Consider the immense influence of aliments upon health, structure, and even character. Compare the people who live only on milk and vegetables with those who are in the constant use of spirituous liquors. See how alkohol, carried into the new world, has modified the manners and habits of the savages; consider the slow and gradual influence of regimen in chronic diseases, and you will perceive that in health, as in disease, the alteration of the fluids is frequently before that of the solids, which consequently become changed; for it is an inevitable circle. But the alteration of the fluids appears to depend essentially upon the mode of the mixture of parts not animalized with those that are so. We should have a very inaccurate idea of the mixture with the blood of the foreign substances brought by the way of the intestines, the skin, or the lungs, for the purposes of sanguification, if we compared it to the mixture of inert substances, or chemical combinations. The blood enjoys, if we may so say, the rudiments of organic sensibility; and as the life which it enjoys places it more or less in relation to the fluids that enter it, it is more or less disposed to combine with them and to endow them with the life with which it is animated. Sometimes it repulses for a long time substances that are foreign to it. I am persuaded that a great number of the phenomena that we experience after taking food, especially acrid substances, and spirituous liquors, arises in part from the general disorder that the blood undergoes when its vitality begins to communicate itself to these foreign substances from the kind of struggle which takes place in the vessels, between the living fluid and that which does not live. Thus we see all the solids rise, as it were, against a stimulant they are unaccustomed to. Who knows but that the vitality of the fluids has an influence upon their motions? I think it is very probable. I doubt whether fluids purely inert could, if they were alone in animated vessels, circulate like living fluids. In the same manner, animated fluids could not move themselves, if they were in vessels deprived of life. Life then is equally necessary to one and the other. But these subjects are too obscure to occupy us longer. V. _Of the properties independent of life._