LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ROBERT WHYTT, M.D. 107 



From the year 1744 to 1751, Whytt had been engaged in the preparation of 

 a work " On the Vital and other Involuntar}^ Motions of Animals." In the latter 

 year it was published. This is the work which fixed the attention of physiolo- 

 gists throughout Europe on its author. It was the misapprehension of certain 

 expressions used by him in this work, which led to the current belief, not yet 

 wholly obsolete, that his views largely corresponded with those of the followers of 

 Stahl. Even Haller inadvertently named him a semianimist, as if he had 

 been the advocate of a part of the Sthalian doctrines. Nothing can be more 

 erroneous. Whytt held nothing in common with the peculiar ideas of Stahl. 

 A very few observations will suffice to prove how little there was of coincidence 

 between his mode of thinking and that of Stahl. 



The essential feature in the doctrines of Stahl is, that a rational, thinking, 

 provident, conscious principle, originates and directs all the phenomena of living 

 nature. It was a systematised extension of views which had never ceased to 

 prevail from the earliest times. The ancients could discover no active agency in 

 mere matter. Their poets peopled every moving scene with intelligent beings, 

 Dryads, Hamadryads, Nymphs, and Demigods, to account for the visible effects. 

 And when philosophers arose, they borrowed their source of force from man's 

 own intelligence, and ascribed natural phenomena, inorganic and organic, to a 

 soul ; whence arose their soul of the world, their vegetative soul, their animal soul. 

 The idea of the latter, in particular, was never lost sight of throughout the entire 

 range of ancient physiology. The belief in the agency of the soul, as productive of 

 the phenomena of animal life, is continued through the mystifications of the scho- 

 lastic ages, through the paradoxes of Paracelsus, through the profundities of 

 Des Cartes, till it begins to be systematised in the vagaries of Van Helmont and 

 Stahl. The activity relied on is an archeus, a psyche, an anima, a soul, a mind ; 

 that is, an agency framed on the conviction of the sufficiency of man's intelligence 

 to determine new combinations of matter for the production of effects which he 

 has premeditated. 



There is still room in modern science for such a psyche. When the modern 

 inquirer, not content with mere law, seeks the causes of organic phenomena, he 

 cannot dispense with such an active force. As human intelligence is required to 

 combine and regulate the natural forces which man avails himself of to produce 

 his own works upon the earth, so with all the new found activity of matter 

 derived from the interchanges of such forces as light, heat, aggregation, affinity, 

 electricitj^ polarity, gravitation, a psyche is indispensable to direct the order and 

 course of these forces in the development and working of organic bodies. Deduct 

 the effects of all these natural forces in the development and working of organic 

 bodies, and the residual force found to be necessary constitutes the psyche — a 

 force just as essential in a " protococcus" as in the human frame. If it be other- 

 wise sought for, it is nowhere else to be met with, except in the potentialities 



vol. xxiii. part I. 2 a 



