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There is at least this difference: When vitality is gone, you cannot recall it, or reproduce it by your chemistry; but you can recombine the two gases in which you have decomposed water, any number of times, and get your aquosity back again; it never fails; it is a power of chemistry.
The powers of observation and experiment having increased, it became possible by scientific test and analysis to satisfy the desire for a more immediate knowledge, and thus to discover, for example, that water is water, not because it possesses the form of aquosity, as the Scholastics would have said, but because it is chemically composed of oxygen and hydrogen.
Aquosity is not an activity, it is a property, the property of wetness; viscosity is a term to describe other conditions of matter; solidity, to describe still another condition; and opacity and transparency, to describe still others as they affect another of our senses. But the vital activity in matter is a concrete reality.
What better philosophical status has "vitality" than "aquosity"? And why should "vitality" hope for a better fate than the other "itys" which have disappeared since Martinus Scriblerus accounted for the operation of the meat-jack by its inherent "meat roasting quality," and scorned the "materialism" of those who explained the turning of the spit by a certain mechanism worked by the draught of the chimney?
So likewise the small terrestrial fire doth not burn so lively in dusky, dark, rainy weather, nor manifests it self with joy in its operation, as it doth when there is a fair, pure, serene, unfalsified heavenly Air; the reason is, because the sympathy is bound and hindered by the obstruction of those Accidents and the waterish Air, so that the attractive power is grieved, that it cannot accomplish its compleat Love and Operation as it should, for this hinderance brings the aquosity to the contrary Element.
What better philosophical status has "vitality" than "aquosity"? And why should "vitality" hope for a better fate than the other "itys" which have disappeared since Martinus Scriblerus accounted for the operation of the meat-jack by its inherent "meat-roasting quality," and scorned the "materialism" of those who explained the turning of the spit by a certain mechanism worked by the draught of the chimney.
As Huxley points out, it is no more justifiable to postulate the existence of a vitalistic principle in protoplasm than it would be to set up an "aquosity" to account for the properties of water, or a "saltness" for the qualities of a certain combination of sodium and chlorine.
'What better philosophical status has vitality than aquosity? 'If scientific language is to possess a definite and constant signification, we are, he considers, 'logically bound to apply to protoplasm or the physical basis of life the same conceptions as those which are held to be legitimate elsewhere. Wherefore, he concludes, that 'if the phenomena exhibited by water are its properties, so are those presented by protoplasm its properties, and that if it be correct to describe 'the properties of water as resulting from the nature and disposition of its component molecules, there can be no 'intelligible ground for refusing to say that the properties of protoplasm result from the nature and disposition of its molecules.
In fact, in considering this question of life, it is about as difficult for the unscientific mind to get along without postulating a vital principle or force which, Huxley says, is analogous to the idea of a principle of aquosity in water as it is to walk upon the air, or to hang one's coat upon a sunbeam.
Yet those who invoke "a vital principle" or "vitality" in connection with protoplasm should, if they were consistent, apply their method to the mystery of water. Let us see how it would run. Nevertheless, in spite of their ignorance about the real nature of water, men of science do not invent an "aqueous principle" or "aquosity" with the notion of "explaining" water.
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