The possibility of a machine at the root of the phenomena in question always has to be excluded in order that vitalism may be proved, and I cannot grant that the necessity of such an exclusion has been actually shown by any of my fellow-combatants against so-called mechanism, except Noll.[66] [66] We are dealing here with morphogenesis and so-called vegetative physiology only; to certain psychologists, who have refuted the theory of psycho-physical parallelism, I must grant that they also have proved vitalism. (See Volume II.) *The Logic of our First Proof of Vitalism* Let us devote the end of our present lecture to an account of the logical means by which it has been possible to develop what we hope will be regarded as a true *proof* of life autonomy. Firstly, we have looked upon the phenomena of morphogenesis without any prepossessions; we may say that we have fully surrendered ourselves to them; we have not attacked them with any sort of dogmatism except the inherent dogmatism of all reasoning. But this dogmatism, if it may be called so, does not postulate that the results of the inorganic doctrines must hold for the organic world, but only that both the inorganic and the organic must be subject to certain most general principles. By studying life as a given phenomenon, by fully devoting ourselves to our problem, we not only have analysed into its last elements what was given to us as our subject, but we also, more actively, have created new combinations out of those elements: and it was from the discussion of these positive constructions that our argument for vitalism was derived. We have analysed morphogenesis into elementary processes, means, potency, formative stimulus, just as the physicist analyses mechanics into time, velocity, mass, and force; we have then rearranged our elements into “systems”--the equipotential systems, the harmonious-equipotential system in particular, just as the physicist composes his elements into the concepts of momentum or of kinetic energy or of work. And finally, we have discussed our compositions and have obtained our result, just as the physicist gets his ultimate results by discussing work and kinetic energy and momentum. Of course the comparison is by no means intended to show that mechanics and biology are sciences of the same kind. In my opinion, they are not so at all; but nevertheless there do exist similarities of a logical kind between them. And it is not the formal, logical character alone which allows us to compare biology with other natural sciences: there is still something more, there is one kind of assumption or postulate, or whatever you may choose to call it, without which all science whatever would be altogether *impossible*. I refer to the concept of *universality*. All concepts about nature which are gained by positive construction out of elements resulting from analysis, claim to be of *universal validity*; without that claim there could indeed be no science.