The Physical Basis of Mind. George Henry Lewes
in research, trying by its aid to come upon some observation which will reveal the hidden process; but careful never to allow the guess to supersede observation, or to form a basis of deductions not immediately verified.
29. A glance at the metaphysiological definitions will detect both the kind of guess and the kind of reliance which prevailed. The mystery was not simply recognized, it was personified as an entity: Will and Intelligence were liberally accorded to it, for it was supposed to shape matter, and direct force into predestined paths by prescience of a distant end. The observed facts of the egg passing through successive changes into a complex organism were so marvellous, so unlike any facts observable in the inorganic world, that they seemed to demand a cause drawn from higher sources. The mystery of life obtruded itself at every turn. It was named, and men fancied it explained. But in truth no mystery is got rid of by explanation, however valid; it is only shifted farther back. Explanation is the resolution of a complex phenomenon into its conditions of existence—the product is reduced to its factors; the explanation is final when this resolution has been so complete that a reconstruction of the product is possible from the factors. The vast majority of explanations—especially in the organic region—are no more than what mathematicians call “a first approximation.” It is through successive approximations that science advances; but even when the final stage is reached a mystery remains. We may know that certain elements combine in certain proportions to produce certain substances; but why they produce these, and not different substances, is no clearer than why muscles contract or organisms die. This Why is, however, an idle question. That alone which truly concerns us is the How, and not the Why.
30. Biology is still a long way off the How. But it can boast of many approximations; and its theories are to be tested by the degree of approximation they effect. In this light the physiological, intra-organic, hypotheses manifestly have the advantage. Many of them are indeed very unacceptable; they are guided by a mistaken conception of the truths reached by Analysis. For when men first began to discard the extra-organic hypotheses, and to look into the organism itself, they were so much impressed by the mechanical facts observed, that they endeavored to reduce all the phenomena to Mechanics. The circulation became simply a question of hydraulics. Digestion was explained as trituration. The chemists then appeared, and their shibboleths were “affinities” and “oxidations.” With Bichat arose the anatomical school, which decomposing the organism into organs, the organs into tissues, and these tissues into their elements, sought the analytical conditions of existence of the organism in the properties of these tissues, and the functions of these organs. The extra-organic agent was thus finally shown to be not only a fiction, but a needless fiction.
Every student of the history of the science will note how from the very necessities of the case the metaphysiologists, without relinquishing their Vital Principle, have been led more and more to enter on the track of the physiologists, pursuing their researches more and more into the processes going on in the organism, and assigning more and more causal efficiency to these, with a corresponding restriction of the province of their extra-organic cause. Hence in the ranks of the vitalists have been found some of the very best observers and theorists; but they were such in despite of, and not in consequence of, their hypothesis, which was only invoked by them when evidence was at fault. Nor, unscientific as vitalism is, can we deny that it has been so far serviceable to the science, that it has corrected the materialist error of endeavoring to explain organic phenomena by physico-chemical laws; and has persistently kept in view the radical difference between organic and inorganic.
31. These remarks may justify a selection of definitions, classified under the two heads. The selection is fitly opened by the Aristotelian definition which prevailed for centuries.
Aristotle distinguishes Life, which he says means “the faculties of self-nourishment, self-development, and self-decay,” from the Vital Principle. Every natural body manifesting life may be regarded as an essential existence (οὐσία); but then it is an existence only as a synthesis (ὡς συθέτη); and since an organism is such a synthesis, being possessed of Life, it cannot be the Vital Principle (ψυχή). Therefore it follows that the Vital Principle must be an essence, as being the Form of a natural body holding life in potentiality. The Vital Principle is the primary reality of an organism. “It is therefore as idle to ask whether the Vital Principle and Organism are one, as whether the wax and the impress on it are one. … Thus if an eye were an animal, Vision would be its Vital Principle: for Vision is, abstractedly considered, the essence of the eye; but the eye is the body of Vision, and if Vision be wanting, then, save in name, it is no longer an eye.”
Apart from certain metaphysical implications, inevitable at that period, there is profound insight in this passage. His adversary Telesio quite misconceives the meaning here assigned to the Vital Principle.8
32. Let us pass over all the intermediate forms of the hypothesis, and descend to Kant, who defines Life “an internal principle of action” (this does not distinguish it from fermentation); an organism he says is “that in which every part is at once means and end.” “Each part of the living body has its cause of existence in the whole organism; whereas in non-living bodies each part has its cause in itself.” Johannes Müller adopts a similar view: “The harmonious action of the essential parts of the individual subsist only by the influence of a force, the operation of which is extended to all parts of the body, and does not depend on any single parts; this force must exist before the parts, which are in fact formed by it during the development of the embryo. … The vital force inherent in them generates from the organic matter the essential organs which constitute the whole being. This rational creative force is exerted in every animal strictly in accordance with what the nature of each requires.”
33. This is decidedly inferior to Aristotle, who did not confound the vegetative with the rational principle. It rests on the old metaphysical error of a vis medicatrix, an error which cannot sustain itself against the striking facts which constantly point to a vis destructrix, a destructive tendency quite as inexorable as the curative tendency. And the experimental biologist soon becomes impressed with the fact that the tissues have indeed a selective action, by which from out the nutrient material only these substances are assimilated which will enter into combination with them; but this selective action is fatal, no less than reparative: substances which poison the tissue are taken up as readily as those which nourish it. The idea of prescience, therefore, cannot be sustained; it is indeed seldom met with now in the writings of any but the Montpellier school, who continue the traditions of Stahl’s teaching. It has been so long exploded elsewhere that one is surprised to find an English physiologist clinging to a modification of it—I mean Dr. Lionel Beale, who repeatedly insists on Life as “a peculiar Force, temporarily associated with matter,” a “power capable of controlling and directing both matter and force,” an “undiscovered form of force having no connection with primary energy or motion.” “The higher phenomena of the nervous system are probably due primarily to the movements of the germinal matter due to vital power, which vital power of this the highest form of germinal matter is in fact the living I.”
34. Apart from the primary objection to all these definitions, namely, that they seek to express organic phenomena in terms of an extra-organic principle, to formulate the facts observed in terms of a cause inferred, there is the fatal objection that they speak confidently on what is avowedly unknown. If the force be, as Dr. Beale says, “undiscovered,” on what grounds can he assert that it has no connection with the forces which are known? All that the observed facts warrant is the assertion that organic phenomena are special (which no one denies), and must therefore depend on special combinations of matter and force. But on this ground we might assume a crystallizing Force, and a coagulating Force, having no connection with the molecular forces manifested elsewhere: these also are special phenomena, not to be confounded with each other.
35. Schelling defines Life as “a principle of individuation” and a “cycle of successive changes determined and fixed by this internal principle.” Which is so vague that it may be applied in very different senses. Bichat’s celebrated definition (which is only a paraphrase of a sentence in Stahl), “the sum of the functions which resist Death,” although an endeavor to express the facts from the Intra-organic point of view, is not only vague,