8 
Transactions Texas Academy of Science. 
tions; and that it was, in consequence, discarded by most biologists of 
the second part of last century. 
Lotze, after carefully examining and refuting every argument that 
had been advanced in support of a special principle of life believed to 
be superadded to the agencies operative in physical nature, arrived at the 
conclusion that there exists no unitary vital force actuating and direct- 
ing vital processes in fulfillment of a predetermined organic plan; that 
it is, on the contrary, a purely mechanical order of events in life, as 
everywhere else, which gives rise to the form and concatenation of all 
complex results in nature; and that these are entirely dependent on the 
co-operating efficiencies of the elements that compose all kinds of bodies. 
He maintained therewith that the efficiencies belonging to the elements 
are themselves fully competent to build up organic structures and to 
manifest the phenomena of vitality without the aid of any foreign 
agency. For, living beings — so he argued — arise out of the common 
store of nature and revert into the same. And as life derives all its 
means of existence from this common store, and develops entirely out 
of the substances yielded by it, it has in consequence to submit entirely 
to the general laws governing all natural phenomena alike. Organic 
bodies, being composed of the same .elements that compose other bodies, 
are therefore like other bodies the outcome of the peculiar mode of com- 
position and actuation of their sundry constituent elements. They form 
altogether part of the general mechanism of nature. Such were Lotze’s 
antivitalistic views. 
Lotze himself was no believer in inert material elements, but having 
disproved the existence of a special vital force, the way seemed now open 
to others for the scientific application of atomic mechanics to all vital 
phenomena. This task was, in fact, henceforth acknowledged by most 
leading biologists to be the true and final aim of their science. And 
when Bobert Julius Mayer propounded the epoch-making doctrine of the 
indestructibility of force or motion, the all-comprising doctrine, namely, 
known under the name of the “ Conservation of Energy,” it seemed ob- 
vious to investigators of nature, that the perceptible world in all its 
multifold and changing forms is wholly the outcome of the play of inde- 
structible matter energized by indestructible motion. 
Believing that all physical phenomena of nature are produced by 
moved matter, and that all scientific knowledge is finally reducible to 
atomic mechanics, Du Bois-Beymond, in his well-known atomic fantasy 
declared, that a mind cognizant for the time being of the position and 
motion of all atoms composing the universe would be able in accordance 
with mechanical laws to deduce therefrom, in their minutest detail, all 
