
Polish solid state physicist Michal Kurzynski’s 2006 appendix C.1 Elementary Building Blocks, from his The Thermodynamic Theory Machinery of Life, wherein he outlines the 20 main elements common to animate matter (or life) as he vacillates on these two terms, i.e. he defines humans as CHNOPS+14 state of matter. [7]

Polish solid state physicist Michal Kurzynski’s 2006 appendix C.1 Elementary Building Blocks, from his The Thermodynamic Theory Machinery of Life, wherein he outlines the 20 main elements common to animate matter (or life) as he vacillates on these two terms, i.e. he defines humans as CHNOPS+14 state of matter. [7]

In hmol science, animate matter is matter (fermions) that moves or is animated, generally by the action of force (bosons). The term ‘animate matter’ frequently arises in origin of life, life vs. non-life, and what is life debates or discussions, in the sense of what separates animate matter from inanimate matter.

The term “animate matter” frequently is evoked in discussions whether or not a human has a psyche, consciousness, free will (or self-motion), a soul, spirit, among others, particularly in the 17th century up until the early 20th century, but even in modern time. [1]

Descartes' mind-matter dualism
In 1664, English philosopher Margaret Cavendish critiqued of some of French philosopher Rene Descartes’ 1637 discourses, particularly his metaphysical system of dualism describes two kinds of substance: matter and mind. According to this system, everything that is "matter" is deterministic and natural—and so belongs to natural philosophy—and everything that is "mind" is volitional and non-natural, and falls outside the domain of philosophy of nature. Cavendish concludes, in her review, in a very long-winded explanation, that animate matter has self-motion, animate matter does not, but that all matter of the universe is a commixture of the two, part animate and part inanimate, such that the animate is moving and the inanimate moved. [5] Cavendish, in general, rejected the work of Aristotle and mechanical philosophy and tended to engage in criticism, not only with Descartes, but with Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle.

Moral motion
In his 1789 Travels to Discover the Source of Moral Motion (volume one) and Apocalypse of Nature, wherein the Source of Moral Motion is Discovered (volume two), British philosopher John Stewart outlines the very-interesting results of his researchers of having travelled the world to study the various systems of morality, out of which he derives a religion-free eight tenet “Religion of Nature”, based firstly on abandonment of every notion of a deity, with the replacement of the postulate that all that exists is matter and motion, then secondly outlines a new replacement religion of how combinations of the particles of matter coalesce to form “intellectualized bodies” that can have both moral motion and immoral motion in the course of the “revolutions and operations” of the universe, which is said to have neither beginning or end. [6]

Living matter
A near synonym to animate matter, often used, is “living matter”, albeit one that is invested heavily in the anthropomorphic conceptions, such as that there exists something called “life”, which as of 2009 has been shown be a defunct view, often connected with morality and the Ra-theology based theory of death and the soul. In 1926, Russian biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky took this route and in his The Biosphere, delineation of the matter of the biosphere into two types: (a) living matter and (b) kosnoe matter or inert matter, arguing to the effect that the living matter has never been made from inert matter, on the logic that each type of matter comes from different elements of the period table. [3] Prior to this publication, Vernadsky penned three articles on the topic of living matter: “Living Matter”, “The Structure of Living Matter”, and “Living Matter in Geochemical History of the Element’s System”; only one of which has since been published. [4] Vernadsky’s “living matter” as distinct from “inert matter”, however, has since been show to be fallacious, one reason being that animate molecules such as human molecules, are composed of 26 elements, and these elements are not compartmentalized to certain groups.

Non-rational vs. rational animate matter
In 1955, Belgian-born English thermodynamicist Alfred Ubbelohde, in his chapter on “Thermodynamics and Life”, stated abruptly that the term ‘life’ is shorthand for ‘animate matter’, and alluded to the direction that in the thermodynamical study of “living things” that one must utilize the latter term over the former. [2] Ubbelohde thus introduced the subject of “animate thermodynamics” in place of the outdated anthropomorphic-based defunct subject of “life thermodynamics”. Ubbelohde, however, footnoted his definition of life as animate matter by subdividing animate matter into two classes: (a) non-rational animate matter, in which selection processes are unconscious, and (b) rational animate matter, in which selection processes are conscious. This latter addendum, however, is still soaked with anthropomorphism, with the implicit assumption that certain types of moving matter have consciousness and that consciousness is something that exists in the definitions of the modern physical sciences. This dichotomy can easily be shown to be fallacious by asking whether or not the animate light-induced ‘straightening’ 3-element molecule retinal is conscious or rather if it ‘selects to choose to straighten consciously or unconsciously’, which invariably leads to the conclusion that the premise of consciousness is an outdated model that is defunct in a modern physical science or hmol science perspective.

References
1. Hutchinson, Horace G. (1922). The Fortnightly Club (ch. 6: Animate Matter and Human Reason, pgs. 61-). E.P. Dutton.
2. Ubbelohde, Alfred René. (1954). Man and Energy. Illustrated (ch. 8: life and thermodynamics, pgs. 183-200; ‘animate matter’, pg. 183). Hutchinson's Scientific & Technical Publications.
3. Vernadsky, Vladimir I. (1926). The Biosphere (living matter, pg. 53-56). Copernicus.
4. Vernadsky, Vladimir I. (1978). Zhivo Veshchestvo (Living Matter). Moscow: Nauka.
5. (a) Cavendish, Margaret. (1664). Philosophical Letters (pgs. 97-128). London; in Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period (esp. pgs. 24-26) edited by Margaret Atherdon. Hackett Publishing, 1994.
(b) Margaret Cavendish – Wikipedia.
6. (a) Stewart, John. (1789).Travels to Discover the Source of Moral Motion (volume one). Ridgway.
(b) Stewart, John. (1790). The Apocalypse of Nature: wherein the Source of Moral Motion is Discovered (volume two). Ridgway.
(c) Griffiths, Ralph. (1791). The Monthly Review, Volume 5 (Art. VI, Review: Travels Over the Most InterestingParts of the Globe and The Apocalypse of Nature, pgs. 144-46). G. Griffiths.
(d) Watkins, John, Shoberl, Frederic, and Upcott, William. (1816). A Biographical Dictionary of Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland (John Stewart, pg. 333). H. Colburn.
7. Kurzynski, Michal. (2006). The Thermodynamic Machinery of Life (animate matter, pg. 1; §C.1: Elementary Building Blocks, pgs. 315-). New York: Springer.

Further reading
● Stout, George F. (1931). Matter and Mind (section: The Distinction of Animate and Inanimate Matter, pgs. 105-). The University Press.
● Kuvakin, Valerii A. (1994). “Animate Matter”, in: A History of Russian Philosophy (pgs. 526-). Prometheus Books.