Vitalism

VITALISM (from Latin vitalis - life), the doctrine that life phenomena, although conditioned to a greater or lesser degree by physical and chemical processes, are at the same time separated from phenomena of inanimate nature by an absolute boundary and are governed by special immaterial forces, principles, or beginnings, different from those observed in the inorganic world. The history of V. can be divided into three periods: 1) ancient V., 2) V. of the modern era from Paracelsus to Johann Müller, 3) neovitalism. Ancient V. To speak of ancient V. only cum grano salis, since the modernization of Greek natural philosophy and science, upon closer acquaintance with them, becomes a very difficult matter. V. of the modern era is defined by its opposition to mechanism and aims to supplement its gaps, but such opposition was not clearly expressed in ancient natural philosophy: the points of disagreement of ancient systems lay in a different plane - the arrangement and governance of the world as a whole. Most ancient natural philosophers drew a distinction not only between living and dead, but also between humans and other living beings, considering the latter distinction more important. In the recognized materialists of antiquity, Leucippus and Democritus (460-370 B.C.) and their later followers - Epicurus (342-271 B.C.) and Lucretius (99-55 B.C.) - we encounter a clear demarcation of living and dead by the criterion of soul; their innovation consisted in identifying the soul with reason, considered the exclusive property of humans. The soul, according to the atomists, consists of atoms of a special kind, small, round, easily movable, resembling atoms of fire; they penetrate the body through breathing and, due to the special structure of the body, are retained in it, animating and moving it. We find a view closer to modern V. in Plato (427-347 B.C.): for him the immortal soul is not only the moving principle of the body, but also 'self-moving'. It should be noted, however, that for Plato not only organisms but also celestial bodies are alive; the entire world is 'a living being, animate and rational'. The difference between various categories of living beings depends on the composition of the soul and the greater degree of reason. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) is usually considered the founder of V., although he is not to a greater extent than other ancient thinkers, and perhaps even to a lesser degree, since he did not recognize the immortality of the soul, but considered the soul to be the form, the entelechy of the body. According to Aristotle's teaching, every body, natural and artificial, consists of matter and form, which transforms matter into body; matter is a relative concept, it also represents bodies of a lower order that have been formed, and prime matter remains unknown to us. Forms exist from eternity, and every new body comes into being with the participation of previously existing bodies, i.e., forms. Of course, not every matter can receive any form; it must possess a certain potency, and in the process of becoming, potency passes into actuality, the form is realized. The moment of realization, completion, is denoted by Aristotle with the term entelechy, which does not represent, as it were, either a substance or an agent, into what Driesch subsequently transformed entelechy. Living beings, according to Aristotle, have a threefold composition: 1) elements that are formed into units of a higher order; 2) simple or homogeneous parts (tissues, fluids); they in turn serve as matter for 3) heterogeneous parts - organs. Organs are joined into a whole - the organism - with the help of the highest form - the soul. 'The soul,' says Aristotle, 'is the first entelechy of a natural body, organized, having life in potentiality.' At the origin of a living being, matter is provided by the mother's secretion, form by the father's seed; in spontaneous generation, matter and form are provided by the environment. Aristotle distinguishes several kinds of soul: nutritive, sensitive, motive, and rational; each subsequent kind includes the preceding ones. In development and life, pneuma and innate heat also participate (however, Aristotle speaks of them in passing). However, these concepts, especially pneuma (spirit, Latin - spiritus), played a significant role in ancient biology and medicine. Pneuma, a special subtle substance, penetrates the body through breathing and animates it; its excess, deficiency, or improper distribution cause diseases; the relationship of this concept to the soul of the atomists is obvious. The Stoics especially popularized pneuma, seeing in it the universal animating principle; in medicine we encounter pneuma in some works of the Hippocratic collection (5th and 4th centuries B.C.) and then in the school of pneumatists (1st century A.D.) and in Galen (2nd century), who synthesized ancient medicine. In the question of the soul, Galen follows Plato, but the soul acts on the body not directly, but through the intermediary of the subtle material pneuma, which, according to the three parts of the soul, is of three kinds - psychic, animal, and physical. Echoes of this doctrine, firmly rooted in science thanks to Galen's authority, are encountered until the 18th century. Thus, ancient thought in its attempts to define the specific differences of living developed a series of concepts: material soul, dispersing after death, soul-substance, but immortal, soul-form (binding the complex whole), and finally pneuma - subtle material spirit, essentially identical with the material soul, but having received an auxiliary role. When the church gained control of the world, it combined the Jewish myth of creation with the speculations of natural philosophers, mainly with Plato's teaching, but partly with Aristotle's and the Stoics', and developed the dogma of the immortal soul governing the body. Although this dogma had nothing to do with science, being obligatory for believers, it left its mark on the subsequent