THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



monistic sense, if we understand by it the sum of the 

 forms of energy which are especially distinctive of the 

 organism, particularly metabolism and heredity. In 

 this we pass no opinion on their nature, and do not say 

 that they are specifically different from the forces of 

 inorganic nature. We might call this monistic concep- 

 tion "physical vitalism." However, the usual meta- 

 physical vitalism affirms in a thoroughly duaUstic sense 

 that the vital f orceds a teleological and super-mechanical 

 principle, is essentially different from the ordinary 

 forces of nature, and of a transcendental character. 

 The special form in which this theory of a supernatural 

 vital force has been presented for the last twenty years 

 is often called Neo vitalism; we might call the older 

 form, by contrast, Palavitalism. 



The older idea of the vital force as a special energy 

 could very well be accepted in the first third of the nine- 

 teenth century, and in the eighteenth, because the 

 physiology of the time was destitute of the most im- 

 portant aids to the founding of a mechanical theory. 

 There was then no such thing as the cell-theory or as 

 physiological chemistry ; ontogeny and paleontology were 

 still in their cradles. Lamarck's theory of descent (1809) 

 had been done to death, like his fundamental principle: 

 "Life is only an elaborate physical phenomenon." 

 Hence we can easily understand how physiologists 

 acquiesced in the vitalist hypothesis up to 1833, and 

 supposed the wonders of life to be enigmatic phenomena 

 that escaped physical explanation. 



But the position of Palavitalism changed in the second 

 third of the nineteenth century. In 1833 appeared 

 Johannes Muller's classical Manual of Human Physiology, 

 in which the great biologist not only made a comparative 

 study of the vital phenomena in man and the animals, 

 but sought to provide a sound basis for it in all its 

 sections by his own observations and experiments. It 



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