Bichat, in his famous book upon Life and Death, divides life into two classes,--animal and organic.

Man's intellect, with the brain for its centre, belongs to life animal; his passions to life organic, centred in the heart, in the viscera.

Alas! if the noblest passions through which alone we lift ourselves into the moral realm of the sublime and beautiful really have their centre in the life which the very vegetable, that lives organically, shares with us! And, alas! if it be that life which we share with the vegetable, that can cloud, obstruct, suspend, annul that life centred in the brain, which we share with every being howsoever angelic, in every star howsoever remote, on whom the Creator bestows the faculty of thought!.