The electromotive power _lasts after death_, or in dissected nerves and muscles after separation from the body of the animal, as long as the excitability of the nervous and muscular fibre; whether these fibres are permitted to die gradually from the cessation of the conditions necessary to the support of life, or whether they are suddenly deprived of their vital properties by heat or chemical action. Let us not suppose for a moment that these conclusions indicate in the remotest degree that electricity is life,--that vital power is due to electricity. During life, with every motion, and, indeed, with every emotion, whether we move a muscle or exert the mind, there is a change of state. The result of this is chemical phenomena,--heat and electricity; but these are not life. We excite them equally by giving motion to a dead mass. Notwithstanding the assertions of those who have zealously followed the path of Mesmer, and examined, or they have thought so, the psychological effects dependent upon some strange physiological conditions, there is not an experiment on record,--there is not an observation worthy of credit, which shows that electricity has any connection with their results. All around their subject is uncertainty: doubt involves every experiment, and deception clouds a large number. Some few grains of truth, and these are sufficiently strange, are mixed up in an enormous mass of error. All the phenomena of life,--of the _vis vitæ_ or vitality, are beyond human search. All the physical forces, or elements, we may examine by the test of experiment: but the principle on which sensation depends, the principle even upon which vegetable _life_ depends, cannot be tested. Life is infinitely superior to every physical force; it holds them all in control, but is not itself controlled by them; it keeps its state sacred from human search,--the invisible hidden behind the veil of mortality.