Apeil 21, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



613 



iaent in certain embryos — you may, lie eon- 

 tends, get an identical resultant form (except 

 ■with respect to size). About the experimental 

 facts tbere can be no question; tbough there 

 appears to me to be a fairly evident flaw, of a 

 purely logical sort, in the inference which 

 Driesch draws from them. I do not, how- 

 ever, wish here to discuss the truth of vitalism, 

 but merely to elucidate its import. But even 

 for the latter purpose it is important to note 

 that Driesch's vitalism by no means main- 

 tains that the specific properties or activities 

 of organisms are not functions of any ante- 

 cedent material or physico-chemical configura- 

 tion. Whales do not develop from sea- 

 urchin's eggs, nor does the unfertilized egg 

 develop at all. Always you must first have 

 given a definite mechanism, at the beginning 

 of any morphogenetic or other vital process; 

 and for different products you must have dif- 

 ferent original mechanisms. All that Driesch 

 maintains is that such a process once started 

 continues towards its normal consummation 

 even if, after the start, some of the usual 

 machinery instrumental to that consumma- 

 tion is lost and the rest has to redistribute 

 and redifferentiate itself in order to keep 

 things moving in the customary manner. In 

 short, even the processes in which Driesch 

 finds the independent variability of the phys- 

 ical mechanism of a living body and its physi- 

 ological processes exemplified, still, even for 

 him, have perfectly definite, perceptible and 

 experimentally ascertainable constant ante- 

 cedents, if you go back to an early enough 

 stage in the given sequence of processes. 



3. The fundamental questions concerning 

 vitalism are the first two questions : Can some 

 biological phenomena be shown to be, in the 

 sense defined, autonomous? and can some of 

 them even be shown not to be functions of any 

 fixed configuration of material parts existing 

 in the organism or cell at the moments at 

 which the phenomena take place? Now, one 

 might conceivably answer one or both of these 

 questions in the affirmative, and stop there. 

 Such would be the procedure of a convinced 

 vitalist who had caught the spirit of scientific 

 positivism. But most vitalists, undoubtedly. 



are not of a positivistic temper, and they have 

 accordingly often gone on to account for the 

 asserted peculiarity or uniqueness of organic 

 processes by hypostatizing special forces or 

 agents as causes of these peculiar modes of 

 action. Such hypostases have been made in 

 three different fashions by three recent schools 

 of biological philosophers, of which the first 

 would apparently refuse to be called vitalistic. 

 The qualitative Energetiker (e. g., Ostwald, 

 Rignano) in so far as they set up as a real 

 entity a specific vital or neural form of energy, 

 having properties and modes of action not 

 characteristic of energy in any other of its 

 transformations, seem to imply both the au- 

 tonomy of organic phenomena and the need 

 of postulating a special dynamic background 

 for these phenomena. The psycho-vitalists 

 (who are indeed biological animists), such as 

 Pauly, France, Strecker, find the cause of 

 the unique modes of physical behavior dis- 

 tinctive of organisms in a seelisches Innen- 

 lehen, a rudimentary form of consciousness 

 and of purposive action, ascribed to even the 

 simplest living things. And Driesch and 

 Eeinke and their followers, in order to explain 

 how organisms can, as these biologists believe, 

 piirsue their typical ends even after a con- 

 siderable modification or partial destruction 

 of their usual machinery, postulate " ente- 

 lechies " or " dominants " having the power, 

 so to say, to take command even of a disabled 

 organic ship and steer it (under certain con- 

 ditions) to its destined port. 



Now, it is doubtless in these vitalistic hy- 

 postases that Professor Eitter finds the trait 

 which makes vitalism resemble savage ani- 

 mism. I wish, therefore, to insist upon two 

 considerations in this connection. In the first 

 place, as I have tried to show, the question 

 whether it is worth while to set up such hy- 

 postases, not open to direct observation, is 

 wholly subsidiary to questions 1 and 2, which 

 have to do with potentially ascertainable facts 

 concerning the laws of organic processes. If 

 the verdict upon either of those questions goes 

 in favor of the vitalist's contention, the main 

 issue is settled. Whether, vitalism being as- 

 sumed, it would be worth while to postulate 



