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Let him come out then, as the ablest vitalist now living, and boldly assert the presence of the man-unit and the dog-unit, instead of falling back on his bioplastic spinners and weavers of tissue, which are only the servants and willing workers of the one integral unit, or life-directing force, within.
And when it comes to this sort of speculation, the materialist is just as much in the dark as the vitalist, and neither can have any advantage over the other, except as the one may adopt the analytic, and the other the synthetic method.
One might indeed be a vitalist in biology, out of pure caution and conscientiousness, without sharing those prejudices; and many a speculative philosopher has been free from them who has been a vitalist in metaphysics. Schopenhauer, for instance, observed that the cannon-ball which, if self-conscious, would think it moved freely, would be quite right in thinking so.
Along with Virchow, we must name another of the older generation, the physiologist William Preyer, who combated “vitalism,” “dualism,” and “mechanism” with equal vehemence, and issued a manifesto, already somewhat solemn and official, against “vital force.” And yet he must undoubtedly be regarded as a vitalist by mechanists and vitalists alike.
The "Will" was as evident to him in mechanism as in animal life. M. Bergson, in the more hidden reaches of his thought, seems to be a universal vitalist; apparently an élan vital must have existed once to deposit in inorganic matter the energy stored there, and to set mechanism going.
Is our scientific technology so destitute of definitional accuracy that they cannot use half a dozen scientific terms without committing half that number of down-right scientific blunders? "New-born specks of living matter" is language that a vitalist might possibly use by sheer inadvertence; but no avowed materialist, like Professor Bastian, should trip in this definitional way.
He may be called a scientific vitalist. He keeps close to lines of scientific research as these lines lead him through the maze of the primordial elements of matter, from electron to atom, from atom to molecule, from molecule to colloid, and so up to the border of the living world.
And as the New Vitalist turns from the disputes of his youth to the future of his science, he will cease to boggle at the name Vitalist, or at the inevitable, ancient, popular, and quite correct use of the term Force to denote metaphysical as well as physical overcomers of inertia.
The Vitalist philosophers made no such mistakes. Nietzsche, for example, thinking out the great central truth of the Will to Power instead of cutting off mouse-tails, had no difficulty in concluding that the final objective of this Will was power over self, and that the seekers after power over others and material possessions were on a false scent.
It certainly follows that there must be some superior, at least widely different, agency at work than one of a purely chemical character something which transcends chemical operations. This is precisely what the Vitalist claims. No one will fail to award praise to any attempts to explain the phenomena of Nature, whether within or without any system.
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