3io MAGNALIA NATURE: OR THE GREATER 



of life, have seemed to the vast majority of men to call for 

 description and explanation in terms alien to the language 

 which we apply to inanimate things : though at all times 

 there have been a few who sought, with the materialism of 

 Democritus, Lucretius or Giordano Bruno, to attribute most, 

 or even all, of these phenomena to the category of physical 

 causation. 



For the first scientific exposition of Vitalism, we must 

 go back to Aristotle, and to his doctrine of the three parts 

 of the tripartite soul: according to which doctrine, in 

 Milton's language, created things ' by gradual change sub- 

 limed, To vital spirits aspire, to animal, To intellectual ! ' 

 The first and lowest of these three, the i/w^r) 17 BptTrruaj, by 

 whose agency nutrition is effected, is 17 -n-pcarr) '/wx 1 ?* the 

 inseparable concomitant of life itself. It is inherent in 

 the plant as well as in the animal, and in the Linnaean 

 aphorism, vegetabilia crescunt et vivunt, its existence is 

 admitted in a word. Under other aspects, it is all but 

 identical with the V^X 1 ? avgrjTiicij and yewrjTi/oj, the soul of 

 growth and of reproduction : and in this composite sense 

 it is no other than Driesch's ' Entelechy,' the hypothetic 

 natural agency that presides over the form and formation 

 of the body. Just as Driesch's psychoid or psychoids, which 

 are the basis of instinctive phenomena, of sensation, instinct, 

 thought, reason, and all that directs that body which entelechy 

 has formed, are no other than the ala-d^rnctj, whereby ani- 

 malia vivunt et sentiunt, and the SICWOTJTIKT;, to which 

 Aristotle ascribes the reasoning faculty of man. Save only 

 that Driesch, like Darwin, would deny the restriction of vou?, 

 or reasoning, to man alone, and would extend it to animals, 

 it is clear, and Driesch himself admits, 1 that he accepts both 

 the vitalism and the analysis of vitalism laid down by 

 Aristotle. 



The irvevfM. of Galen, the vis plastica, the vis vitce forma- 



1 Science and Philosophy of the Organism (Gifford Lectures), ii. p. 83, 1908. 



