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Updated: June 23, 2025
In his case we have not to clear up the ground and to follow things out to their conclusions, nor to purge his theories from irrelevant, vitalistic, or pantheistic accessory theories, as we have, for instance, in the case of Haeckel.
But the idea thus started was pressed into general service. New dominants are added, and the theory advances farther and farther from the “machine theory,” becomes ever more enigmatical, and more vitalistic. The Constructive Work of Driesch.
We have, therefore, the right to hold fast the monistic and mechanical view, whether men choose to brand the system as Materialism or not. In this sense, all natural science, with the law of causation at its head, is thoroughly materialistic." The monistic theory he calls "mechanical or causal," as distinguished from the dualistic theory, which he calls "teleological or vitalistic."
Disguised under various catchwords and with the greatest diversities of expression, the antitheses remain essentially the same through the centuries, competing with one another, often mingling curiously, so that from time to time one or other almost disappears, but always crops up again, so that it seems as if the conflict would be a never-ending one—the antitheses between the mechanical and the “vitalistic” view of life.
If the issue should turn in favour of the vitalistic conception, great gains are bound to accrue to religion; for thus a warrant for a belief in a reality higher in nature than what is termed physical will be established and shown to be at work in the origin and constant "becoming" of physical phenomena.
They call this view the mechanical view of the world; and, as "monism," put it in opposition to the "vitalistic, teleological, and dualistic view of the world." In order to obtain a correct view of this standpoint, we quote from Häckel's "Natural History of Creation", Vol.
I., Lotze wrote a long introductory article to the whole work, on “Life and Vital Force.” It was the challenge of the newer views to the previously vitalistic standpoint, and at the same time it was based on Lotze’s general principles and interspersed with philosophical criticism of the concepts of force, cause, effect, law, &c.
And he has the advantage over many of his successors of being very much clearer. The present state of the problem of life may be regarded as due to a reaction of biological investigation and opinion from the “vitalistic” theories which prevailed in the first half of last century, and which were in turn at once the root and the fruit of the German Nature-philosophy of that time.
They would scorn to postulate such a theory, or accept any such absurd remnant of the old vitalistic school. It is rather "molecular force" a physical, not a vital unit that gives us these "new-born specks of living matter." This is what they would all assert at once, in their enthusiasm to enlighten us on a new terminology.
The conclusion which, with regard to biological methods and ideals, seems to make all concessions to the purely mechanical mode of interpretation, is not sufficiently obvious from the premisses. If the vital series be a “real” one, we should expect that a “vitalistic” mode of interpretation, with methods and aims of its own, would be required, just as a special science of psychology is required.
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