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Updated: June 23, 2025
This criticism is not so applicable to Highmore, whose theory of development is more vitalistic than Digby's, and is more akin to the concepts developed by Gassendi than those of Descartes. Highmore had experience with the embryo itself, and his actual contribution as an observer of development, although hardly epochal, is worthy of note.
Even Professor Tyndall's "fog-banks of primordial haze" would be ignominiously scattered in flight before these atomic legions. Let our materialistic friends summon them, then, to their aid. The field of controversy will never be won by their molecular "Hessians." The ineffably bright lancers that stand guard over the elemental hosts are the light brigade with which to rout the vitalistic enemy.
Associated with them is Reinke’s “Theory of Dominants.” Driesch started from their ranks, and is a most interesting example of consistent development from a recognition of the impossibilities of the mechanistic position to an individually thought-out vitalistic theory. Hertwig, too, takes a very definite position of his own in regard to these matters.
As Huxley points out, it is no more justifiable to postulate the existence of a vitalistic principle in protoplasm than it would be to set up an "aquosity" to account for the properties of water, or a "saltness" for the qualities of a certain combination of sodium and chlorine.
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.
Perhaps for a screen against various dynamic vibrations, and as a receiver of other suited dynamic vibrations. It may be that even the hair of the head acts as a sensitive vibration-medium for conveying currents of physical and vitalistic activity to and from the brain.
However, the decline of this vitalistic rationalism coincided with the rise of a mechanistic rationalism which had its roots in ancient Greek atomistic theories of matter.
But present or absent, there should be between the baby and the father that strange, intangible communication, that strange pull and circuit such as the magnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a vitalistic pull and flow which lays all the life-plasm of the baby into the line of vital quickening, strength, knowing.
In his “Theory of Dominants,” Reinke, the botanist of Kiel, has attempted to formulate his opposition to the physico-chemical conception of life into a vitalistic theory of his own.
The majority of experts—not to speak of the popular materialists, and especially those who, sailing under the flag of materialistic interpretation, have their ships full of vitalistic contraband—regard as the ideal of their science an ultimate analysis of the phenomena of life into mechanical processes, into “mechanics of the atom.” They believe in this ideal, and without concealing that it is still very far off, do not doubt its ultimate attainability, and regard vitalistic assumptions as obstacles to the progress of investigation.
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