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Updated: June 26, 2025
If we are to "reject the vitalistic hypotheses of the ancient Greeks, and the modern vitalism of Driesch, of Bergson, and of others," and if, on the other hand, we are to view, as he thinks we must, the cosmos as one of "limitless and ordered energy" we have emphasised the word "ordered" for reasons which will shortly appear we must clearly look out for some middle way.
That theology cleared for faith an open road, made of faith a reasonable thing, yet did not rob it of a sense of high adventure; cleansed it of the taints of thrift and selfish concern. In this reaffirmation of vitalism there might be a future, yes, an individual future, yet it was far from the smug conception of salvation.
Of the making of books on the question of Vitalism there would seem to be no end; and, following upon quite a number of others comes this handsome, well-illustrated, intensely interesting book, by one whose writings are always worth study.
The theories of development promulgated by Digby and Highmore reveal the chief formulations of mechanistic rationalism, more or less free of empiricism, that were emerging as the vitalism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries waned. There was little new in these theories: both Digby's and Highmore's theories included different combinations of elements of ancient lineage.
The difference between vitalism and the mechanical theory of life is not, that the one regards the processes in the organism as opposed to those in the inorganic world while the other identifies them, but that vitalism regards life as a combination of chemical and physical processes, with the co-operation and under the regulation of other principles, while the mechanical theory leaves these other principles out.
There are the problems of germ-plasm, and its transmission; the effect on it, if any, of the body, and the reaction of the body to its environment. There are also the catalysers of which we have spoken, with many problems associated with them, and throwing a possible and unexpected light on the vexed question of Vitalism and the Conservation of Energy.
This is vitalism as opposed to mechanism, or scientific materialism, which is the doctrine of the all-sufficiency of the physical forces operating in the inorganic world to give rise to all the phenomena of the organic world a doctrine coming more and more in vogue with the progress of physical science.
Since the discovery of Evolution as the method of the Life Force the religion of metaphysical Vitalism has been gaining the definiteness and concreteness needed to make it assimilable by the educated critical man. But it has always been with us.
Some years ago, when I was delivering a lecture at the Cathedral Hall of Westminster, in the course of the questioning which took place at the termination of the discourse, which was on vitalism, I was asked by one who signed his paper, "So and So, Atheist," "What would you say if you saw a duck come out of a hen's egg?"
Highmore's theory of development appears to have emerged directly out of his observations of development. In this sense, his theory rests upon a more solid base than does the developmental theory of Digby. His theory is a mixture of vitalism and atomism, designed to eliminate the "fortune and chance" resident in Digby's concept. "Generation," he says,
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