Mechanistic Biology 245 



acquainted with every motion in it, and to synthesise it again into 

 a comprehended whole. Exactly similar is the attitude we must 

 adopt to living matter. Neither method, it may well be said, will 

 give us a full understanding of the typewriter, but the second method 

 is the scientific method and as such the biological method. All 

 through the writings of the neo-vitalists one finds an inability to 

 be content with the mechanistic answers to the questions of how 

 the processes in living animals go on. Although it is never 

 explicitly stated, one has a strong suspicion that they want really 

 to ask why living beings should exist and should act as they do. 

 Clearly the scientific method can tell us nothing about that. They 

 are what they are because the properties of force and matter are 

 what they are, and ^t that point scientific thought has to hand the 

 problem over to philosophical and religious thought. 



But even when the arguments of the modern vitalists have been 

 examined and the conclusion has been reached that they are not 

 sufficient to sustain the weight placed on them, there are still other 

 objections to neo-vitalism which cannot be forgotten. The first 

 and greatest of these is the pragmatic one that vitalism has been if 

 anything a hindrance to research. Of all the hypotheses put for- 

 ward to account for the phenomena of life, vitalism in all its forms 

 has been ever the least stimulating. Whereas the mechanistic 

 hypothesis does at least provide definite theories which can be 

 proved, or disproved vitalism simply fills up the gaps in mechanistic 

 descriptions after the fashion of Columbus's map-maker, " Where 

 Unknown, there place Terrors." 



But an even more significant fact in the history of vitalism is 

 one which has been referred to above — namely, its constant retire- 

 ment from one position to another. It is impossible to feel great 

 confidence in a negative theory which has always rested its main 

 support on the weak points of its opponent. Lawrence Henderson, 

 indeed, believes that in limiting the operation of vitalism to 

 entelechies the vitalists have destroyed the distinctiveness of their 

 own case, for, as he shows in his book " The Fitness of the Environ- 

 ment," we have to postulate an entelechy of a sort in the inorganic 

 world to account for the fact that the external world is as adapted 

 to the animal as the animal to it. In this way there is again no 

 difference between organic and inorganic processes. " Vitalism," 

 he says, " disappears in universal teleology. Science has put the 

 old teleology to death, and Its disembodied spirit, freed from vitalism 



