July 21, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



11 



opinion. This can hardly make for lucid and 

 fruitful discussion. 



The prevalent confusion is illustrated once 

 more in the " test of vitalism " proposed by 

 another correspondent of Science." We are 

 asked to suppose an organism " instantane- 

 ously resolved into its constituent particles," 

 and then put together again out of the same 

 particles, each being impressed " with motions 

 the same in direction and amount which they 

 possessed at the instan*'- of dissolution." 

 Then, " if the reassembled body goes on as an 

 organism as before, it will be proof that life 

 is but the operation of . . . the ordinary 

 mechanical and chemical forces." It surely 

 would prove nothing of the sort. The possi- 

 bility of the artificial production of life by 

 chemical synthesis would logically be per- 

 fectly consistent with any of the several kinds 

 of vitalism (including the doctrine of Lebens- 

 autonomie, which is what the writer quoted 

 seems really to mean by vitalism), even with 

 Driesch's notion of entelechy. There is in 

 the nature of the imaginary experiment noth- 

 ing indicated which excludes the hypothesis 

 that an entelechy was originally in charge of 

 the organism in question, that it, so to say, 

 hovered hopefully about the scene during the 

 process of decomposition, and promptly took 

 charge of che proceedings again as soon as the 

 original complex was recomposed. The pro- 

 posed test, moreover, according to the pro- 

 ponent of it, permits '' no sharp line of dis- 

 tinction " between one class of vitalists and 

 the non-vitalists. It is not a wholly helpful 

 way of defining non-vitalism to make it mean 

 " one kind of vitalism." 



2. The desirability of some effort to define 

 and discriminate the " first " sense of vitalism 

 — ^the doctrine of organic autonomy — is indi- 

 cated by the fact that, both in the address 

 cited and in his recent discussion, Professor 

 Jennings seems to fail to distinguish that 

 doctrine from something quite different and 

 much less significant. This is shown in the 

 passage already quoted about the " newness " 

 of the methods of action characteristic, e. g., 

 of clocks ; here the sense in which the unique- 



" Science, June 2, 1911, p. 852. 



ness of vital phenomena is asserted by many 

 vitalists is not difl^erentiated from the sense in 

 which every phenomenon under heaven may 

 be called unique. The same misapprehension 

 is shown in the concluding sentence of his 

 letter, in which Professor Jennings (evidently 

 referring to my " first " sense of vitalism) 

 speaks of " the (for the working investigator) 

 relatively inconsequential question as to 

 whether anything happens in living things 

 that doesn't happen in those not alive." This 

 is undeniably a redundant question to raise, 

 not only for working investigators, but even 

 for otiose philosophers; but it is not a 

 question which any one, so far as I know, has 

 ever before proposed to raise. It certainly is 

 not synonymous with the real question con- 

 cerning the present possibility or intrinsic 

 conceivability of the explanation of organic 

 phenomena by the laws which describe the 

 motion of inorganic particles — i. e., of por- 

 tions of matter whether in or out of those 

 complexes called living bodies — which is the 

 question over which " vitalists " and " mech- 

 anists " have been wont to debate. Clock- 

 phenomena (to use Professor Jennings's illus- 

 tration), however "new," are not autonomous 

 with respect to the laws of physics; on the 

 contrary, if you know the laws of physics (as 

 a study of other inorganic bodies than clocks 

 might reveal them to you) and know also the 

 number, size, arrangement and composition of 

 the pieces in a given clock (with due allow- 

 ance for external forces), you can predict 

 pretty well how the clock will behave. What 

 the partisans cf the doctrine of organic au- 

 tonomy deny is that you conceivably ever can, 

 from a study of the laws of motion of inor- 

 ganic particles, arrive at a law from which 

 you can predict how any living body will 

 behave, even if you hnow the number, size, 

 arrangement and composition of the particles 

 composing that tody. This question, about 

 the ultimate relation of the laws of biology- 

 to those of the sciences of the inorganic, may 

 not be susceptible of a demonstrative answer; 

 but it is at any rate quite distinct from the 

 banalities to which Professor Jennings refers. 

 The question is one to which every reflective 



