Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
An intervention of “vitalistic” principles, directions and so forth, would, we are told, involve a sudden obtrusion and disappearance again of energy-effects which had no efficient cause in the previous phenomena. From any point of view it would be a miracle, and in particular it would be doing violence to the law of the constancy of the sum of energy.
This is good vitalistic doctrine, as far as it goes, yet Huxley saw no difference between the matter of life and other matter, except in the manner in which the atoms are aggregated.
From the solar plexus first of all pass the great vitalistic communications between child and parents, the first interplay of primal, pre-mental knowledge and sympathy. It is a great subtle interplay, and from this interplay the child is built up, body and psyche.
In our fear of being metaphysical we have swung to another extreme, and have lost sight of valuable truth which lay at the bottom of the old vitalistic theories. Cells, tissues, and organs are but channels along which the flood of life-force flows. Each theory contains important truth.
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.
We pass on to the next elimination: "Although its visible results are in a high degree purposeful, we may also exclude as unscientific the vitalistic theory of an entelechy or any other form of internal perfecting agency distinct from known or unknown physio-chemical energies."
This opinion of the great German chemist was in a measure substantiated by experiments of his compatriot Helmholtz, whose earlier experiments confirmed, but later ones contradicted, the observations of Schwann, and this combined authority gave the vitalistic conception a blow from which it had not rallied at the time when Pasteur entered the field.
I. In more than one place, Professor Haeckel enlarges upon the service which the "Origin of Species" has done, in favouring what he terms the "causal or mechanical" view of living nature as opposed to the "teleological or vitalistic" view. And no doubt it is quite true that the doctrine of Evolution is the most formidable opponent of all the commoner and coarser forms of Teleology.
Professor Soddy, in discussing the relation of life to energy, does not commit himself to the theory of the vitalistic or non-mechanical origin of life, but makes the significant statement that there is a consensus of opinion that the life processes are not bound by the second law of thermo-dynamics, namely, the law of the non-availability of the energy latent in low temperatures, or in the chaotic movements of molecules everywhere around us.
In speaking of his "plastide particles," Professor Bastian, the most defiant challenger of vitalistic propositions now living, says: "Certain of these particles, through default of necessary conditions, never actually develop into higher modes of being."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking