The ethnologist of our world must take up her position at the common locus where roles, actions and abilities are distributed — those that make it possible to define one entity as animal or material and another as a free agent, one as endowed with consciousness, another as mechanical, and still another as unconscious and incompetent. Our ethnologist must even compare the always different ways of defining — or not defining — matter, law, consciousness and animals' souls, without using modern metaphysics as a vantage point. Just as the constitution of jurists defines the rights and duties of citizens and the State, the working of justice and the transfer of power, so this Constitution - which I shall spell with a capital C to distinguish it from the political ones — defines humans and nonhumans, their properties and their relations, their abilities and their groupings. – We Have Never Been Modern, p15. emphasis added
All things which are, and have being, are found under a triple diversity general. For either they are deemed Supernatural, Natural, or, of a third being. Things Supernatural are immaterial, simple, indivisible, incorruptible, and unchangeable. Things Natural are material, compounded, divisible, corruptible, and changeable. Things Supernatural are of the mind only comprehended: Things Natural are able to be perceived of the sense exterior. In things Natural, probability and conjecture hath place: But in things Supernatural, chief demonstration and most sure Science is to be had. By which properties and comparisons of these two, more easily may be described, the state, condition, nature and property of those things which we before termed of a third being: which, by a peculiar name also, are called Things Mathematical. For these, being (in a manner) middle between things supernatural and natural, are not so absolute and excellent as things supernatural: Nor yet so base and gross as things natural: But [they] are things immaterial: and nevertheless by material things able somewhat to be signified. – John Dee's introduction to Euclid
Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.