Alive

The first sense is the everyday one, marked as an endoreality term: a convenient threshold rather than a fact of nature. Something moves, breathes and has not been certified dead, so it counts as alive. The second sense moves the question to access. A thing is alive to the degree it can reach anima, the animating energy, directly as primary anima or through others as secondary anima. Marsh treats this as a genuinely open question rather than a settled fact, asking whether it is the ability to access anima or the ability to exercise will that is the defining feature of living, and noting that both are not always present in those we consider alive. What the definition changes is which question you ask of a living thing: not whether it clears the threshold, but whether it can still reach the energy of life.

Biology has never fully agreed on a definition of life. The teaching checklist of growth, metabolism, response and reproduction is a rule of thumb, and NASA's working definition, a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, is built for astrobiology rather than philosophy. Older vitalism held that living things carry a special force absent from dead matter, a view mainstream biology dropped. Marsh treats anima as energy and connection rather than a chemical or a spirit, and keeps the definition of living an open question rather than a closed one.