Life and death

by A. Dastre

It is this preconceived idea that we are about to examine. Current opinion solves a priori the question of the fundamental homogeneity or lack of resemblance of these three orders of phenomena—the phenomena of inanimate nature, of living nature, and of the thinking soul. Animism, vitalism, and monism are, in reality, different ways of looking at them. They are the different answers to this question:—Are vital, psychic, and physico-chemical manifestations essentially distinct? Vitalists distinguish between life and thought, animists identify them. In the opposite camp mechanicians, materialists, or monists make the same mistake as the animists, but to that mistake they add another: they assimilate the forces at play in animals and plants to the general forces of the universe; they confuse all three—soul, life, inanimate nature.

These problems belong on many sides to metaphysical speculation. They have been discussed by philosophers; they have been solved from time immemorial in different ways, for reasons and by arguments which it is not our purpose to examine here, and which, moreover, have not changed. But on some sides they belong to science, and must be tested in the light of its progress. Cuvier and Bichat, for example, considered that the forces in action in living beings were not only different from physico-mechanical forces, but were utterly opposed to them. We now know that this antagonism does not exist.

The preceding doctrines, therefore, depend up to a certain point on experiment and observation. They are subject to the test of experiment and observation in proportion as the latter can give us information on the degree of difference or analogy presented by psychic, vital, and physico-chemical facts. Now, scientific investigations have thrown light on these points. There is no doubt that the analogies and the resemblances of these three orders of manifestations have appeared more and more numerous and striking as our knowledge has advanced. Hence it is that animism can count to-day but very few advocates in biological science. Vitalism in its different forms counts more supporters, but the great majority have adopted the physico-chemical theory.

Both animism and vitalism separate from matter a directing principle which guides it. At bottom they are mythological theories somewhat similar to the paganism of old. The fable of Prometheus or the story of Pygmalion contains all that is essential. An immaterial principle, divine, stolen by the Titan from Jupiter, or obtained from Venus by the Cypriot sculptor, descends from Olympus and animates the form, till then inert, which has been carved in the marble or modelled in the clay. In a word, there is a human statue. It receives a breath of heavenly fire, a vital force, a divine spark, a soul, and behold! it is alive. But this breath can also leave it. An accident happens, a clot in a vein, a grain of lead in the brain—the life escapes, and all that is left is a corpse. A single instant has proved sufficient to destroy its fascination. This is how all men picture to their minds the scene of death. The breath escapes; something flies away, or flows away with the blood. The happy genius of the Greeks conceived a graceful image of this, for they represented the life or the soul in the form of a butterfly (Psyche) leaving the body, an ethereal butterfly, as it were, opening its sapphire wings.

But what is this subtle and transient guest of the human statue, this passing stranger which makes of the living body an inhabited house? According to the animists it is the soul itself, in the sense in which the word is understood by philosophers; the immortal and reasoning soul. To the vitalists it is an inferior, subordinate soul; a soul, as it were, of secondary majesty, the vital force, or in a word, life.

Primitive Animism.—Animism is the oldest and most primitive of the conceptions presented to the human mind. But in so far as it is a co-ordinated doctrine, it is the most recent. In fact it only received its definitive expression in the eighteenth century, from Stahl, the philosopher-physician and chemist.

According to Tylor, one of the first speculations of primitive man, of the savage, is as to the difference between the living body and the corpse. The former is an inhabited house, the latter is empty. To such rudimentary intellects the mysterious inhabitant is a kind of double or duplicate of the human form. It is only revealed by the shadow which follows the body when illuminated by the sun, by the image of its reflection in the water, by the echo which repeats the voice. It is only seen in a dream, and the figures which people and animate our dreams are nothing but these doubled, impalpable beings. Some savages believe that at the moment of death the double, or the soul, takes up its residence in another body. Sometimes each individual possesses, not one of these souls, but several. According to Maspero, the Egyptians counted at least five, of which the principle, the ka or double, would be the aeriform or vaporous image of the living form. Space is peopled by souls on their travels, which leave one set of bodies to occupy another set. After having been the cause of life in the bodies which they animated, they react from without on other beings, and are the cause of all sorts of unexpected events. They are benevolent or malevolent spirits.

Analogy inevitably leads simple minds to extend the same ideas to animals and plants; in a word, to attribute souls to everything alive, souls more or less nomadic, wandering, or interchangeable, as is taught in the doctrine of metempsychosis. Mons. L. Errera points out that this primitive, co-ordinated, hierarchized doctrine—meet subject for the poet’s art—is the basis of all ancient mythologies.

The Animism of Stahl.—Modern animism was much more narrow in scope. It was a medical theory—i.e. almost exclusive to man. Stahl had adopted it in a kind of reaction against the exaggerations of the mechanical school of his time. According to him, the life of the body is due to the intelligent and reasoning soul. It governs the corporeal substance and directs it towards an assigned end. The organs are its instruments. It acts on them directly, without intermediaries. It makes the heart beat, the muscles contract, the glands secrete, and all the organs perform their functions. Nay more, it is itself the architectonic soul, which has constructed and which maintains the body which it rules. It is the mens agitat molem of Virgil.

It is remarkable that these ideas, so excessively and exaggeratedly spiritualistic, should have been brought forward by a chemist and a physician, while ideas completely opposed to these were admitted by philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz, who were decided believers in the spirituality of the soul. Stahl had been Professor of Medicine at the University of Halle, physician to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and later to the King of Prussia. He left an important medical and chemical work, both theoretical and practical. He is the author of the celebrated theory of phlogiston, which held its ground in chemistry up to the time of Lavoisier. He died about 1734.