SHOBTEK AETICLES AND DISCUSSION 



ON PRACTICAL VITALISM 



In a series of critical and polemical essays, published during 

 the past few years in American journals by diverse authors, par- 

 ticularly by Jennings, the problem of vitalism has been dis- 

 cussed in a manner that may seem exhaustive. 



There would appear to be no possibility of adducing new ar- 

 guments in the matter. If in spite of this a new presentation 

 is here attempted, it is because the author holds a standpoint 

 entirely divergent from what has been thus far set forth in the 



If it is true that the argumentation of the promoter and 

 leader of the new scientific vitalism — Driesch — becomes at times 

 somewhat metaphysical, it appears to me also that the criticism, 

 as made by Jennings, tends at times to become dialectical and 

 sophistical. 



I can not otherwise characterize the tendency to efface any 

 specific difference between the living and the non-living. By 

 isolating at random a feature of the living and comparing it 

 with an inorganic model one can indeed seem to show the iden- 

 tity of the two. But in this procedure we recognize the typical 

 method of the ancient sophists. I can find nothing of interest, 

 for example, in such an argumentation as the one cited below 

 from Jennings. 1 



In a rejoinder to Lovejoy, who insists "that the same phenom- 

 ena occur in a given organism in spite of profound modifica- 

 tions of the composition and configuration of the parts" Jen- 

 nings objects that we have here 



a proposition that holds for things in general. An iron body of a certain 

 form moves toward the earth. We may change the form in most varied 

 ways . . . change the material, substitute lead, brass, stone . . . ; it still 

 moves toward the earth. 2 



Nothing is easier than to prove that black and white, plant 

 and animal, man and monkey, are "fundamentally the same." 



1 A typical one for the antivitalistic criticism. 



2 American Naturalist, 1913, p. 395. 



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