Things cease to be exclusively and solely material when, though they may be divisible in a certain respect, they are nevertheless indivisible in another respect. Plants, animals, all living organisms, considered simply as objects occupying space and as therefore having certain dimensions, admit surely of being separated into parts. Trees are cut into logs, sawed into boards; animals are slaughtered and quartered. But considered from the point of view of its peculiar quality, of the essential property which distinguishes it from all other bodies, an organism is not divisible. If we do divide it, each component part ceases to be what it previously was when conjoined with the others. Such a part cannot be preserved; it withers, it decays, and is dispersed, so that the whole can never be reconstituted. The various parts of an organism, considered as such, are inseparable, because each of them is and maintains itself on the strength of its relations to the others, forming with them a true and essential unity. If we however try to find out what this unity is by which all the limbs are indissolubly held together, we shall discover nothing which can be observed and represented spatially, nothing endowed with dimensions, however small, after the manner of the several limbs which this unity fuses within itself and vivifies. If unity which is the life-giving principle of every organism could be spatially represented, or in other words, if it were something material, it would be one of those very limbs that have to be unified, and could not then be the unifying principle itself. Hence the vanity of the efforts on the part of materialistic physiologists who obstinately strive to explain life by observing the parts which compose the organic mass, by studying the concurrence of their processes, their chemical relationships, and their mechanism. A material being, organically constituted, is something more than a material thing pure and simple: it announces already a higher principle; it presages the spirit.