Life must be considered sui generis; it is not a form of energy, nor can it be expressed in terms of something else.

We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character.

But although life is not energy, any more than it is matter, yet it directs energy and thereby controls arrangements of matter.

Death is not extinction. Neither the soul nor the body is extinguished or put out of existence.

The amount of sophistication varies according to the quality of the medium, and to the state of the same medium at different times; it must be attributed in the best cases physiologically to the medium, intellectually to the control.

Whatever life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world.