Life and death

by A. Dastre

Animism survived him for some time, maintained by the zeal of a few faithful disciples. But after the witty mockery of Bordeu,[1] in 1742, it began to decay. We must, however, point out that an attempt to revive this theory was made in 1878 by a well-known doctor of the last generation, E. Chauffard. While preserving the essential features of the theory, this learned physician proposed to bring it into harmony with modern science, and to free it from all the reproaches which had been levelled at it.

The Animism of E. Chauffard.—These reproaches were numerous. The most serious is of a philosophic nature. It rises from the difficulty of conceiving a direct and immediate action of the soul, considered as a spiritual principle, upon the matter of the body. There is such an abyss—hewn by the philosophic mind itself—between soul and body, that it is impossible to imagine any relation between them. We can only get a glimpse of how the soul might become an instrument of action.

This was the problem which sorely tried the genius of Leibniz. Descartes, in earlier days, attacked it vigorously, like an Alexander cutting the Gordian knot. He separated the soul from the body, and made of the latter a pure machine in the government of which the soul had no part. He attributed all the known manifestations of vital activity to inanimate forces. Leibniz, also, was compelled to reject all action, all contact, all direct relation, every real bond between soul and body, and to imagine between them a purely metaphysical relation—pre-established harmony:—“Soul and body agree in virtue of this harmony, the harmony pre-established since the creation, and in no way by a mutual, actual, physical influence. Everything that takes place in the soul takes place as if there were no body, and so everything takes place in the body as if there were no soul.” At this point we almost reach a scientific materialism. It is easy for the materialist to break this frail tie of pre-established harmony which so loosely unites body and soul, and to exhibit the organism as under the sole control of universal mechanics and physics.

Thus the weak point of Stahl’s animism was the supposition of a direct action exercised on the organism by a distinct, heterogeneous, spiritual principle.

Chauffard has endeavoured to avoid this pitfall. In conformity with modern ideas, he has brought together what the ancient philosophers and Stahl himself separated—the activity of matter and the activity of the soul. “Thought, action, function, are embraced in an indissoluble union.” This is the classical but not very lucid theory which has been so often reproduced—Homo factus est anima vivens—which Bossuet has expressed in the celebrated formula: “Soul and body form a natural whole.”

A second objection raised against animism is that the soul acts consciously, with reflection, and with volition, and that its essential attributes are not found in most physiological phenomena, which, on the contrary are automatic, involuntary, and unconscious. The contradictory nature of these characteristics has obliged vitalists to conceive of a vital principle distinct from thought. Chauffard, agreeing here with Boullieu, Tissot, and Stahl himself, does not accept this distinction; he refuses to shatter the unity of the vivifying and thinking principle. He prefers to attribute to the soul two modes of action: the one which is exercised on the acts of thought, and hence it proceeds consciously, with reflection, and with volition; the other exercising control over the physiological phenomena which it governs, “by unconscious impressions, and by instinctive determinations, obeying primordial laws.” This soul is hardly in keeping with his definition of a conscious, reflecting, and voluntary principle; it is a new soul, a somatic soul, singularly akin to that rachidian soul which, according to Pflüger, a well-known German physiologist, resides in each segment of the spinal marrow, and is responsible for reflex movements.

Twofold Modality of the Soul.—This twofold modality of the soul, this duality admitted by Stahl and his disciples, was repugnant to many thinkers, and it is this repugnance that gave rise to the vitalistic school. It appeared to them to be a heresy tainted by materialism—and so it was. In this lay the strength and the weakness of animism. It admits of a unique animating principle for all the manifestations of the living being, for the higher facts in the realm of thought, and for the lower facts connected with the body. It throws down the barriers which separate them. It fills up the gap between the different forms of human activity, and assimilates them the one to the other.

Now this is precisely what materialism does. It, too, reduces to a single order the psychical and physiological phenomena, between which it no longer recognizes anything but a difference of degree, thought being only a maximum of the vital movement, or life a minimum of thought. In truth, the aims of the two schools are diametrically opposed; the one claims to raise corporeal activity to the dignity of thinking activity, and to spiritualize the vital fact; the other lowers the former to the level of the latter and materializes the psychic fact. But, though the intentions are different, the result is identical. Spiritualistic monism inclines towards materialistic monism. One step more, and the soul, confused with life, will be confused with physical forces.

On the other hand, twofold modality has this advantage, that it escapes the objection drawn from the existence of so many living beings to which a thinking soul cannot be attributed; an anencephalous fœtus, the young of the higher animals, the lower animals and plants, living without thought, or with a minimum of real, conscious thought. The advocate of animism replies that this physiological activity is still a soul, but one which is barely aware of its existence—a gleam of consciousness. In this theory, the knowledge of self, the consciousness, is of all degrees. On the other hand, in the eyes of the vitalist, it is an absolute fact which allows of no attenuation, of no middle course between the being and the non-being.

It is this conception of the continuity of the soul and life, it is the affirmation of a possible lowering of the complete consciousness down to a mere gleam of knowledge, and finally down to unconscious vital activity, which saved animism from complete shipwreck. That is why this ancient doctrine finds, even in the present day, a few rare supporters. An able German scientist, G. von Bunge, well known for his researches in physiological chemistry, professes animistic views in a work which appeared in 1889. He attributes to organized beings a guiding principle, a kind of vital soul. A distinguished naturalist, Rindfleisch, of Lübeck, has likewise taken his place among the advocates of what we may call neo-animism.