nergy.

Jouffroy says: Personality, in jurisprudence, denotes the capacity of
rights and obligations which belong to an intelligent will.

A person is a being who is intelligent and free. Every spiritual and moral
agent, every cause which is in possession of responsibility and
consciousness, is a person.

Webster says: Person is an individual human being consisting of body and
soul. We apply the word to living beings possessed of a rational nature;
the body when dead is not called a person.

The Biblical ground nature of the word person is in these words: "What man
knoweth the things of a man but the spirit of man which is in him."

Intelligence is an essential attribute of person, but it is not a property
of matter. If intelligence is a property of matter, then the distinction
between person and thing is of a necessity a distinction without a
difference. But no greater absurdity could possess the human mind for one
moment than the thought that intelligence is a property or quality of
matter. Nothing short of the fact expressed in Bible language that the
spirit of man is a gift from God, will account for the distinction between
person and thing. Man in his physical nature is enslaved to the laws of
physical nature in common with all organized things; is subject to the
laws that control matter. The law of organic existence is such that he can
not live without a continual supply of food, which the nutritive process
continually provides in order to make up for the wastage consequent upon
disintegration of parts. But there are impassible limits fixed to the
nutritive process by the most certain of all laws, viz: those of gravity
and chemical action. To abolish these laws would insure the destruction of
all organic existence, because it would be the abrogation of the essential
conditions of organized being. Yet it is true that when a certain point is
reached a change and dissolution of the molecules always takes place, and
this change is the sure introduction of death. Hence, nothing short of
union with God, through his own appointed means, by which he brings his
own omnipotence to bear for the purpose of controlling the essential
condition of organic existence, could ever be an antidote of death. Man in
his original innocence enjoyed such means in the fruit of the tree of
life. Being removed from this he dies by the essential laws of his
existence. So man in his physical nature is enslaved in common with all
things that