No. 559] DOCTRINES HELD AS VITALISM 387 



thinker, the grounds he gives for vitalism tending merely 

 to show that nature can not he explained mechanically, 

 while the conclusion he draws is that there is a distinc- 

 tion between the living and the non-living; though he may 

 also hold that the non-living can not be explained me- 

 chanically. In this way it is evident that no difference 

 in principle is made between the living and non-living. 1 



5. To clear up this matter one may propose to himself 

 the following: 



Test Question.— Suppose it were demonstrated that 

 mechanical formulation 5 is not adequate for living things, 

 would that establish vitalism, without a correlative dem- 

 onstration that it is adequate for non-1 ir in (j tlwips? 



If one answers this question affirmatively, his vitalism 

 is of the class B, not requiring any difference in prin- 

 ciple between the living and the non-living. 



6. My own "personal meaning" for vitalism had been 

 that set forth under A; I had supposed it an irreducible 

 minimum for a vitalistic doctrine that it should make a 

 deep-lying distinction of some sort between the science 

 of the living and that of the non-living; but the argu- 

 ments for vitalism adduced by various authors show that 

 not all share this idea. It appears clear that the doctrine 

 B, that mechanism is not adequate to nature in general, 

 has no distinctive interest for the biologist; he shares his 

 interest in such a question on an equal footing, theoret- 

 ical and practical, with the physicist. Many persons who 

 do not call themselves vitalists hold that the mechanical 

 formulation of nature (as simply masses moving in space 

 and time, and the laws of such movements, with nothing 



