The most important point has already been emphasised. Even if the theory of the struggle for existence were correct, it would be possible to subject the world as a whole to a teleological interpretation. But these anti-Darwinian theories now emerging, though they do not directly induce teleological interpretation, suggest it much more strongly than orthodox Darwinism does. A world which in its evolution is not exposed, for good or ill, to the action of chance factors—playing with it and forcing it hither and thither—but which, exposed indeed to the most diverse conditions of existence and their influences, and harmonising with them, nevertheless carries implicitly and infallibly within itself the laws of its own expression, and especially the necessity to develop upwards into higher and higher forms, is expressly suited for teleological consideration, and we can understand how it is that the old physico-teleological evidences of the existence of God are beginning to hold up their heads again. They are wrong when they try to demonstrate God, but quite right when they simply seek to show that nature does not contradict—in [pg 186] fact that it allows room and validity to—belief in the Highest Wisdom as the cause and guide of all things natural.
As far as the question of the right to interpret nature teleologically is concerned, it would be entirely indifferent whether what Korschinsky calls “the tendency to progress,” and the system of laws in obedience to which evolution brings forth its forms, can be interpreted “mechanically” or not; that is to say, whether or not evolution depends on conditions and potentialities of living matter, which can be demonstrated and made mechanically commensurable or not. It may be that they can neither be demonstrated nor made mechanically commensurable, but lie in the impenetrable mystery inherent in all life. Whether this mystery really exists, and whether religion has any particular interest in it if it does, must be considered in the following chapter.
Chapter VIII. The Mechanical Theory Of Life.
What is life—not in the spiritual and transcendental sense, but in its physical and physiological aspects? What is this mysterious complex of processes and phenomena, common to everything animate, from the seaweed to the rose, and from the human body to the bacterium, this ability to “move” of itself, to change and yet to remain like itself, to take up dead substances into itself, to assimilate and to excrete, to initiate and sustain, in respiration, in nutrition, in external and internal movements, the most complex chemical and physical processes, to develop and build up through a long series of stages a complete whole from the primitive beginnings in the germ, to grow, to become mature, and gradually to break up again, and with all this to repeat in itself the type of its parent, and to bring forth others like itself, thus perpetuating its own species, to react effectively to stimuli, to produce protective devices against injury, and to regenerate lost parts? All this is done by living organisms, all this is the expression in them of “Life.” What is it? Whence comes it? And how can it be explained?
The problem of the nature of life, of the principle of vitality, is almost as old as philosophy itself, and from the earliest times in which men began to ponder over the problem, the same antitheses have been apparent which we find to-day. Disguised under various catchwords and with the greatest diversities of expression, the antitheses remain essentially the same through the centuries, competing with one another, often mingling curiously, so that from time to time one or other almost disappears, but always crops up again, so that it seems as if the conflict would be a never-ending one—the antitheses between the mechanical and the “vitalistic” view of life. On the one side there is the conviction that the processes of life may be interpreted in terms of natural processes of a simple and obvious kind, indeed directly in terms of those which are most general and most intelligible—namely, the simplest movements of the smallest particles of matter, which are governed by the same laws as movement in general. And associated with this is the attempt to take away any special halo from around the processes of life, to admit even here no other processes but the mechanical ones, and to explain everything as the effect of material causes. On the opposite side is the conviction that vital phenomena occupy a special and peculiar sphere in the world of natural phenomena, a higher platform; that they cannot be explained by merely physical or chemical or mechanical factors, and that, if “explaining” means reducing to terms of such factors, [pg 189] they do in truth include something inexplicable. These opposing conceptions of the living and the organic have been contrasted with one another, in most precise form and exact expression, by Kant in certain chapters of the Kritik der Urteilskraft, which must be regarded as a classic for our subject.[56] But as far as their general tendency is concerned, they were already represented in the nature-philosophies of Democritus on the one hand, and of Aristotle on the other.
All the essential constituents of the modern mechanical theories are really to be found in Democritus, the causal interpretation, the denial of any operative purposes or formative principles, the admission and assertion of quantitative explanations alone, the denial of qualities, the reduction of all cosmic developments to the “mechanics of the atom” (even to attractions and repulsions, thus setting aside the “energies”), the inevitable necessity of these mechanical sequences, indeed at bottom even the conviction of the “constancy of the sum of matter and energy.” (For, as he says, “nothing comes out of nothing.”) And although he makes the “soul” the principle of the phenomena of life, that is in no way contradictory to his general mechanical theory, but is quite congruent with it. For the “soul” is to him only an aggregation of thinner, smoother, and [pg 190] rounder atoms, which as such are more mobile, and can, as it were, quarter themselves in the body, but nevertheless stand in a purely mechanical relation to it.
Aristotle, who was well aware of the diametrical opposition, represents, as compared with Democritus, the Socratic-Platonic teleological interpretation of nature, and in regard to the question of living organisms his point of view may quite well be designated by the modern name of “vitalism.” Especially in his theory of the vegetable soul, the essence of vitalism is already contained. It is the λόγος ἐνυλος (logos enhylos), the idea immanent in the matter, the conceptual essence of the organism, or its ideal whole, which is inherent in it from its beginnings in the germ, and determines, like a directing law, all its vegetative processes, and so raises it from a state of “possibility” to one of “reality.” All that we meet with later as “nisus formativus,” as “life-force” (vis vitalis), as “endeavour after an end” (Zielstrebigkeit), is included in the scope of Aristotelian thought. And he has the advantage over many of his successors of being very much clearer.[57]
The present state of the problem of life may be regarded as due to a reaction of biological investigation and opinion from the “vitalistic” theories which prevailed in the first half of last century, and which were in turn at once the root and the fruit of the German Nature-philosophy of that time.