development of science and is undoubtedly one of the most enduring roots of modern vulgar vitalism. Vitalism of the modern era arises as a counterbalance to the mechanical view of living beings, beginning to take root in science under the influence of the development of experimental physics, mechanics, and the application of mathematics to natural science. For the first time, this view was formulated with full sharpness by Descartes in his teaching about animals, which he considered machines or automatons, set in motion by animal spirits (spiritus animales) circulating through the nervous system, their circulation being entirely determined by external irritations. Man differs from animals by the presence of thinking substance, i.e., an immortal soul capable of feeling and thinking, which, being localized in the pineal gland, can change the movement of spirits and thereby influence the machine of the body; in animals, as is known, Descartes denied any ability to feel. Descartes' teaching was adopted by some physicians of that time, the so-called iatrophysicists and iatromechanists, while iatrochemists, originating from Paracelsus, attached main importance to chemical processes and recognized the presence in the organism, besides the soul, special guiding forces. Such is the teaching of van Helmont (1577-1644) about archa regulating processes in individual organs. The vitalism of van Helmont and other 17th-century scientists (e.g., Harvey) was still primitive and vague, and the first developed system of V. appears only in the 18th century; it belongs to the German professor of medicine and chemistry G. E. Stahl (1660-1732), known for his chemical theory of phlogiston. His views are set forth in his extensive work 'The True Theory of Medicine' (1708), they provide the ideological basis for his medical views and are formulated in opposition to the teaching of F. Hoffmann, his colleague at the university, who viewed life from a mechanical standpoint. Stahl decisively rejects the existence in the body of various vital principles, or archa, and recognizes only the single soul as the guiding principle. His basic position: 'The soul itself builds its body, manages it and moves it without outside help.' Stahl is led to this position by two series of judgments concerning 1) the purposiveness of the organism, 2) its self-preservation. Analyzing the concept of mechanism or machine, which reduces to size, figure, position of parts and movement, Stahl finds that it is in itself foreign to the concept of purposiveness, i.e., the use for a certain purpose. A mechanism performing special functions is an instrument or organism, like a clock, adjusted and adapted for telling time. Such an organ cannot arise by chance, it exists for someone else, and such a purposeful builder and acting agent is the soul. Another series of arguments concerns the composition of the organism, which Stahl defines not as a chemical body or compound (mixtio), but as a mixture or aggregate (aggregatum). This aggregate, besides the special arrangement of substances, is distinguished by the fact that its substances decompose extremely easily, and yet the organism restores itself and exists for a long time. This act of restoring what is lost and preserving the body, contradicting everything observed in inanimate nature, is possible only with the help of movements directed by the soul. Stahl's vitalism, which considers the body as an organ of the soul, is usually called animism.

Interesting is the heated polemic between Stahl and the philosopher Leibniz, who partially adhered to the mechanical position of Descartes and characterized the organism as a 'machine, not only hydropneumatic, but also fiery-explosive'. From Stahl originate two lines of V.; XVIII century—French and German. The first is connected with the medical school of Montpellier, where: followers of Stahl were hostile to the followers of the mechanist Boerhaave. Among the vitalists of this school belonged-^ Borde (1722-1776), who viewed the organism as a federation of organs that possess an independent ability to life (the harmony of the whole is determined, mainly, by the nervous system), and, in particular, Barthez (1734-1806); standing on the position of Stahl in relation to mechanists, Barthez does not consider it possible to attribute conscious soul to the guidance of physiological functions and introduces alongside it a special 'vital principle' (principe vital). The influence of the Montpellier school is attributed to the vitalist tendency present in Bichat (1771-1802), who, considering the organism as a collection of tissues, attributed to them, besides physical, special 'vital properties'—sensitivity, contractility, etc., which change and cannot be accounted for.—The German line of V. had much greater significance in science, to which belonged, first of all, the famous embryologist K. F. Wolff (1733-94). In his classic 'Theoria generationis' (1759), where the theory of epigenesis, i.e., the emergence of parts of the organism from an undifferentiated mass of the germ, was first fully and clearly presented, Wolff appears as a vitalist and critic of mechanical medicine. Subjecting the facts of development of plants and the chick that he observed to analysis, he comes to the distinction between basic and additional principles of development. The basic ones are: 1) the ability of nutrient fluids to solidify and in this way form parts of the embryo and 2) a special 'essential force' (vis essentialis), which directs the movement of fluids where and where there are no blood vessels. The developing body is not a machine, it consists only of 'inorganic substance', but the machine is a product of the latter, includes it in itself and must be strictly delimited from it. Without definitely expressing himself regarding physiological processes of the animal organism, Wolff points out that mechanical medicine of the English physicians Pitcairn, Friend, etc. concerns only the simplest acts: movement of blood, respiration, swallowing, etc., but otherwise represents a 'spurious system'. And only at the very end of his work, in a note, Wolff adds that personally his views most closely approach the doctrine of Stahl about the soul governing the body. In what relation the 'essential force' stands to it remains unclear.