168 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
Lamarck’s time. The chief starting point of the 
doctrine was due to Haller, and, as Verworn states, 
it is a doctrine which has confused all physiology down 
to the middle of the present century, and even now 
emerges again here and there in varied form.* 
Lamarck was not a vitalist. Life, he says, is usually 
supposed to be a particular being or entity; a sort of 
principle whose nature is unknown, and which possesses 
living bodies. This notion he denies as absurd, saying 
that life isa very natural phenomenon, a physical fact ; 
in truth a little complicated in its principles, but not in 
any sense a particular or special being or entity. 
He then defines life in the following words: “ Life 
is an order and a state of things in the parts of every 
body possessing it, which permits or renders possible 
in it the execution of organic movement, and which, 
so long as it exists, is effectively opposed to death. 
Derange this order and this state of things to the point 
of preventing the execution of organic movement, or 
the possibility of its reéstablishment, then you cause 
death.’”’ Afterwards, in the Przlosophie zoologique, he 
modifies this definition, which reads thus: “ Life, in 
the parts of a body which possesses it, is an order and 
a state of things which permit organic movements; 
* General Physiology (English trans., 1899, p. 17). In France 
vitalism was founded by Bordeu (1722-1766), developed further by 
Barthez Seas 1806) and Chaussier (1746-1828), and formulated most 
distinctly by Louis Dumas (1765-1813). Later vitalists gave it a thor- 
oughly mystical aspect, distinguishing several varieties, such as the 
nisus formativus or formative effort, to explain the forms of organisms, 
accounting for the fact that from the egg of a bird, a bird and no other 
species always develops (4. ¢., p. 18). 
t Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivans (1802), p. 70. The 
same view was expressed in Alémotres de physique (an Ppp. 254- 
257, 386. 
