Bichat defined life as the ensemble of the functions which resist death. This is to define life in terms of death,—but death is but the end of life, and cannot be defined without first defining life. Claude Bernard rejects all definition of life as insufficient, and incompatible with experimental science.
Some modern physiologists regard sensibility, others irritability, as the characteristic of life, and define life as the faculty of responding, by some sort of change, to an external stimulus. As in the case of movement, we have found by more attentive observation that this faculty also is universal in nature. There is no action without reaction; an elastic body repels the body that strikes it. Every object in nature dilates with heat, contracts with cold, and is modified by the light which it absorbs. Everything in nature responds to exterior action by a change, and hence this faculty cannot be the characteristic of life.
A distinguished professor of physiology was accustomed to teach that the disproportion between action and reaction was the characteristic of life. "Allow a gramme weight to fall on a nerve, and the muscle will raise a weight of ten grammes. This disproportion is the characteristic of life." But there is a much greater disproportion between action and reaction when the friction of a match blows up a powder factory, or the turning of a switch lights the lamps and animates the tramways and the motors of a great city. The disproportion between action and reaction is therefore no characteristic of life.
The essential characteristic of life is often said to be nutrition—the phenomenon by which a living organism absorbs matter from its environment, subjects it to chemical metamorphosis, assimilates it, and finally ejects the destructive products of metamorphosis into the surrounding medium. But this characteristic is also common to a great number of ordinary chemical reactions, so that we cannot call it peculiar to life. Consider, for instance, a fragment of calcium chloride immersed in a solution of sodium carbonate. It absorbs the carbonic ion, incorporates it into a molecule of calcium carbonate, and ejects the chlorine ion into the surrounding medium.
It may be argued that this is merely a chemical process, since the substance which determines the reaction is also modified, the chloride of calcium changing into carbonate of calcium. But every living thing is also changing its chemical
constitution during every moment of its existence,—it is this change which constitutes the process of senile involution. The substance of the child is other than that of the ovum, and the substance of the adult is not that of the child. Hence we cannot regard nutrition as the exclusive characteristic of life.
Other authorities regard growth and organization as the essentials of life. But crystals also grow. It was said that the growth of a crystal differed from that of a living thing, in that the former grew by the addition of material from without—the juxtaposition of bricks, as it were—while the latter grew by intussusception, an introduction of fresh material into the substance of the organism. A crystal, moreover, was homogeneous, while the tissues of a living being were differentiated—such differentiation constituting the organization. At the present time, however, we recognize the existence of a great variety of purely physical productions, the so-called "osmotic growths," which increase by a process of intussusception, and develop therefrom a marvellous complexity of organization and of form. Hence growth and organization cannot be considered as the essential characteristics of life.
Since, then, we are totally unable to define the exact boundary which separates life from the physical phenomena of nature, we may fairly conclude that no such separation exists. This is in conformity with the "law of continuity,"—the principle which asserts that all the phenomena of nature are continuous in time and space. Classes, divisions, and separations are all artificial, made not by nature but by man. All the forms and phenomena of nature are united by insensible transition; it is impossible to separate them, and in the distinction between living and non-living things we must content ourselves with relative definitions, which are far from being precise.
Life can only be defined as the sum of all phenomena exhibited by living beings, and its definition thus becomes a mere corollary to the definition of a living being.