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Updated: May 14, 2025
To which Cauchy replied that it did not appear to him to be possible to know more about this than he himself already knew, neither could he conceive how the most perfect intelligence could arrive at a clearer comprehension of the mystery of reflection than that manifested in his own explanation of it, seeing that he had furnished a mechanistic theory of the phenomenon.
The more we reflect upon it, the more we shall see that this production of the same effect by two different accumulations of an enormous number of small causes is contrary to the principles of mechanistic philosophy. We have concentrated the full force of our discussion upon an example drawn from phylogenesis. But ontogenesis would have furnished us with facts no less cogent.
We have now to ask ourselves in what way this energy conception of life differs from, or goes beyond, the two theories of life mechanistic and vitalistic, which have hitherto been supposed to have exhausted the possibilities of explanation. In order to do this we must analyse the author's idea of energy and its relationship to biological processes a little more closely.
This is not surprising, when we remember how complicated is the problem and how short the time during which we have been emphasizing the human relations as distinguished from the material or mechanistic aspect of business organization.
He took over the mechanistic principle and handled it as never a man had done before; he became the mechanizer of the world. At the same time he was something mightier than that: he was the heir of the French idea of spiritual and popular liberty. Prussia fell, and would have fallen, even if its mechanism had not grown rusty.
I read the other day a very downright book, with a kind of dry insolence about it, by a man who was concerned with stating what he called the mechanistic theory of the universe. The worlds, it seemed, were like a sandy desert, with a wind that whirled the sands about; and indeed I seemed, as I looked out on the world through the writer's eyes, to see nothing but wind and sand!
The processes of thought, and therefore the consistent habitual discipline, of the former ran in terms of the personal agents engaged, and of the personal relations of discretion, control and subordination necessary to the work; whereas the mechanistic logic of the modern technology, more and more consistently, runs in terms of the impersonal forces engaged, and inculcates an habitual predilection for matter-of-fact statement, and an habitual preconception that the findings of material science alone are conclusive.
However, the decline of this vitalistic rationalism coincided with the rise of a mechanistic rationalism which had its roots in ancient Greek atomistic theories of matter.
So, too, there are innumerable forces in nature which can excite in man no adaptive response, since there exist in man no brain patterns tuned to their waves, as in the case of certain ethereal and radioactive forces. On this mechanistic basis the emotions may be explained as activations of the entire motor mechanism for fighting, for escaping, for copulating.
And wherever, among the younger generation of biologists, one has broken away from the fascinations of the mechanistic theory, he has usually turned to “psychical” co-operating factors. Is there Ageing of the Mind? Naturalism is also only apparently right in asserting that the mind ages with the body.
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