If you ask Google for "things", and select the images tab, quite a few of the images will show definite separations between living and non-living things. I do not believe that separation is really there, that instead life is a spectrum like light or sound, and that inanimate things like rocks have lower frequencies, and animals and humans higher frequencies.
This is not a really crazy notion: It is for instance refered to by Rupert Sheldrake as the morphogenic field. It is what guides atomic reactions, chemical reactions, DNA recombination, cell division, etc.