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Updated: August 23, 2024
All this was well enough in the days of naïvely vitalistic ideas of the world as having a life and soul. But not in these days of mechanics, the strict calculation of the amount of energy used, and the mechanical theory of heat. The world-clock cannot wind itself up. It, too, owes its activity to the transformation of potential energy into kinetic energy.
There lies the stumbling-block of the vitalistic theories. We shall not reproach them, as is ordinarily done, with replying to the question by the question itself: the "vital principle" may indeed not explain much, but it is at least a sort of label affixed to our ignorance, so as to remind us of this occasionally, while mechanism invites us to ignore that ignorance.
All the time they quiver with the interchange, there is one long endless flow of vitalistic communication between members of one family, a long, strange rapport, a sort of life-unison. It is a ripple of life through many bodies as through one body. But all the time there is the jolt, the rupture of individualism, the individual asserting himself beyond all ties or claims.
Digby's concept was essentially free of vitalistic coloring; akin to the embryological efforts of Descartes in its virtual independence from observations of the developing embryo, it was similarly vulnerable to Voltaire's criticism of Descartes, that he sought to interpret, rather than study, Nature.
The profession was literally ravaged by theories, schools and systems iatromechanics, iatrochemistry, humoralism, the animism of Stahl, the vitalistic doctrines of Van Helmont and his followers and into this metaphysical confusion Morgagni came like an old Greek with his clear observation, sensible thinking and ripe scholarship.
His experiments still hold the field in a region of study which has vastly extended itself in recent years, becoming of prime importance in the vitalistic controversy. In the dispute, however, with which we are concerned Needham and Spallanzani defended opposite positions.
For the reasons given by Spencer, man's earliest interpretation of things is inevitably vitalistic. Ghosts the primitive protoplasm from which the gods are made are assumed, and once assumed dominate the savage intelligence.
This divine prevision thus becomes the wisest and most beneficent provision. Without life there would be no such thing as death, and without death no such thing as this grand succession and march of life this passing from out the Shadow into the Day. Darwinism Considered from a Vitalistic Stand-Point.
We have now to ask ourselves in what way this energy conception of life differs from, or goes beyond, the two theories of life mechanistic and vitalistic, which have hitherto been supposed to have exhausted the possibilities of explanation. In order to do this we must analyse the author's idea of energy and its relationship to biological processes a little more closely.
In the "Academy" for October, 1869, there is a review by Professor Huxley of Dr. Haeckel's "Natürlische Schöpfungsgeschichte," in which he says: "Professor Haeckel enlarges on the service which the 'Origin of Species' has done in favoring what he terms 'the causal or mechanical' view of living nature as opposed to the 'teleological or vitalistic' view.
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