—The second major vitalist of the XVIII century is the anatomist Blumenbach (1752-1840), and his V. is also connected with the processes of embryonic development, and especially, with regeneration, and is set forth in a small book 'On the Formative Drive' (1789). By the term 'formative drive' (nisus formativus, Bildungstrieb) Blumenbach designates 'a special force, innate to organic bodies and, as long as they live, constantly acting'. This force guides development and must be placed alongside other life forces (which at that time, following Haller, were considered contractility, irritability, and sensitivity), as well as the basic forces of nature, e.g., attraction... The 'essential force' (vis essentialis) of Wolff Blumenbach considers a special case of nisus formativus. In Blumenbach, the new thing is the recognition of the life principle as one of the natural forces.—Even further departs from the doctrine of Stahl the physiologist Reil (1759-1813), who in the first book of the 'Archiv fur die Physiologie' he founded (1796) placed a discussion about the vital force, where he puts forward the hypothesis of living matter. 'The basis of all phenomena of animal bodies must be sought in living matter, in the original difference of its basic substances, in their mixture and form'. The nature of this matter is such that it produces animal bodies as if by a process of special crystallization; it has the ability to assimilate foreign matter and to shape it purposefully. At the beginning of the XIX century V. in Germany receives wide distribution; the doctrine of the 'vital force' becomes increasingly dogmatic and passes into textbooks. To the vitalists of this time belong a number of outstanding scientists: Treviranus, who at first taught about the vital force and matter capable of life, and then put forward the concept of instinct, which determines development; Tiedemann, inclined following Reil to the recognition of 'living substance', the physiologist Burdach, Oken. But the most famous is the famous physiologist and zoologist Johann Muller (1801-58), who set forth his views in a widely spread textbook of physiology (1833). The difference between the inorganic and organic worlds lies, in Muller's opinion, 1) in substance, 2) in the continuous activity of the organism, which manifests itself as a creative ability working according to a known rational plan and according to the laws of harmony; in the organism there is a unity of the whole, reigning over the multitude of its parts. The cause of these peculiarities lies in the 'organic force', able to form not only organic substances but also organs necessary for the whole. 'This creative rational force manifests itself in accordance with strict lawfulness, as nature requires of each animal, it exists in the germ even before its future parts have separated, and it is this that actually produces the members without which the idea of the whole could not be realized'; this force disappears with death. Further, Muller raises the question, whether this principle is really a force or some weightless substance, and leaves it unanswered; what is certain is that it is movable and has no parts, because it can divide and be inherited. Besides this force, Muller recognizes in the living being also a soul, which is spread throughout the entire organism, but acts only through the medium of the brain.—At the end of the 40s of the XIX century V., having received, so to speak, almost universal recognition, rather quickly loses one position after another. By this time in science a number of discoveries had occurred, which showed that the functions attributed to the vital force can be explained without its participation and that, finally, the very concept of force must be changed. These include: synthesis_: of organic substance (specific to the animal organism)—urea, produced by Wohler (1828), research on animal electricity by Du Bois-Reymond and the law of conservation of force by J. R. Mayer and Helmholtz. It is interesting to note that among the opponents of V. turned out to be the closest students of J. Muller: Du Bois-Reymond and Schwann. Lotze, a physician, later a philosopher, placed in the 'Dictionary of Physiology' of Wagner (1842) an article 'Life', in which he declared organisms to be machines, but the most devastating criticism of V. was made by Du Bois-Reymond in the preface to his research on animal electricity (1848). The whole world as a whole decomposes into particles of matter moving according to certain laws, under the influence of central forces connected with them, and living beings are no exception; there is no vital force, and in general no force can exist independently, and all the more to perform such diverse tasks as were attributed to the vital force; the ideal of science is analytical mechanics, into the sphere of which organisms entirely belong. In the 50s and 60s of the XIX century the strengthening of the mechanistic position was facilitated by the flourishing of the vulgar materialistic philosophy of Vogt, Moleschott and Buchner, which, however, was expounded for the general public, and especially, the appearance of Darwin's theory, which gave a materialistic explanation of purposiveness and knocked out the last ground from under V.—From the scientific criticism of V. in subsequent years it is necessary to note the lectures of Claude Bernard on life phenomena. Criticizing V., rejecting the 'vital force', the latter, however, did not take up a consistently materialistic position, remaining essentially an agnostic. He recognizes the existence of material conditions determining the appearance of life processes; at the same time, he admits the existence of laws determining 'the order and form' of THESE processes.

