CHAPTER III 



BICHAT AND HIS TISSUE THEORY 



IN THE IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING SECTION of this worlc One chapter (chap- 

 ter v) was devoted to giving an account of the two mutually opposed 

 ideas as to the nature of life that were prevalent during the early part of 

 the eighteenth century: the mechanistic, which conceived the phenomena of 

 life from the purely mechanical point of view, and the vitalistic, which, rep- 

 resented by Stahl and his pupils, saw in the soul the real entity of life and 

 regarded the body as existing for and through the soul. Curiously enough, 

 Stahl's doctrine, the most markedly vitalistic of them all, won support 

 particularly in France, where it was preserved and further developed by the 

 medical faculty at Montpellier. It was especially Stahl's idea of the complex 

 chemical composition of the body and the easy decomposability of its constit- 

 uent parts, and the peculiar structure of them characteristic of different 

 beings, that was developed by the Montpellier school. On the other hand, 

 these scientists paid less attention to Stahl's speculations on the soul itself; 

 rather, it was life, the life-force, that was believed to be the binding force 

 that prevents the chemical components of the body from disintegrating. We 

 have seen Stahl's theory recur in this form both in Humboldt and in Cuvier. 

 In actual fact the sharp distinction between mechanism and vitalism was to 

 a certain extent removed towards the close of the eighteenth century; the 

 progress of chemistry made it necessary to consider other functions in the 

 body besides the purely motive phenomena — ■ a fact that even the most con- 

 vinced mechanists eventually had to realize; while, on the other hand, a 

 number of active natural forces were discovered — primarily the electric and 

 the magnetic — of which earlier ages knew nothing and in face of which bi- 

 ology — whether vitalistic or mechanistic — was bound to adopt a definite 

 attitude. As examples of the influence of these new discoveries may be men- 

 tioned, on one hand, Galvani's experiments with electrical phenomena in 

 the organism, which were continued by Humboldt and others, and on the 

 other Mesmer's investigations into "animal magnetism," or what we should 

 nowadays call hypnotic phenomena. As a result of all these complications, 

 that age's conception of life-phenomena became a mere groping in the dark; it 

 was only after the discovery of the law of the indestructibility of energy that 

 biology also gained a fresh basis on which to build, as a result of which it 

 became possible to form a fresh mechanical conception of life-phenomena. 



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