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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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