ON THE MORPHOLOGICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 217 



which is that her phenomena have, or have at some time 

 had, a definite place and position in space. Here, then, 

 the phenomena of lower and higher life and the new 

 creations of human culture, art and industry, open out a 

 great department of reality which is accessible to external 

 observation and study. Without committing ourselves 

 to any theory on the subject, we have in this department 

 to deal with the phenomena of apparent or real design 

 and purpose. How has the century dealt with these 

 phenomena ? The answer to this question, the history 

 of nineteenth century thought as directed towards the 

 phenomena of life and of mind as natural phenomena, 

 will be dealt with in two further chapters, which will 

 respectively deal with the vitalistic 1 and the psycho- 



1 It would have been in some 

 respects preferable to use the 

 word "biological" instead of vital- 

 istic. In fact, in the original draft 

 of this passage I used the former 

 term. The reasons which made me 

 alter it are the following : The 

 term biology was first used in 1801 

 by Lamarck in his ' Hydroge"ologie.' 

 " About the same time it occurred 

 to Treviranus that all those sciences 

 which deal with living matter are 

 essentially and fundamentally one, 

 and ought to be treated as a whole ; 

 and in the year 1802 he published 

 the first volume of what he also 

 called ' Biologic.' Treviranus's great 

 merit lies in this, that he worked 

 out his idea, and wrote the very 

 remarkable book to which I refer. 

 It consists of six volumes, and oc- 

 cupied its author for twenty years 

 from 1802 to 1822. That is the 

 origin of the term ' biology ' ; and 

 that is how it has come about that 

 all clear thinkers and lovers of con- 

 sistent nomenclature have substi- 

 tuted for the old confusing name of 



' natural history,' which has con- 

 veyed so many meanings, the term 

 ' biology,' which denotes the whole 

 of the sciences which deal with 

 living things, whether they be ani- 

 mals or whether they be plants." 

 This extract from Huxley's " Lecture 

 on the Study of Biology " (South 

 Kensington, Dec. 1876, reprinted 

 in ' American Addresses,' &c., 1886, 

 p. 129, &c.), has induced me to 

 adopt the term " vitalistic " to 

 denote those doctrines and chapters 

 in biology which deal specially with 

 the principle and phenomena of 

 life. A very large portion of bi- 

 ology deals with such phenomena 

 of living things as can be studied 

 without any reference to a doctrine 

 or theory of life in particular, they 

 being either mere facts of distribu- 

 tion or that very large and increasing 

 class of biological processes which 

 admit of purely mechanical, physi- 

 cal, or chemical description and 

 explanation. The very fact, how- 

 ever, that the question whether the 

 principle of life is purely mechanical 



