202 EVOLUTION 



worth, Emerson, Meredith, these and many 

 other Nature-poets are perhaps the truest, 

 because deepest, biologists of us all. 



It is partly in the intrinsic difficulty of the 

 problem — vital activity being something be- 

 tween mechanical causality and our conscious 

 purposing — and partly in the way that 

 science ever takes on the colour of its time, 

 that we must look for an explanation of the 

 historical oscillations of biology between the 

 mechanistic interpretations of the living 

 organism and the vitalistic appreciations of 

 it. Now it is a machine and again it is a 

 spirit, now an automaton and again a free 

 agent, now an engine and again an entelechy. 

 The pendulum of thought continues to 

 swing. 



Despite the fact that as yet no vitalist 

 writer has succeeded in making himself 

 and his nomenclature really intelligible to 

 any other, and that the frequent gibes at 

 vitalistic metaphysics and mysticism remain 

 largely justified, we confess that the modern 

 movement of vitaHsm has our increasing 

 sympathy. It affects our evolutionism to 

 this extent at least that we feel compelled to 

 recognize the persistence of some originative 

 impetus within the organism, which expresses 

 itself in variation and mutation, and in all 

 kinds of creative effort and endeavour. 