V. Karpov. Neovitalism. The empirical biological material accumulated by the mid-19th century and continuing to grow thereafter clearly showed that, despite the deepening physicochemical research and the enormous results achieved, the fundamental problems of life (the problem of purposiveness, evolution, ontogenesis and phylogenesis) cannot be resolved by this means; the contradiction noted by Engels as early as 1878 between this material and the empiricism, metaphysical materialism and eclecticism prevailing in the natural sciences was becoming increasingly acute. Only materialistic dialectics could resolve this contradiction, from the point of view of which, on the one hand, life processes are forms of motion of a single matter and are therefore subject to the same physicochemical regularities as phenomena of inanimate nature; on the other hand, however, living matter represents the highest stage of organization of this single matter and, being connected with previous stages by continuous transitions, at the same time possesses a specific quality and is subject to special, specifically biological regularities that require for their cognition special, adequate methods of research. But this dialectic 'in its rational form is hateful to the bourgeoisie and its theoretical leaders, because in the positive understanding of what exists it also includes the understanding of its negation and its inevitable fall; ...because it makes no concessions, being critical and revolutionary in its essence' (Marx). And since for the same reason dialectical materialism became the most powerful weapon of the proletariat that came out to fight for its liberation and this struggle began to take on an ever broader scope, the bourgeoisie, in search of a counterbalance, sharply turned in the field of ideology to the already seemingly obsolete idealistic systems of Kant, Berkeley, Aristotle, Plato and many others, not to mention the new flourishing of religion and mysticism. However, any real progress in science is possible only by applying materialistic methods of research; therefore, in its practical activity, bourgeois science and biology in particular continue to 'spontaneously' use precisely these methods. But as soon as the question comes to the philosophical generalization of the empirical material obtained, the picture changes. Part of the researchers gets stuck in agnosticism or hides behind it, begins to repeat after Claude Bernard that 'the biologist should not be asked whether he is a spiritualist or a materialist,' and either refuses to recognize the existence of any qualitative distinction between life and inanimate nature and the regularities specific to it (life), or, recognizing the qualitative peculiarity of life phenomena, declares it unknowable, 'irrational,' inaccessible to natural-scientific study. Such are the various schools of the so-called mechanists. Others take openly idealistic positions: like the mechanists, they not only do not deny the power of physicochemical methods of research, but even admit the possibility of solving by this means such problems as the synthesis of an egg capable of development (Driesch); like the mechanists, they identify the materialistic interpretation of life phenomena with physicochemical ones, but, not finding on this path explanations for the specific peculiarities of life phenomena, declare the distinction between inorganic nature and life absolute, life autonomous, and try to understand it with the help of special supersensory factors constructed by intellectual means. Like the old vitalists, these neovitalists again resort to non-material 'life forces,' although they call them by different names; such are the 'dominants' of Reinke, the 'entelechy' of Driesch, the 'dynamic morph' of Gurwitz, the 'systems of impulses' of von Uexküll, the 'souls of atoms' of Köhler, the 'life energy' of Rignano, etc. However, taking into account the views prevailing in the natural sciences, modern vitalists modify their 'life forces' »8 in the sense that they include them in the general chain of causality and do not allow them to violate the laws of conservation of matter and energy (although Driesch considers that this is by no means necessary). Rudolf Virchow also calls himself a neovitalist, although his position has nothing in common with modern neovitalism. He does not reduce life phenomena to simple physicochemical processes and insists on the 'peculiarity' of life phenomena, which he connects with their specific substrate—the cell. At the same time, he rejects any spiritualism and teleology. In these his quite correct views, however, he is inconsistent. Along with, and sometimes simultaneously with, materialistic thoughts, he expresses doubts about the historical origin of life from inanimate nature and about the correctness of the evolutionary theory, and in places he even goes to a compromise with the church. Another difference of modern V. from the old one is the significant limitation of the field of activity of 'life forces': through the mouth of its recognized leader, Driesch, neovitalism declares that 'physiology, in the narrow sense of the word, cannot provide proof of the autonomy of the life process.' There remains, however, a vast area—physiology of morphogenesis (embryogenesis, restitution and regeneration), heredity and neuropsychic life (reflexes, instincts, memory and human reason)—which is still very inadequately investigated, and it is from this area that Driesch draws material for 'three proofs of the autonomy of life phenomena,' which (proofs) he himself considers one of his greatest merits. 