Life and death

by A. Dastre

Decentralization of the Vital Principle.—The result is the same in the higher vertebrates, only the experiment is much more difficult. At the Physiological Congress of Turin in 1901, Locke showed the heart of a hare, extracted from the body of the animal, and beating for hours as energetically and as regularly as if it were in its place. He suspended it in the air of a room at the normal temperature, the sole condition being that it was irrigated with a liquid composed of certain constituents. The animal had been dead some time. More recently Kuliabko has shown in the same way the heart of a man still beating, although the man had been dead some eighteen hours. The same experiment is repeated in any physiological laboratory, in a much easier manner, with the heart of a tortoise. This organ, extracted from the body, fitted up with rubber tubes to represent its arteries and veins, and filled with the defibrinated blood of a horse or an ox taken from the slaughter-house, works for hours and days pumping the liquid blood into its rubber aorta, just as if it were pumping it into the living aorta.

But it is unnecessary to multiply examples. Every organ can be made to live for a longer or shorter period even though removed from its natural position; muscles, nerves, glands, and even the brain itself. Each organ, each tissue therefore enjoys an independent existence; it lives and works for itself. No doubt it shares in the activity of the whole, but it may be separated therefrom without being thereby placed in the category of dead substances. For each aliquot part of the organism there is a partial life and a partial death.

This decentralization of the vital activity is finally extended in complex beings from the organs to the tissues, and from the tissues to the anatomical elements—the cells. The idea of decentralization has given birth to the second form of vitalism, a softened down and weakened form—namely, pluri-vitalism, or the theory of vital properties.

§ 2. The Theory of Vital Properties.

The advocates of the theory of vital properties have cut up into fragments the monistic and indivisible guiding principle of Bordeu and Barthez. They have given it new currency—pluri-vitalism. This theory maintains the existence of spiritual powers of a lower order, which control phenomena more intimately than the vital principle did. These powers, less lofty in their dignity than the rational soul of the animists, or the soul of secondary majesty of the unitarian vitalists, are eventually incorporated in the living matter of which they will then be no longer more than the properties. Brought into closer connection therefore with the sensible world, they will be more in harmony with the spirit of research and with scientific progress.

The defect of the earlier conceptions, their common illusion, rose from their seeking the cause outside the object, from their demanding an explanation of vital phenomena from a principle external to living, immaterial, and unsubstantial matter. Here this defect is less marked. The pluri-vitalists will in turn appeal to the vital properties as modes of activity, inherent in the living substance in which and by which they are manifested, and derived from the arrangement of the molecules of this substance—that is to say, from its organization. This is almost the conception of the present day.

But this progress will only be realized at the end of the evolution of the pluri-vitalist theory. At the outset this theory seems an exaggeration of its predecessor, and a still more exaggerated form of the mythological paganism with which it was reproached. The archeus, the blas, the properties, the spirits—all have at first the effect of the genii or of the gods imagined by the ancients to preside over natural phenomena, of Neptune stirring up the waters of the sea, and of Eolus unchaining the winds. These divinities of the ancient world, the nymphs, the dryads, and the sylvan gods, seem to be transported to the Middle Ages, to that age of argument, that philosophical period of the history of humanity, and there metamorphosed into occult causes, immaterial powers, and personified forces.

Galen.—The first of the pluri-vitalists was Galen, the physician of Marcus Aurelius, the celebrated author of an Encyclopædia of which the greater part has been lost, and of which the one book preserved held its own as the anatomical oracle and breviary throughout the Middle Ages. According to Galen the human machine is guided by three kinds of spirits: animal spirits, presiding over the activity of the nervous system; vital spirits governing most of the other functions; and finally, natural spirits regulating the liver and susceptible of incorporation in the blood. In the sixteenth century, in the time of Paracelsus, Galen’s spirits became Olympic spirits. They still presided over the functional activity of the organs, the liver, heart, and brain, but they also existed in all the bodies of nature.

Van Helmont.—Finally, the theory was laid down by Van Helmont, physician, chemist, experimentalist, and philosopher, endowed with a rare and penetrating intellect. Here we find many profound truths combined with fantastic dreams. Refusing to admit the direct action of an immaterial agent, such as the soul, on inert matter, on the body, he filled up the abyss which separated them by creating a whole hierarchy of immaterial principles which played the part of mediators and executive agents. At the head of this hierarchy was placed the thinking and immortal soul; below was the sensitive and mortal soul, having for its minister the principal archeus, the aura vitalis, a kind of incorporeal agent, which is remarkably like the vital principle, and which had its seat at the orifice of the stomach. Below again were the subordinate agents, the blas, or vulcans placed in each organ, and intelligently directing its mechanism like skillful workmen.

These chimerical ideas are not, however, so far astray as the theory of vital properties. When we see a muscle contract, we say that this phenomenon is due to a vital property—i.e., a property without any analogue in the physical world, namely contractility, in the same way the nerve possesses two vital properties, excitability and conductibility, which Vulpian proposed to blend into one, calling it neurility. These are mere names, serving as a kind of shorthand; but to those who believe that there is something real in it, this something is not very far from the blas of Van Helmont. Vulcans, hidden in the muscle or the nerve, are here detected by attraction, there by the production and the propagation of the nervous influx; that is to say, by phenomena of which we as yet know no analogues in the physical world, but of which we cannot say that they do not exist.