasis of the principles of life, as a somewhat manifestableper se, and consequently itself a phÊnomenon; the latencyof which was to be attributed to accidental, or at least contingentcauses, ex. gr.; the limits or imperfection of our senses, orthe inaptness of the media: but that herein he philosophized inthe spirit of the purest Newtonians, who in like mannerrefused to hypostasize the law of gravitation into an ether, whicheven if its existence were conceded, would need another gravitationfor itself. [Footnote continued on next page]

*TheHunterian position is a genuine philosophic IDEA, the negativetest of which as of all Ideas is, that it is equidistantfrom an ens logicurn (= an abstraction), an ens reprÊsentativum(= a generalization), and an ens phantasticum (= an imaginarything or phÊnomenon.)

Is not the progressive enlargement, theboldness without temerity, of chirurgical views and chirurgicalpractice since Hunter's time to the present day, attributable,in almost every instance, to his substitution of what may perhapsbe called experimental Dynamic, for the mechanical notions,or the less injurious traditional empiricism, of his predecessors?And this, too, though the light is still struggling through acloud, and though it is shed on many who see either dimly or notat all the IDEA, from which it is eradiated? Willingly would wedesignate, what we have elsewhere called the mental initiative,by some term less obnoxious to theanti-Platonic reader, than this of Idea obnoxious, we mean,as soon as any precise and peculiar sense is attached to the sound.Willingly would we exchange the Term, might it be donewithout sacrifice of the Import: and did we not see, too,clearly, that it is the meaning, not the word, that is the objectof that aversion, which, fleeing from inward alarm, tries to shelteritself in outward contempt-that is at once folly and a stumbling-blockto the partizans of a crass and sensual materialism, the advocatesof the Nihil nisi ab extra. [5]

They, like moles,

Nature's mute monks, live mandrakes ofthe ground,

Shrink from the light, then listen fora sound;

See but to dread, and dread they knownot why,

The natural alien of their negative eye!S. T. C. [6]

Footnotes

[1] As in Elliotson's translation of Blumenbacb(see above, 159 n 1, 1545n) Institutions (1817) 333-9.

[2] John Hunter (1728-93), the famous physiologistand surgeon, in whose honour the Hunterian Orations are deliveredannually at the Royal College of Surgeons. In this connexion seeTL (1848) 17-18, and above, 1473-5 and nn.

[3] See Abernethy Enquiry 48.

[4] The museum, containing models and illustrationsdepicting all phases of health and disease, was housed temporarilyin Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1806, moved to permanent quarters in1812, and opened to the public in 1813. There was considerablecontroversy about the government's donating the funds necessaryfor its purchase and housing.

[5] "Nothing if not from without".

[6] Limbo lines 6-10 (var): PW (EHC) 1430.