420 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 875 



entiation is little more than a superficial 

 phenomenon; the whole meaning, bearing 

 and philosophy of evolution has been dis- 

 cussed by Bergson, on a plane to which 

 neither Darwin nor Spencer ever attained ; 

 and the hypothesis of a vital principle, or 

 vital element, that had lain in the back- 

 ground for near a hundred years, has come 

 into men's mouths as a very real and 

 urgent question, the greatest question for 

 the biologist of all. 



In all ages the mystery of organic form, 

 the mystery of growth and reproduction, 

 the mystery of thought and consciousness, 

 the whole mystery of the complex phenom- 

 ena of life, have seemed to the vast ma- 

 jority of men to call for description and 

 explanation in terms alien to the language 

 which we apply to inanimate things; 

 though at all times there have been a 

 few who sought, with the materialism of 

 Democritus, Lucretius or Giordano Bruno, 

 to attribute most, or even aU, of these phe- 

 nomena to the category of physical causa- 

 tion. 



For the first scientific exposition of vital- 

 ism, we must go back to Aristotle, and to his 

 doctrine of the three parts of the tripartite 

 soul: according to which doctrine, in Mil- 

 ton's language, created things "bygrandual 

 change sublimed, To vital spirits aspire, to 

 animal, To intellectual!" The first and 

 lowest of these three, the '^^xv v dpeTTTiKt], 

 by whose agency nutrition is effected, is rj 

 irpdnr) '<^v)(ri, the inseparable concomitant 

 of life itself. It is inherent in the plant 

 as well as in the animal and in the Lin- 

 nean aphorism, Vegetahilia crescunt et 

 vivunt, its existence is admitted in a word. 

 Under other aspects, it is all but identical 

 with the '^v'^rj av^7)TLKrj and yevrjTiK'^ the 

 soul of growth and of reproduction: and 

 in this composite sense it is no other than 

 Drieseh's "Entelechy," the hypothetic 

 natural agency that presides over the form 



and formation of the body. Just as 

 Drieseh's psychoid or psychoids, which are 

 the basis of instinctive phenomena, of sen- 

 sation, instinct, thought, reason, and aU 

 that directs that body which entelechy has 

 formed, are no other than the alaOrjTiKr), 

 whereby animalia vivxmt et sentiunt, and 

 the BiavoTjTiKT] to which Aristotle ascribes 

 the reasoning faculty of man. Save only 

 that Driesch like Darwin, would deny the 

 restriction of vov?, or reasoning, to man 

 alone, and would extend it to animals, it is 

 clear, and Driesch himself admits,^ that he 

 accepts both the vitalism and the analysis 

 of vitalism laid down by Aristotle. 



The 7rvev/j.a of G-alen, the vis plastica, 

 the vis vitce formatrix, of the older physi- 

 ologist, the Bildungstrieb of Blumenbaeh, 

 the Lebenskraft of Paracelsus, Stahl and 

 Treviranus, "shaping the physical forces 

 of the body to its own ends," "dreaming 

 dimly in the grain of the promise of the 

 full corn in the ear,"^ these and many 

 more, like Drieseh's "entelechy" of to-day, 

 are all conceptions under which successive 

 generations strive to depict the something 

 that separates the earthy from the living, 

 the living from the dead. And John 

 Hunter described his conception of it in 

 words not very differentt from Drieseh's, 

 when he said that his principle, or agent, 

 was independent of organization, which 

 yet it animates, sustains and repairs; it 

 was the same as Johannes Miiller's concep- 

 tion of an innate "unconscious idea." 



Even in the middle ages, long before 



- ' ' Science and Philosophy of the Organism ' ' 

 (Gifford Lectures), II., p. 83, 1908. 



^ at. Jenkinson (Art. "Vitalism," in Sihiert 

 Journal, April, 1911), who has given me the fol- 

 lowing quotation: "Das Weizenkorn hat allerdinga 

 Bewusstsein dessen was in ihm ist und aus ihm 

 werden kann, und traiimt wirklich davon. Sein 

 Bewusstsein und seine Traume mogen dunkel 

 genung sein ' ' ; Treviranus, ' ' Erscheinungen und 

 Gesetze des organisehen Lebens, " 1831. 



