764 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXX. No. 778 



The teleological factors merely give direction 

 and correlation and tempo to transfers of 

 energy. 



All this midsummer-night's dream land of 

 biology, peopled with strange, elflike creatures, 

 is, assuredly, the negligible part of contem- 

 porary vitalism. It is not in these premature 

 and over-ingenious eiiorts of the constructive 

 imagination that the new tendency has any- 

 thing of present value to contribute to science 

 or philosophy. But in the common and funda- 

 mental negative creed of all vitalists — their 

 denial of the possibility of " reducing " all 

 laws of organic action to consequences of the 

 laws of mechanical action — there lies a signifi- 

 cant and debatable issue. Yet even this funda- 

 mental issue is often ill formulated. One 

 result of the whole discussion thus far has 

 been to involve in a good deal of obscurity 

 and confusion the meaning of the primary 

 notions concerned — the notions of mechanism 

 and vitalism. It has become difficult, in the 

 absence of clear and generally accepted defini- 

 tions, to make sure who should be called vital- 

 ists and who should not. Thus the writer of 

 a recent historical sketch (Braunig) classifies 

 Nageli, Eimer and Haaeke as vitalists in spite 

 of themselves. Driesch insists that Strecker 

 is a real, though misguided, vitalist, while 

 Strecker prefers to regard his doctrine as a 

 "third standpoint," essentially different from 

 both vitalism and mechanism. Certain of the 

 school of Energetiker who recognize a specific 

 vital form of energy call themselves vitalists, 

 others appear to regard themselves as cham- 

 pions of mechanism; Driesch regards the 

 latter classification as correct, because even 

 " vital energy " is a quantitative conception. 

 Le Dantec affirms, while Driesch denies, the 

 chemical distinctiveness of living matter; but 

 Le Dantec passes for an extreme opponent of 

 vitalism. Through their diverse affiliations 

 with current theories on cognate problems, the 

 two parties exhibit almost all possible varieties 

 of doctrinal hybrids. Le Dantec appears to 

 be a mechanistic neo-Lamarckian ; Pauly, a 

 vitalistic neo-Lamarckian; Wolff, a vitalistic 

 anti-Lamarckian. The result of all this con- 

 fusion has been a great deal of arguing at 



cross-purposes, of which both sides have been 

 guilty. I cite only one illustration. Zur 

 Strassen, in a "refutation" of Driesch' con- 

 tends that before any such phenomenon as 

 restitution can serve as a pertinent argument 

 for vitalism, each instance of it must be shown 

 " to have no utility for the organism in which 

 it occurs, and therefore to be a power that can 

 not have been produced through natural se- 

 lection." For causation through selection is 

 mechanical causation. In so arguing, Zur 

 Strassen is jumbling together two distinct 

 senses of " mechanical." We speak, indeed, of 

 the Darwinian explanation of the adaptive 

 characters of organisms as a mechanistic ex- 

 planation. But we mean thereby only that it 

 is not teleological, that it represents the given 

 effects as resulting from the pressure of ex- 

 ternal circumstances, through accidental con- 

 formity to which certain variations get se- 

 lected. We do not mean that Darwinism 

 traces the laws of species-forming back to the 

 laws of molecular mechanics. Yet it is only in 

 the latter sense that " mechanism " need be 

 antithetic to vitalism. Darwinism takes the 

 incipient useful variation for granted. But 

 the argument of the vitalist is, or may be, 

 drawn solely from the nature of the variation, 

 not from the fact of its selection and survival 

 as a character of a species. Its survival may 

 be due to its usefulness; but it may itself, 

 from the outset, constitute a mode of behavior 

 of matter which is not reducible to mechanical 

 law nor explicable as the result solely of the 

 spatial ordering of material particles. It is 

 for this latter conclusion that Driesch con- 

 tends. Zur Strassen's objection to the argu- 

 ment from restitutions is, therefore, quite be- 

 side the mark. 



Since little that is profitable can be said 

 upon the subject until these confusions are 

 cleared up, it is worth while to attempt to 

 distinguish the possible meanings of the de- 

 nial that vital phenomena can be " mechan- 

 istically " explained. The denial may refer 

 primarily to the way in which the matter in 

 the organism behaves, while, in a given living 

 individual, a given physiological process is 



' Roux's Archiv, 1908, p. 158. 



