DECADENCE AND REVIVAL 25 



here he shows himself to have been a whole- 

 hearted adherent of the most rigidly mechanical 

 school. The first quotation is consistent with 

 a vitalistic view of life, for no one will deny 

 that in certain respects the human and other 

 bodies are mechanisms and that the processes 

 which take place in them are to be explained 

 in terms of chemistry and physics. But the 

 vitalist would add to this the statement that 

 all the processes which take placejn the body 

 areT not~explicable in these terms, and, more- 

 over, that none of them find their full explana- 

 tion in any such way. Huxley's second state- 

 ment shows that his view was not such as has 

 just been indicated, but agreed with that put 

 forward, in 1889, by the late distinguished 

 physiologist, Professor Burdon Sanderson,* Burdon 

 that "for the future, the word 'vital,' as Sanderson 

 distinctive of physiological processes, might 

 be abandoned altogether," a statement, the 

 inaccuracy of which will very shortly be made 

 manifest. A similarly rigid view is held to-day 

 by a number of scientific men, and as an ex- 

 ample of one of a recent utterance of this kind 



* At a later date he had modified his opinion, for Pro- 

 fessor Hartog, in his Problems of Life and Reproduction, 

 says that in 1900, when talking to him and Prof. Ch. 

 Richet, Burdon Sanderson said : " The real meaning of life 

 is adaptations," " using the word," Hartog continues, 

 "evidently in the same sense as 'self-regulation'!" 



