LIFE AND THE COSMOS 293 



Vitalism therefore flourishes, as the recent 

 remarkable works of Driesch and Bergson tes- 

 tify. Of these two authors the former is 

 concerned to prove that pure mechanism is 

 insufficient in biology, and that to mechanism 

 must be added his entelechies ; * the latter 

 has gone beyond the vitalism of earlier au- 

 thors, to give his own view of his speculations, 

 and introduced the idea of the vital impetus. 



THE VITALISM OF BERGSON 



Upon analysis the theory of Bergson 

 amounts to this, that there is an original 

 creative impetus impelled upon life which, at 

 all events in the main, is responsible for the 

 course that organic evolution has taken. 

 To quote his own words: "So we come back, 

 by a somewhat roundabout way, to the idea 

 we started from, that of an original impetus 

 of life, passing from one generation of germs 

 to the following generation of germs through 

 the developed organisms which bridge the 

 interval between the generations. This im- 

 petus, sustained right along the lines of evo- 

 lution among which it gets divided, is the 

 fundamental cause of variations, at least 



1 Driesch, "The Science and Philosophy of the Organism." 

 London, 1907 and 1908, two volumes. 



