706 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION I. 



but that from the nature of things they must for ever remain so. This attitude 

 implies that it is a hopeless business for the physiologist to try by the use of more 

 appropriate methods to remove existing discrepancies between living and non- 

 living phenomena, and this is accentuated by the use of a peculiar nomenclature 

 which, in attributing certain phenomena to vital directive forces, leaves them 

 cloaked with a barren and, from the investigator's point of view, a forbidding 

 qualification. 



It is of course possible in describing phenomena to employ a new and special 

 terminology, but since many aspects of the phenomena of living processes can be 

 described in accordance with physical and chemical conceptions, the creation of a 

 vitalistic nomenclature duplicates our terminology. A double terminology is 

 always embarrassing, but it becomes obstructive when it is of such diversity that 

 description in the one can never under any circumstances bear any scientific 

 relation to that in the other. In this connection it is somewhat significant that 

 the one kind, namely vitalistic, is abandoned as soon as the observed phenomena 

 to which it referred have been found to be capable of expression in terms of the 

 other. The reason for this abandonment raises questions of principle, which 

 appear to me to render it impossible for a scientific physiologist to seriously employ 

 vitalistic nomenclature in describing physiological phenomena. Science is not the 

 mere catalogue of a number of observed phenomena ; such a miscellaneous en- 

 cyclopaedia may constitute what many people would describe as knowledge ; but 

 science is more than this. It is the intellectual arrangement of recognised pheno- 

 mena in a certain orderly an-ay, and the recognition of any phenomenon is only 

 the first step towards the achievement of this end. The potent element in science 

 is an intellectual one essentially connected with mental grouping along one 

 particular line, that which tends to satisfy our craving for causative explanation. 

 Hence it involves the intellectual recognition of widespread characteristics, so 

 general in their distribution that they are termed fundamental. The most funda- 

 mental of such characteristics are those which possess the widest intellectual 

 sphere, and in natural science these are the broad conceptions of matter and motion 

 which form the essential basis of both chemistry and physics. If this grouping is, 

 in regard to any phenomenon, at present impracticable, then this subject matter 

 cannot be justly regarded as forming a part of natural science, though it might be 

 considered as natural knowledge, and in so far as this is the case in physiology it 

 appears to me to be a confession of present scientific ignorance. If, however, it is 

 boldly asserted that the nature of any phenomenon is such that it can never by 

 any possibility be brought into accord with the broad conceptions which I have 

 indicated, then I fail to understand how it can claim to bear any relation to 

 natural science, since, ex hypothesi, it can never take its proper place in the 

 causative chain which man forges as a limited but intelligible explanation of the 

 world in which he lives. Only in so far as physiological phenomena are capable 

 of this particular intellectual treatment and take part in this intellectual con- 

 struction can we hope to obtain, however dimly, a knowledge of permanent 

 backgrounds among the shifting scenes of the living stage, and thus, by gradually 

 introducing order amidst seeming confusion, claim_ that gift of prevision which has 

 long been enjoyed by other branches of natural science. 



Neo-vitalism, like its parent vitalism, is fostered by the imperfect and prejudiced 

 view which man is prone to take in regard to his own material existence. This 

 existence is, for him, the most momentous of all problems, and it is therefore not 

 surprising that he should assume that in physiology, pathology, and, to a lesser 

 degree, in biology, events are dealt with of a peculiarly mystic character, since 

 many of these events form the basis of his sensory experience and occur in a 

 material which he regards with a special proprietary interest. He is reluctant to 

 believe that those phenomena which constitute the material part of his ejdstence 

 can be intellectually regarded as processes of a physico-chemical type, difi'erLng 

 onlv in complexity from those exhibited in the non-living world, and impelled by 

 this reluctance he fabricates for them, out of his own conceit, a special and 

 exclusive realm. The logical pressure of physical and chemical conceptions forbids 

 the postulation, by either the public or the neo-vitalist, of such an inoongruous 



