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Updated: June 26, 2025
Yet this is what M. Bergson does in his whole defence of metaphysical vitalism, and especially in the instance of the evolution of eyes by two different methods, which is his palmary argument.
Hence it is the fashion amongst its opponents to write of it as "mystical" or, as Loeb does, as "supernatural," probably the most illogical term that could possibly be used. What is Vitalism? It is the theory that there is some other element call it entelechy with Driesch, or call it what you like in living things than those elements known to chemistry and physics.
Some have considered it so, and spoken of its marvellously complicated molecule. Of course it is made up of carbon, hydrogen, and other substances within the domain of chemistry. But is it, therefore, merely a chemical compound? The reply involves the whole riddle of Vitalism.
M. Bergson thus introduces his metaphysical force as a peculiar requirement of biology; he breaks the continuity of nature; he loses the poetic justification of a metaphysical vitalism; he asks us to believe that life is not a natural expression of material being, but an alien and ghostly madness descending into it I say a ghostly madness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should live?
Nowadays, when we are turning in weary disgust and disillusion from Neo-Darwinism and Mechanism to Vitalism and Creative Evolution, it is difficult to imagine how this new departure of Darwin's could possibly have appealed to his contemporaries as exciting, agreeable, above all as hopeful.
As to formations without the requisite gemmules. Mr. Lewes and Professor Delpino. Difficulty as to developmental force of gemmules. As to their spontaneous fission. Pangenesis and Vitalism. Paradoxical reality. Pangenesis scarcely superior to anterior hypotheses. Buffon. Owen. Herbert Spencer. "Gemmules" as mysterious as "physiological units." Conclusion.
Very characteristic is Pfeffer’s “Pflanzen-Physiologie” , which is written professedly from the mechanist point of view. “Vitalism,” according to this authority, is to be rejected, but instead of “vital force” he offers us “given properties,” and the alleged machine-like collocations of the most minute elements.
Deistic rationalism conceives God as the Reason of the Universe, but its logic compels it to conceive Him as an impersonal reason that is to say, as an idea while deistic vitalism feels and imagines God as Consciousness, and therefore as a person or rather as a society of persons.
For a long time one of the most prominent figures in the controversy was Prof. G. Bunge, of Basle, who was one of the first modern physiologists to champion vitalism, and who has tried to show by analogies and illustrations what is necessarily implied in vital activity.
The point at issue between vitalism and mechanism in biology is whether the living processes in nature can be resolved into a combination of the material. The material processes will always remain vital, if we take this word in a descriptive and poetic sense; for they will contain a movement having a certain idiosyncrasy and taking a certain time, like the fall of an apple.
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