ON THE VITALISTIC VIEW OF NATURE. 383 



years, the instrument was gradually improved. The 

 reasons which prevented Bichat from treating biology 

 as an application of physics and chemistry lay deeper, 

 and were rooted in the second great idea which governed 

 him and his school his " Vitalism." As stated above, 10. 

 those who have studied the phenomena of life can be vitalism. 

 divided into two classes. There are those who have 

 been struck by the resemblance of the processes and 

 phenomena in living matter with those in dead or 

 unorganised matter : their attention has been directed 

 more and more to establishing a parallelism between 

 organic and inorganic nature, and they have fre- 

 quently ended in the conviction that their parallelism 

 warrants us in asserting their ultimate identity. There 

 have been others who have been impressed with the 

 essential and fundamental difference between organic 

 and inorganic processes and phenomena. To them, all 

 attempts to reduce the living process to a mechanism 

 seem to have failed, and however much they have ap- 

 preciated the insight gained by the other class of 

 students, they have deemed it equally important to 

 emphasise the essential difference the independence, 

 originality, and incommensurability of the phenomena of 

 life. The latter can be called Vitalists in the broadest 

 sense of the term. Bichat belonged to them. As the 

 former class of students have frequently arrived at the 

 thesis that organic and inorganic processes are ultim- 

 ately identical, so the latter have frequently arrived 

 at the thesis that they are fundamentally opposed and 

 antagonistic. Bichat gives expression to this view in n. 



His defini- 



his celebrated definition of life, as the totality of those t'nofiife. 