'Experiments on animal eggs in the first period of cleavage have shown that the first two, as well as the first four cleavage cells, if separated from each other, each produce a whole organism of reduced size; even isolated cells of later stages of segmentation, which represent respectively ¹/₈, ¹/₁₆ and ¹/₃₂ of the egg, also give whole derivatives, although they do not go through all stages of embryonic development. The integrity of the developmental result is not violated even when the relative positions of nuclei or entire cleavage cells are changed. A single organism (only of increased size) is also obtained after artificially induced fusion of two eggs. And, finally, the most remarkable experiment: if we cut the embryo, which has already completed the segmentation process and consists of approximately a thousand cells, i.e., remove elements from it in any quantity and arranged in any way, we will still obtain a whole organism as a result.' Such a system, in which 'any of the cells can, if necessary, produce the parts necessary for the whole organism,' Driesch calls 'equipotential,' and since 'cells... left arbitrarily next to each other always work collectively, in a "harmonious" way,' he constructs the concept of a 'harmoniously-equipotential system'; 'such systems are found everywhere in the animal kingdom, they also play a role in the processes of regeneration.' 'The proportionally typical development' of any segment of such a system, from the point of view of pure chemistry or pure colloid chemistry, 'is fundamentally incomprehensible'; it also contradicts the idea of any 'machine-like' ('by machine we mean the typical arrangement of physical and chemical constituent parts, the action of which causes a typical effect') construction of a harmoniously-equipotential system, 'because the specific "mechanism," built differently in three spatial dimensions, does not remain the same when parts are removed from it or when certain parts are arbitrarily moved within it. Thus, a mechanism cannot be the basis of embryology,' 'the causal basis of certain life phenomena cannot be any mechanism, of whatever kind. Therefore, non-mechanical agents must necessarily exist,' to which Driesch gives the name borrowed from Aristotle—'entelechy.' Such is the 'first proof of the autonomy of life processes.'—The 'second proof' consists in the analysis of the phenomena of heredity, embryogenesis, regeneration and is accompanied by the construction of the concept of a 'complexly-equipotential system,' i.e., a system where each part is capable not only of producing an unlimited number of new individual parts, but also the same 'composite aggregates': each cell from the epidermis of a begonia leaf can reproduce the whole plant; the cambium in most higher plants has the same property; similarly, any transverse section through the skin of aquatic annelids recreates the complex brain; the germ cells of any organism recreate a new organism. All these complexly-equipotential systems 'arise from a single cell by repeated division,' and it is impossible to imagine any 'machine' that would 'repeatedly divide and at the same time maintain its integrity,' not only is it impossible, but also 'meaningless.' 'The basis for the development of elements of complexly-equipotential systems is, therefore, not a machine, but something that is not "extensive" (i.e., spatially extended) diversity.'

We will call this principle here 'entelechy'.-The third proof,' finally, is based on an analysis of the movements of animal organisms (tropism, instincts, reflexes) and of human actions, 'considered exclusively as a phenomenon of nature and, therefore, without any psychological justification.' And here it turns out that neither the variability of instincts, nor the formation of conditioned reflexes, nor the manifestations of 'memory' and 'reason' in man can be inherent in any conceivable 'machine,' but rather indicate, albeit 'indirectly,' the presence of the same immaterial agent, or entelechy, somewhat different from the previous ones and therefore called 'psychoid,' and from the point of view of metaphysics, we have, without a doubt, the right to say that ultimately 'psychoid' and 'soul-psyche' are one and the same concept, which is the subject in the experiments of life and the object in the laws of motion of the body.' Driesch's 'three proofs' have been repeatedly criticized and experimentally tested from various sides. It has been shown and proven (Saxl) that in the cases of restitution and regeneration he cites, the processes proceed in a completely different way than he depicts them; it has been shown that many of the phenomena which he considers specifically vital also occur in inanimate nature and are observed, in particular, in 'liquid' crystals (Pribram and others), as a result of which Driesch had to acknowledge crystallography as a transition from physics and chemistry to biology; the nervous and psychic phenomena he cites and numerous additional 'proofs' have been explained quite rationally and without the help of entelechy. Finally, it was not difficult to notice that these and similar vitalistic proofs rely on a completely arbitrary identification of materialistic explanation with mechanical, 'machine-like,' i.e., on a crude vulgarization of the opponent's point of view, since none of modern materialist biologists hold such views. The goal of all these 'proofs' and the basic foundation of neovitalism is actually the resolution of the problem of the purposiveness of life processes, an idealistic resolution-in opposition to the materialistic, Darwinian one, which does not satisfy the neovitalists. The Darwinian theory explains the evolution of the living world, and along with it, the purposiveness observed in it through the accumulation of random beneficial changes (see above). It is against this role assigned to chance that the vitalists protest, considering that it is impossible to explain a long regular process by chance, just as it is impossible to explain by chance the wonderfully complex and mutually adapted organs of living beings and their structure. Darwin's theory, operating, in their words, with 'absolute chance,' is declared to be 'a recipe for how to build houses of certain styles by nothing but the disorderly piling up of stones' (Driesch), and in its place various teachings of autogenesis, orthogenesis, entogenesis, nomogenesis are constructed, attempting to explain the evolution of the organic