LIFE 



is true that MuUer retained to the last (1858) the 

 current idea of a vital force, as the supreme regulator of 

 all the vital activities. However, he did not regard it as 

 a metaphysical principle (like Haller, Kant, and their 

 followers), but as a natural force, subject, like all others, 

 to fixed chemical and physical laws, and subordinate to 

 the whole. In his comprehensive study of every single 

 vital function — the organs of sense and the nervous 

 system, metabolism and the action of the heart, speech 

 and reproduction — Mtiller endeavored above all to 

 establish, by close observation of the facts and careful 

 experiments, the regularity of the phenomena, and to 

 explain their development by a comparison of the higher 

 and lower forms. Hence Johannes Miiller is wrongly 

 described — as he has been of late — as a vitalist; he was 

 rather the first physiologist to provide a physical 

 foundation for the current metaphysical vitalism. He 

 really gives an indirect proof of the reverse theory, as 

 E. Dubois-Reymond rightly observed in his brilliant 

 memorial speech. In the same way Schleiden (1843) cut 

 the ground from under vitalism in botany. By his cell- 

 theory (1838) he showed the unity of the multicellular 

 organism to be the resultant of the functions of all the 

 cells which compose it. 



The physical explanation of the vital processes and 

 the rejection of Palavitalism were general in the last 

 third of the nineteenth century. This was due most 

 of all to the great advance in experimental physiology, 

 which Carl Ludwig and Felix Bernard led as regards 

 the animal body, and Julius Sachs and Wilhelm Preyer 

 for the plant. "While these and other physiologists 

 used the remarkable results of modem physics and 

 chemistry in the experimental study of the vital func- 

 tions, and sought to determine their complicated course 

 in terms of mass and weight and formulate their dis- 

 coveries as mathematically as possible, they brought a 

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