26 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



their edges, towards a confidence in the ultimate unification 

 of all knowledge and in the ultimate establishment of a few 

 primary laws that will describe in common terms, and enable 

 us to deduce from common principles, phenomena presenting 

 superficially the utmost appearance of dissimilarity and 

 uniqueness. This faith has been preached of late with 

 abundant enthusiasm by many men of science. 



Thus we may say (though the generalization has only a 

 rough and approximate truth) that modern science began with 

 a special emphasis on the unity of scientific law; that there 

 followed a period chiefly characterized by the preoccupation 

 of scientists with the segregated phenomena of their several 

 special fields ; and that there has lately ensued a new impulse 

 toward unification, which differs from the first in that it re- 

 sults from the actual, detailed progress of the special sciences, 

 and has behind it some already achieved triumphs in the re- 

 duction to unity, and to quantitative formulation, of facts 

 seemingly hopelessly irreducible and incommensurable. Yet 

 in our own time this tendency has, by its very successes, chal- 

 lenged criticism and vigorous dissent, in so far as it proclaims 

 the reasonableness of the hope of an eventual complete re^ 

 duction of the sciences to unity. The doctrine known as 

 vitalism, which has had a sudden and surprising revival 

 among many philosophically minded biologists within the past 

 decade, is primarily and essentially, in its contemporary forms, 

 a protest against the dogma of the unity of science. Though 

 there seems to be a good deal of variation in the use of the 

 term vitalism, the common and fundamental contention of all 

 the newer vitalists is that the laws of biology can never be 

 completely "reduced" to any more general laws holding good 

 equally in the action of non-living and living matter. Their 

 main doctrine, in short, affirms what the Germans call the 

 Eigengesetzlichkeit, the independence or autonomy, of or- 

 ganic phenomena, in relation to inorganic. In taking this atti- 

 tude, the vitalistic biologists are in harmony with another 

 tendency of much more general import than vitalism a 