world by 'internal properties' inherent in organisms (Korzhinsky, Jensen), 'internal laws of development' (Waagen, Berg), 'capacity for selection' (Wagner), etc., and which either have an openly vitalistic and mystical character, or hide behind the fig leaf of the 'law of inertia,' 'the second law of thermodynamics.' In reality, however, all these theories come down to this: for every progressive or regressive process observed in nature, a corresponding 'property' of the organism, its 'capacity,' or 'law of development' is invented ad hoc, with the result that what we get is merely a dogmatic proclamation of the same regularity of development or the presence of purposiveness, more or less colored by a flood of words, but not helping our understanding of these facts in the least and explaining nothing at all. The objections to the Darwinian theory are based on a completely incorrect, metaphysical, absolute opposition of chance and regularity, and on the concept of a random phenomenon as an uncaused one. But if we discard the latter understanding, since nothing of the sort exists in nature and no materialist or Darwinian even thinks of such 'chance,' then two understandings of it remain. Most often, a phenomenon is called 'random' when we do not know all or some of the causes that produced it: it is in this subjective sense that Darwin spoke, saying that evolution is based on random variations. It is quite obvious that here there is no question of any denial of regularity; it is assumed that, as science develops, the causes producing these variations will be discovered and 'chance' will be eliminated. Nevertheless, even this understanding of chance is incorrect: each individual variation will remain random even when we are able to establish the entire chain of causality corresponding to it, since in reality chance is a completely objective fact, depending not at all on our knowledge or ignorance, but occurring always where many complex causes act simultaneously or phenomena belonging to independent domains, with their own independent regularities, interact. This variation is objectively random, since the changes in the external environment and the maternal organism that caused its occurrence took place independently of each other, according to their own special regularities; it is, however, at the same time also necessary, since the given effect of the external environment and the given state of the organism and the result of their interaction were strictly determined. Given the complexity of the conditions, it is impossible to predict the appearance of each individual variation, but on the basis of a sufficient number of observations it is quite possible, using the theory of probability, to predict the general distribution of these variations and to establish the regularity of this randomness. Chance thus turns out to be 'a special particular form of necessity' (Deborin). The greatest number of such objective chances is observed in collectives where the crossing of the individual regularities of the members of the collective with each other and with the regularities of the collective as a whole and with the regularities of the external environment reaches the greatest complexity; one can even say that before us here is a continuous mass of chances, through which, to use the words of Engels, necessity breaks through. But such collectives are, in the final analysis, all objects of science (electronic, atomic, molecular, cellular, human collectives), and it is quite understandable that not only in the social sciences but also in biology and physics, research methods based on the theory of probability are of ever greater importance, and that physicists now formulate even the most 'immutable' laws of their science in terms of statistical regularity and probability. Thus, 'necessity itself determines itself as chance' (Hegel, Engels). 'The sum of chances itself creates a certain necessity, while necessity, in turn, gives rise to a series of chances, creates a series of possibilities which have their roots in the essence, i.e., in the law of development of this given reality. If, therefore, the random is necessary, and the necessary is random, chance is rather absolute necessity, as Engels expresses it' (Deborin). 'A special, random form of necessity' is represented by purposiveness. 'If in the properties of a given substance there is the possibility of its infinite change and if this change occurs over a long period of time, then random coincidences of conditions are inevitable, as a result of which purposiveness appears' (Deborin), along with which, of course, non-purposive phenomena also arise. And 'purposiveness itself should be understood not absolutely, but very, very relatively,' as evidenced by numerous examples of useless and even harmful properties and organs in animals and plants. Only in this way can purposiveness be rationally understood, and only this understanding of it can serve as a reliable basis for studying the regularities governing its emergence. If we abandon this path, together with the neovitalists, then only two possible alternatives remain: one consists in the direct recognition of purposiveness as transcendent, i.e., in the recognition of a purpose set for the organism by a mind or rational being existing outside it-'God'; the second-in recognizing it as immanent, i.e., as an inalienable, primary property of living matter, due to 'a special, peculiar only to it and indivisible regularity' (Driesch). The first conclusion is categorically rejected by modern science, and the second, since Darwinism is not recognized, inevitably leads to the assumption of a 'purposively acting cause' (Kant) underlying purposiveness. Based on this, the German botanist Reinke developed (1894) his teaching of 'dominants,' or 'higher forces,' standing above energy and governing it, '...just as man does in his instruments and machines,' although at the same time 'for us all their activity remains a mystery, which we accept without being able to resolve it.'

