24 VITALISM AND SCHOLASTICISM 



was intoxicating and it is not hard to under- 

 stand how men came to think, for a time, that 

 there was nothing in the earth or in the heavens 

 over the earth which was past their finding 

 Anti- out. And so Professor Huxley* proclaimed 



vitalists that the whole worldj living and not-living, 



is the result of the mutual interaction, accord- 

 ing to definite laws, of the forces possessed by 

 the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity 

 of the universe was composed." 



And again t he stated " that the living body 

 is a mechanism . . is now the expressed or 

 implied fundamental proposition of the whole 

 of scientific physiology." There is a curious 

 difference between the phrasing of the first and 

 second editions of this article which very clearly 

 shows how definite the late professor's views 

 were on this point, and how rigidly he excluded 

 any such thing as a vital force from his philo- 

 sophyi In the first edition he wrote : " Our 

 volition counts for something as a condition 

 of the course of events." But in a later 

 edition, fearing evidently lest he might have 

 seemed to have bowed down in the House of 

 Rimmon, he altered this so that it reads : " Or, 

 to speak more accurately, the physical state of 

 which our volition is the expression." And 



* Belfast Address, 1874. f Collected Essays, i., 163. 



