Life and death

by A. Dastre

This result is the work of the physiologists of sixty years ago. It is also the consequence of the general march of science and of the progress of the scientific spirit, which shows a more and more marked tendency to separate completely the domain of facts from the domain of hypotheses.

Excessive Use of Hypothetical Agents in Physiological Explanations.—It may be said that in the early part of the nineteenth century, in spite of the efforts of a few real experimenters from Harvey to Spallanzani, Hales, Laplace, Lavoisier, and Magendie, the science of the phenomena of life had not followed the progress of the other natural sciences. It remained in the fog of scholasticism. Hypotheses were mingled with facts, and imaginary agents carried out real acts, in inexpressible confusion. The soul (animism), the vital force (vitalism), and the final cause (finalism, teleology) served to explain everything.

In truth, it was also at this time that physical agents, electric and magnetic fluids, or, again, chemical affinity, played an analogous part in the science of inanimate nature. But there was at least this difference in favour of physicists and chemists, that when they had attributed some new property or aptitude to their hypothetical agents they respected what they attributed. The physiological physicians respected no law, they were subject to no restraint. Their vital force was capricious; its spontaneity made anticipation impossible; it acted arbitrarily in the healthy body; it acted more arbitrarily still in the diseased body. All the subtlety of medical genius was called into play to divine the fantastic behaviour of the spirit of disease. If we speak here of physiologists and doctors alone and do not quote biologists, it is because the latter had not yet made their appearance as authorities; their science had remained purely descriptive, and they had not yet begun to explain phenomena.

Such was the state of things during the first years of the nineteenth century. It lasted, thanks to the founders of contemporary physiology—Claude Bernard in France, and Brücke, Dubois-Reymond, Helmholtz, and Ludwig in Germany—until a separation took place between biological research and philosophical theories. This delimitation operated in physiology properly so called—i.e. in a branch of the biological domain in which as yet joint tenancy had been the rule. An important revolution fixed the respective divisions of experimental science and philosophical interpretation. It was understood that the one ends where the other begins, that the one follows the other, that one may not cross the other’s path. There is between them only one doubtful region about which there is dispute, and this uncertain frontier is constantly being shifted and science daily gains what philosophy loses.

§ 1. Vital Phenomena in Constituted Organisms.

A displacement of this kind had taken place at the time of which we speak. It was agreed, that as far as concerns the phenomena which take place in a constructed and constituted living organism, it would no longer be permissible to allow to intervene in their explanation forces or energies other than those which are brought into play in inanimate nature. Just as when explaining the working of a clock, the physicist will not invoke the volition or the art of the maker, or the design that he had in view, but only the connection of causes and effects which he has utilized; so, for the living machine, whether the most complex, such as the human body, or the most elementary, such as the cell, we may not invoke a final cause, a vital force, external to that organism and acting on it from without, but only the connections and the fluctuations of effects which are the sole actual and efficient causes. In other words Ludwig, and Claude Bernard in particular, expelled from the domain of active phenomenality the three chimeras—Vital Force, Final Cause, and the “Caprice” of Living Nature.

But the living being is not only a completely constructed and completely constituted organism. It is not a finished clock. It is a clock which is making itself, a mechanism which is constructing and perpetuating itself. Nothing of the kind is known to us in inanimate nature. Physiology has found—in what is called morphogeny—its temporary limit. It is beyond this limit, it is in the study of phenomena by which the organism is constructed and perpetuated, it is in the region of the functions of generation and development, that philosophical doctrines expand and flourish. This is the present frontier of these two powers, philosophy and science. We shall presently delimit them more precisely. W. Kühne, a well-known scientist whose death is deplored, not in Germany alone, amused himself by studying the division of biological doctrines among the members of learned societies and in the world of academies. He summed up this kind of statistical inquiry by saying in 1898 at the Cambridge Congress, that physiologists were nearly all advocates of the physico-chemical doctrine of life, and that the majority of naturalists were advocates of vital force, and of the theory of final causes.

Domain of the Morphogenic Idea as the Last Sanctuary of Vital Force.—We see the reason for this. Physiology, in fact, has taken up its position in the explanation of the functional activity of the constituted organism—i.e., on a ground where intervene, as we shall show further on, no energies and no matter other than universal energies and matter. Naturalists, on the other hand, have more especially considered—and from the descriptive point of view alone, at least up to the times of Lamarck and Darwin—the functions, the generation, the development and the evolution of species. Now these functions are most refractory and inaccessible to physico-chemical explanations. So, when the time came to give an account of what they had done, the zoologists had substituted for executive agents nothing but vital force under its different names. To Aristotle it is the vital force itself which, as soon as it is introduced into the body of the child, moulds its flesh and fashions it in the human form. Contemporary naturalists, the Americans C. O. Whitman and C. Philpotts, for example, take the same line of argument. Others, such as Blumenbach and Needham, in the eighteenth century, invoked the same division under another name, that of the nisus formativus. Finally, others play with words; they talk of heredity, of adaptation, of atavism, as if these were real, active, and efficient beings; while they are only appellations, names applied to collections of facts.

This region was therefore eminently favourable to the rapid increase of hypotheses, and so they abounded. There were the theories of Buffon, of Lamarck, of Darwin, of Herbert Spencer, of E. Haeckel, of His, of Weismann, of De Vries, and of W. Roux. Each biologist of any mark had his own, and the list is endless. But here already this domain of theoretical speculation is checked on various sides by experiment. J. Loeb, a pure physiologist, has recently given his researches a direction in which zoology believes may be found the explanation of the mysterious part played by the male element in fecundation. On the other hand, the first experiment of the artificial division of the living cell (merotomy), with its light upon the part played by the nucleus in the preservation and regeneration of the living form, is also the work of a physiological experimenter. It dates back to 1852, and is due to Augustus Waller. This experiment was made on the sensitive nervous cell of the spinal ganglions and on the motor cell of the anterior cornua of the spinal cord. The effects were correctly interpreted twelve or fifteen years later. All that zoologists have done is to repeat, perhaps unconsciously, this celebrated experiment and to confirm the result.

Thus we see that the attack upon the vitalist sanctuary has commenced. But it would be a grave mistake to suppose that final cause and vital force are on the point of being dislodged from their entrenchments. Philosophical speculation has an ample field before it. Its frontiers may recede. For a long time yet there will be room for a more or less modernized vitalism.