ON THE VITALISTIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



387 



After the age of Bichat, and largely through his 

 influence, i.e., through the cultivation of anatomical 

 researches, the pendulum swung in the direction of 

 proving more and more the parallelism of organic and 

 inorganic processes. It reached its maximum swing 

 in that direction about the second third of the 

 century. Since then it appears to have again returned 

 in the opposite direction. Let us follow this movement 

 somewhat more closely, and see how the stronghold in 

 which the innermost secret of life is intrenched has 

 been attacked from all sides by all the processes and 

 methods of the mechanical, physical, and chemical 

 sciences, and how it has persistently refused to sur- 

 render. 1 There was a time when the leading repre- 



duquel les planetes suivent dans 

 1'espace des courbes savantes sans 

 heurter les astres qui fournissent 

 <Tautres carrieres, sans troubler 

 1'harmonie re"glee par le diviii 

 gdometre." Another property which 

 was once thought peculiar to and 

 characteristic of living organisms, 

 that of regeneration after mutila- 

 tion, of "redintegration," is now 

 known to exist also in lifeless struc- 

 tures: " M. Pasteur a siguale" des f aits 

 de cicatrisation, de redintegration 

 cristalline, qui mdritent toute notre 

 attention. . . . Ces faits . . . se 

 rapprochent completement de ceux 

 que presentent les etres vivants 

 lorsqu'on leur fait une plaie plus 

 ou moins prof onde" (ibid., p. 173). 

 1 Bischoff, in his Eloge of Liebig, 

 who remained all his life a vitalist, 

 says (p. 57) : "We must, indeed, as 

 in the exact sciences, guard against 

 letting a mere word step in as an 

 explanation, wherever our insight 

 into the conditioning causes has 

 been insufficient, as was indeed re- 

 peatedly done formerly, when a 

 word was considered to be a suffi- 



cient reason. We must consider it 

 to be the continual duty of organic 

 science to wage, as it were, a con- 

 stant war against this organic force, 

 and to dispute its territory where- 

 soever possible. If, for example, a 

 talent like his succeeds in deducing 

 many morphological traits of the 

 higher animal organisms from the 

 mechanical conditions of growth in 

 the embryo, &c., we shall grate- 

 fully accept the proof ; but we 

 must all the while not forget to 

 ask the further question, by whom 

 these mechanical conditions have 

 been brought together. If it be 

 further true that the cells of the 

 embryo perform the most extra- 

 ordinary wanderings, in order to 

 arrange themselves into the various 

 tissues and organs of the animal 

 body, we shall welcome this as a 

 very interesting and remarkable 

 phenomenon in the obscure region 

 of development ; but we have re- 

 ceived no light on the question who 

 acts as guide to the wandering cells. 

 Similarly, if chemistry should some 

 day succeed in forming albumen ar- 



