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Updated: May 9, 2025
It is true that we do not understand the underlying forces of chemism, etc., but these forces certainly exist and are the foundation of science. But the mechanism of the engine is intelligible. Our understanding of it is such that, with the forces of chemistry and physics as a foundation, we can readily explain the running of the machine.
Mechanism and chemism are adequate to account for astronomy and geology, and therefore, he thinks, are sufficient to account for biology, without calling in the aid of any Bergsonian life impulse. Still these forces stand impotent before that microscopic world, the cell, the foundation of all life.
That all forms of life have a mechanical and chemical basis is beyond question, but when we apply our analysis to them, life evaporates, vanishes, the vital processes cease. But apply the same analysis to inert matter, and only the form is changed. Professor Loeb's artificially fathered embryo and starfish and sea-urchins soon die. If his chemism could only give him the mother-principle also!
I do not see why there may not be some force latent in matter that we may call the vital force, physical force transformed and heightened, as justifiably as we can postulate a chemical force latent in matter. The chemical force underlies and is the basis of the vital force. There is no life without chemism, but there is chemism without life.
Now if it is not thinkable that chemism could beget a cell, is it any more thinkable that it could build a living tissue, and then an organ, and then the body as a whole?
Amid all the activities of his mechanical and chemical factors, there is ever present a factor which he ignores, which his analytical method cannot seize; namely, what Verworn calls "the specific energy of living substance." Without this, chemism and mechanism would work together to quite other ends.
Well, one of the equivalents, transformed by some unknown chemism within us, is our psychic force, or states of consciousness. The two circles, the physical and the psychical, are not concentric, as Fiske fancied, but are linked in some mysterious way.
In separating libidinous from other psychic energy we give expression to the assumption that the sexual processes of the organism are differentiated from the nutritional processes through a special chemism. The analyses of perversions and psychoneuroses have taught us that this sexual excitement is furnished not only from the so-called sexual parts alone but from all organs of the body.
In the active state it takes some form of motion. The various forces which we recognize in nature heat, light, electricity, chemism, etc. are simply forms of motion, and thus forms of this energy. These various types of energy, being only expressions of the universal energy, are convertible into each other in such a way that when one disappears another appears.
But we have plainly not reached the bottom of the matter in our attempt to explain the machinery of living things. We have based the whole process upon three factors. Reproduction, variation, and heredity are the properties of all living matter; but they are not, like gravity and chemism, universal forces of nature. They occur in living organisms only.
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