CHANGES IN SCIENTIFIC OPINION 7 



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 pro- 

 cesses which take place in the body are not ex- 

 plicable in these terms, and moreover that none of 

 them find their full explanation in any such way. 

 Huxley's second statement shows that his view 

 was not such as has just been indicated, but agreed 

 with that put forward, in 1889, by the late dis- 

 tinguished physiologist, Professor Burdon Sander- 

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

 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 example of one of the 

 most recent utterances of this kind may be cited 

 the statements of M. Le Dantec 1 that " between life 

 and death the difference is of the same order as 

 that which exists between a phenol and a sulphate, 

 or between an electrified body and a neutral body. 

 1 The Nature and Origin of Life, Hodder and Stoughton, 

 1907. 



