The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy. Ernst Haeckel
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factors of biological catalysis. Verworn also points out the analogy between this enzymatic process of metabolism and the inorganic processes of catalysis—for instance, in the manufacture of English sulphuric acid. A small and constant quantity of nitromuriatic acid, with the aid of air and water, converts an unlimited mass of sulphuretted acid into sulphuric acid without being changed itself; the molecule of the nitromuriatic acid breaks up steadily by the giving-off of oxygen, and is then restored by the assumption of oxygen.
The manifold and changeful phenomena of life and their sudden extinction at death seem to every thoughtful man to be something so wonderful and so different from all the changes in inorganic nature that from the very beginning of biological philosophy special forces were assumed to explain it. This was particularly due to the remarkable, orderly structure of the organism and the apparent purposiveness of the vital processes. Hence, in earlier days a special organic force (archæus insitus) was assumed, controlling the individual life and pressing the "raw forces" of inorganic matter into its service. In the same way a special formative impulse was supposed to preside over the wonderful processes of development. When physiology began to win its independence, about the middle of the eighteenth century, it explained the peculiar features of organic life by a specific vital force. The idea was generally received, and Louis Dumas endeavored thoroughly to establish it at the beginning of the nineteenth century (cf. chapter iii. of the Riddle).
As the theory of a vital force, or vitalism, plays an important part in the study of the wonders of life, has undergone the most curious modifications in the course of the nineteenth century, and has been lately revived with great force, we must give a short account of it in its various forms. The phrase can be interpreted in a monistic sense, if we understand by it the sum of the forms of energy which are especially distinctive of the organism, particularly metabolism and heredity. In this we pass no opinion on their nature, and do not say that they are specifically different from the forces of inorganic nature. We might call this monistic conception "physical vitalism." However, the usual metaphysical vitalism affirms in a thoroughly dualistic sense that the vital force is a teleological and super-mechanical principle, is essentially different from the ordinary forces of nature, and of a transcendental character. The special form in which this theory of a supernatural vital force has been presented for the last twenty years is often called Neovitalism; we might call the older form, by contrast, Palavitalism.
The older idea of the vital force as a special energy could very well be accepted in the first third of the nineteenth century, and in the eighteenth, because the physiology of the time was destitute of the most important aids to the founding of a mechanical theory. There was then no such thing as the cell-theory or as physiological chemistry; ontogeny and paleontology were still in their cradles. Lamarck's theory of descent (1809) had been done to death, like his fundamental principle: "Life is only an elaborate physical phenomenon." Hence we can easily understand how physiologists acquiesced in the vitalist hypothesis up to 1833, and supposed the wonders of life to be enigmatic phenomena that escaped physical explanation.
But the position of Palavitalism changed in the second third of the nineteenth century. In 1833 appeared Johannes Müller's classical Manual of Human Physiology, in which the great biologist not only made a comparative study of the vital phenomena in man and the animals, but sought to provide a sound basis for it in all its sections by his own observations and experiments. It is true that Müller retained to the last (1858) the current idea of a vital force, as the supreme regulator of all the vital activities. However, he did not regard it as a metaphysical principle (like Haller, Kant, and their followers), but as a natural force, subject, like all others, to fixed chemical and physical laws, and subordinate to the whole. In his comprehensive study of every single vital function—the organs of sense and the nervous system, metabolism and the action of the heart, speech and reproduction—Müller endeavored above all to establish, by close observation of the facts and careful experiments, the regularity of the phenomena, and to explain their development by a comparison of the higher and lower forms. Hence Johannes Müller is wrongly described—as he has been of late—as a vitalist; he was rather the first physiologist to provide a physical foundation for the current metaphysical vitalism. He really gives an indirect proof of the reverse theory, as E. Dubois-Reymond rightly observed in his brilliant memorial speech. In the same way Schleiden (1843) cut the ground from under vitalism in botany. By his cell-theory (1838) he showed the unity of the multicellular organism to be the resultant of the functions of all the cells which compose it.
The physical explanation of the vital processes and the rejection of Palavitalism were general in the last third of the nineteenth century. This was due most of all to the great advance in experimental physiology, which Carl Ludwig and Felix Bernard led as regards the animal body, and Julius Sachs and Wilhelm Preyer for the plant. While these and other physiologists used the remarkable results of modern physics and chemistry in the experimental study of the vital functions, and sought to determine their complicated course in terms of mass and weight and formulate their discoveries as mathematically as possible, they brought a great number of the wonders of life under the same fixed laws that were recognized in the physics and chemistry of the inorganic world. On the other hand, vitalism met with a powerful opponent in Charles Darwin, who solved, by his theory of selection, one of the most obscure biological problems, the constantly repeated question: How can we give a mechanical explanation of the orderly structures of the living being? How was this ingenious machine of the animal or plant body unconsciously produced by natural means, without supposing that some intelligent artificer or creator had deliberately designed and produced it?
The further development of Darwin's theory of selection in the last four decades, and the increasing support which has been given to the theory of descent in the great advance of ontogeny, phylogeny, comparative anatomy, and physiology, did much to establish the monistic conception of life. It took the shape more and more of a definite anti-vitalism. Hence it is strange to find that in the course of the last twenty years the old vitalism that everybody had thought dead has lifted up its head once more, though in a new and modified form.[4] This modern vitalism comprises two essentially different tendencies.
The partisans of the modern vital force are divided into two groups, which may be designated the sceptical and the dogmatic. Sceptical Neovitalism was first formulated by Bunge, of Basle (1887), in the introduction to his Manual of Physiological Chemistry. While he granted the possibility of a full explanation of one part of the vital phenomena by mechanical causes, or the physical and chemical forces of lifeless nature, he rejected it for the other half, especially for psychic activities. He insists that the latter cannot be explained mechanically, and that there is nothing analogous to them in inorganic nature; only a supra-mechanical vital force can produce them, and this is transcendental and beyond the range of scientific inquiry. Much the same was said later by Rindfleisch (1888), more recently by Richard Neumeister in his Studies of the Nature of Vital Phenomena (1903), and by Oscar Hertwig in the lecture on "The Development of Biology in the Nineteenth Century," which he delivered at Aachen in 1900.
This sceptical Neovitalism is far surpassed by the dogmatic system, the chief actual representatives of which are the botanist Johannes Reinke and the metaphysician Hans Driesch. The vitalist writings of the latter, which are devoid of any grasp of historical development, have gained a certain vogue through the extraordinary arrogance of their author and the obscurity of his mystic and contradictory speculations. Reinke, on the other hand, has presented his transcendental dualism in clever and attractive form in two works which deserve notice on account of their consistent dualism. In the first of these, The World as Reality (1899), Reinke gives us "the outline of a scientific theory of the universe." The second work (1901) has the title, Introduction to Theoretical Biology. The two works have the same relation to each other as my Riddle of the Universe and the present supplementary volume. As our philosophic convictions are diametrically opposed in the main issues, and as we both think ourselves consistent in developing them, the comparison of them is not without interest in the great struggle of beliefs. Reinke is an avowed supporter of dualism, theism, and teleology. He reduces all the phenomena of life to a supernatural miracle.
Second Table
ANTITHESIS OF THE MONISTIC AND DUALISTIC THEORIES OF ORGANIC LIFE
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Monistic Theory of Life |