Here, as also in regard to “Darwinism,” which was advanced about the same time, the typical advocate of “caution” was Rudolf Virchow. His doubts and reservations found utterance very soon after the theory itself had been promulgated. In his “Cellular Pathologie,”76 and in an essay on “The Old Vitalism and the New,”77 he puts in a word for a vis vitalis. The old vitalism, he declared, had been false because it assumed, not a vis, but a spiritus vitalis. The substances in animate and in inanimate bodies have undoubtedly absolutely the same properties. Nevertheless, “we must at once rid ourselves of the scientific prudery of regarding the processes of life solely as the mechanical result of the molecular forces inherent in their constituent bodily parts.” The essential feature of life is a derived and communicated force additional to the molecular forces. Whence it comes we are not told. He glided all round the problem with platitudinarian expressions, which were intended to show his own adherence as a matter of course to the new biological school, and which revealed at the same time his striking incapacity for defining a [pg 238] problem with any precision. At a “certain period in the evolution of the earth” this force arose, as the ordinary mechanical movements “swung over” into the vital. But it is thus a special form of movement, which detaches itself from the great constants of general movement, and runs its course alongside of, and in constant relation to, these. (Did ever vitalist assert more?) After thus preparing the way for a return of the veering process at a particular stage of evolution, and giving the necessary assurances against the “diametrically opposed dualistic position,” Virchow employs almost all the arguments against the mechanical theory which vitalists have ever brought forward. Even the catalytic properties of ferments are above the “ordinary” physical and chemical forces. The movement of crystallisation, too, cannot be compared with the vital movement. For vital force is not immanent in matter, but is always the product of previous life.78 In the simplest processes of growth and nutrition the vis vitalis plays its vital rÔle. This is true in a much greater degree of the processes of development and morphogenesis. In the phenomena of irritability life reveals its spontaneity through “responses,” and so on. “Peu d'anatomie pathologique Éloigne du vitalisme, beaucoup d'anatomie pathologique y ramÈne.”

It is impossible to make much of this position. It leaves the theory with one of the opposing parties, the [pg 239] practice with the other, and the problem just where it was before.