To account for Life is one thing: to explain Life another. In the first we are supposed to state something prior (if not in time, yet in the order of Nature) to the thing accounted for, as the ground or cause of that thing, or as its suffient cause....To account for a thing is to see into the principle of its possibility, and from that principle to evolve its being. Thus the mathematician demonstrates the truths of geometry by constructing them....
To explain a power, on the other hand, is (the power itself being assumed, though not comprehended) to unfold or spread it out.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Theory of Life.
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