REPAIRS AND REGENERATION 177 



point. Vitalists have no quarrel with the at- 

 tempt to explain all kinds of operations in the 

 1 ving being according to the laws of chemistry 

 and physics. They admit to the full the claim 

 that all or nearly all these operations involve 

 the invocation of these sciences. There is the 

 farther claim, that these factors explain the 

 whole matter. That, in the opinion of Vitalists 

 t'iey cannot do. Something further is needed, 

 and that something to them is the" enteliecEy, 

 or, in scholastic language, the " form." Even 

 the most mechanistic of writers materialist 

 il the phrase is preferred have gone a long way 

 towards admitting what has just been urged. 

 We have just been alluding to Weismann, 

 a ad may add that in another passage he 

 makes the following very significant remark : 

 <k It would be a great delusion if anyone were 

 to believe that he had arrived at a comprehen- 

 sion of the universe by tracing the phenomena 

 of Nature to mechanical principles. He would 

 thereby forget that the assumption of eternal 

 matter with its eternal laws by no means 

 satisfies our intellectual need for causality." * 

 Such a statement, though exception might be 

 taken to the word "eternal " as applied to 

 matter, could be made by the most orthodox 

 vitalist of the scholastic variety. In another 



* Studies in the Theory of Descent, vol. ii., p. 710. 



M 



