ON THE VITALISTIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



377 



accepting a mechanical conception," we must not " fall 

 into the very common mistake of trying to explain vital 

 processes as being due directly to mechanical causes." 

 It has been quite as impossible to banish the word 

 life from the biological vocabulary as it has been to 

 banish the word " ought " from the ethical. Biological 

 knowledge has become purely chemical, physical, and 

 mechanical, but not so biological thought. The question 

 " What is life ? " still haunts us. Let us see what posi- 

 tion the foremost representatives of modern biological 

 research have taken up to this question. We find that 

 they can be divided into two classes. 



First, there are those who have studied the pheno- , 



The purely 



mena of living matter solely by the means which the |g ie e n c ^ flc 

 advancing sciences of dynamics, physics, and chemistry 

 have placed at their command. To them biology is an 

 applied science. The question " What is life ? " is. ac- 

 cording to their view of method, only to be solved by 

 degrees, by bringing the forms and processes manifested 

 in the living world more and more under the sway 

 of observation, measurement, and possibly calculation. 

 The central problem as to the essence of life and the 



field of pathology. After having 

 assisted in banishing the older 

 vitalism, he, to the dismay of 

 many of his own school, reintro- 

 duced the conception of a vital 

 principle in a well-known review 

 entitled " Old and New Vital- 

 ism," in his own journal (vol. 

 ix. p. 20). " Indeed, the living 

 body consists, so far as we know, 

 of substances of the same kind 

 as we find in ' lifeless nature,' and 

 these substances have not only 

 no other properties and powers in 



the living body, but they do not 

 even lose any of them. . . . Never- 

 theless, we cannot see how the 

 phenomena of life can be under- 

 stood simply as an assemblage of 

 the natural forces inherent in those 

 substances : rather do I consider it 

 necessary to distinguish as an es- 

 sential factor of life an impressed 

 derived force in addition to the 

 molecular forces. I see no ob- 

 jection to designating this force by 

 the old name of vital force." 