A dominant exists for as long as there are different types of energy in the organism and different of its functions, and among this 'multitude' of them it 'is inclined to consider some higher, others subordinate'. 'Everywhere and always dominants are subject to the laws of causality, since they act only within the framework of the general laws of nature and nowhere and never violate them'. 'Thanks to external influences, dominants dormant in organisms can be awakened to life, while the activity of others can be delayed,' and some of them 'may remain hidden if for some reason the conditions necessary for their life activity do not arise'. Dominants multiply together with organisms and are destroyed with their death. They are independent of spatial conditions and work very subtly. And finally, 'there undoubtedly exists a certain analogy between the activity of dominants and the significance of mental motives. Animal instincts most sharply indicate this. Just as in machines, so in organisms dominants form a kind of animating principle, animating the material substrate. We could directly speak of an immanent unconscious intelligence (rationality) of cells, animals and plants, calling dominants... directly intelligent forces, since the activity of dominants in the organism can be compared only with multifaceted, firm and extremely high intelligence'. And it is quite natural to come from here to the 'miracles' of life, to the 'idea of god' and to 'religion, which has always been the strongest support of the poor and helpless'. Drish does not find such an approach satisfactory. Considering that in such teleological concepts as purposefulness, purposiveness, as if someone imperceptibly is present who sets goals for the organism, he believes that these concepts should not be used in constructing a natural-scientific theory, 'unless one wants the exposition of this theory to be absolutely logical from an objective point of view'. He replaces all these terms with the expression 'relating to the whole' (ganzheitsbezogen), which was met with a very favorable reception by biologists and against which, perhaps, there would have been no particular objection, since the usual understanding of purposefulness really amounts to correspondence to the interests of the organism as a whole. In itself, this replacement of one term with another certainly does not help solve the problem of purposefulness, nor do other proposed replacements help, for example, 'long-term viability' by Rou. But Drish uses the term he proposed in a purely metaphysical way, opposing the whole, on the one hand, to the previous stages of embryonic development, and on the other hand, to the constituent parts of which it is composed. It is quite obvious that in actual reality such an opposition does not exist, that from the moment of its origin the organism is already a 'whole' and that there is no 'whole' without its constituent parts, but all this does not prevent Drush from asserting that it is this 'wholeness', this bare abstraction, that is the factor regulating and directing the development and life activity of the organism, that is the very entelechy with which we have already become acquainted above. How does this entelechy act? Drish believes that its action can be represented at least in such a way that 'the non-mechanical agent either exerts a delaying effect on phenomena that were pre-formed in the material combination of the system under consideration... or, under certain conditions, ceases to manifest its delaying action'; the entelechy itself produces nothing and does not violate the principle of conservation of energy. On the other hand, entelechies are accessible to influence from the material world, which can either stimulate them to activity or force them to modify their activity or suspend it. Drish believes that by defining the functions of entelechy in this way, he avoids violating the principle of causality, which some old vitalists were allegedly guilty of. In reality, however, such an interaction and causal relationship between the abstraction-entelechy-and the phenomena of the material world are completely unreal, and the material causal relationship of phenomena (and we know no other) cannot include entelechy as a link. And that entelechy is merely a bare abstraction is evidenced by Drish himself when he says that psychoid entelechies cannot be described in any terms accessible to us, and 'all their characteristics form a complex system of negations'; entelechy is not a special kind of energy, nor any definite substance, no types of quantitative or spatial relationships are applicable to it, including divisibility and localization. 'Entelechy can only be conceived'. Attributing to entelechy regulating and directing functions with respect to the material processes occurring in a living organism, Drish is 'logically' forced to recognize in it a number of mental properties, but since the presence of psyche does not fit in with his concept of entelechy, he attributes to it the abilities of 'perception', 'following', 'willing' and 'knowing' only in some 'figurative sense', and moreover 'willing and knowing' in a primary, i.e. not based on any previous experience. It is quite impossible to find any real meaning in this heap of words and concepts, and Drish himself is forced to admit that 'we are quite unable to represent even to the slightest degree such specific primary knowledge and willing', but he is still 'firmly convinced that we are forced to admit the existence of vitalistic autonomous agents' possessing such properties (since otherwise his entire complex system collapses). The totality of these properties constitutes what Drish calls 'intensive (i.e. non-spatial and non-quantitative) manifoldness', and the activity of entelechy consists in the fact that, with the help of existing material 'conditions', it reveals outward this very its 'manifoldness', but itself introduces nothing material into the life processes. From the point of view of the 'law of sufficient reason', it is important in this connection that 'every spatial phenomenon caused or changed by entelechy has its preceding individual correlate in a certain individual characteristic feature of entelechy'. Drish leaves the question of the number of entelechies to some extent open: 'Naively speaking,' he says, 'one can admit different kinds of entelechies playing a role in the organism' (morphogenetic and psychoid entelechies, entelechies of instincts and actions, entelechies of individual parts of the brain and individual formative processes) and 'working sometimes already too independently and (even) without paying attention to the whole' (in experimental true self-differentiation, in superregeneration); he considers it possible even to arrange entelechies 'according to rank and significance' (Rang und Wert). At the same time, 'however, all entelechies originate from one original and can in this respect be considered together as one'; it is even possible that for all living beings there exists only one entelechy, manifesting itself in time as multiple and extremely resembling that very old 'god' about whom Drish, however, makes no mention. Extremely important is the attitude toward determinism of life phenomena that follows from this teaching: 'In an ideal sense, i.e. for a hypothetical case when the researcher would know, for example, the material composition of the egg and the entelechy 'controlling' this egg, prediction of life processes would be possible. In reality such possibility, undoubtedly, does not exist, since no one can know the entelechy before it has manifested itself by its effect on the substance, and the material installations themselves do not represent all the 'conditions' necessary for the realization of life processes'. From this it follows that 'from a chicken egg a non-chicken can also hatch'... and this is testified to, according to Drish, by the phenomena of mutation and phylogeny. Finally, it will not be useless to note Drish's quite consistent statement from the point of view of the teaching on entelechy, that 'vitalism not only does not contradict everything 'occult' (spiritism, telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.), but even clears the way for it': with this statement he concludes the (larger) part of his 'philosophy of the organic' which deals with the most important achievements of 'analytical biology'. Among the biologists adhering to this teaching, mention should be made of the Moscow professor A. Gurvich: he set himself the task of creating, in addition to the 'theoretical V.' of Drish, whose entelechy does not lend itself to further empirical study, a 'V. practical' operating on 'factors capable of being localized in space... and subject to research according to the general principles of natural science'. Along with species regularities according to which organisms arise and exist and which determine cellular processes at the initial stages of embryonic development, he finds in the further development of individuals a predominance of elements of chance, as a result of which, in his opinion, understanding of the development of the whole becomes impossible (see above about 'chance').

To eliminate this 'contradiction,' he posits the existence of some normative principle, which, while allowing chance to determine the activity of each individual cell, prescribes a plan for their collective 10v activity. From this he arrives at the concept of a 'dynamically preformed form' (morphe), to which he later adds the concept of a 'field.' This 'field' resembles a physical force field only in that 'the field factor is determined by its coordinates and time,' but in all other respects it is something entirely different: first, it is not a force field; second, it is anisotropic to any degree; and third—and this is precisely its 'vitalistic' character, mainly—'there is no need to seek or admit the existence of definitely localized sources of this field or special carriers of its properties, like charged bodies in a dielectric' (in other words, again something completely unreal, invented ad hoc to 'explain' phenomena that, in the author's opinion, cannot be explained from a materialist point of view). With respect to this field, 'morphe' is a 'reformed purely dynamic plane without material carriers,' 'a part of space of a certain configuration and localization, from which the field with its properties originates.' And since the concept of preformation logically forces one to 'consider the life cycle of the individual as a process of realizing something contained in the (fertilized) egg, let us say calmly—an idea,' the connection with entelechy is thus established and is merely confirmed by a later note that these factors must be considered metaphysically as manifestations of entelechy. A special direction in V. is so-called psychovitalism, closely connected with psycholamarckism; its first representatives were Pauli and France. The difference of this direction from V. Driesh and others lies in that instead of knowledge, will, and judgment 'in a figurative sense,' attributed to some abstraction standing outside living matter, it attributes these properties to living matter itself and in a direct sense. Similar ideas were expressed in Russia by E. Shultz, who compared organogenetic processes with instinctive and conscious actions, and by V. A. Wagner, according to whom living substance has the ability not only 'to react in accordance with its state' but also 'to act in such a way that we have the right to speak of a preference which living substance shows for certain objects, certain actions over others.' We thus have to do here with a special animism that invents a psychic act wherever it encounters anything incomprehensible. The natural conclusion of this direction is panpsychism (Pauli). In conclusion, one cannot fail to mention the Vienna Professor Schneider with his euvitalism, who places the phenomena of life in some 'four-dimensional space' and quite seriously discusses astral bodies, spirits (Spirit), and other spiritualistic 'phenomena,' and, naturally enough, about God. This theology alone, to which the most prominent representatives of modern V. inevitably descend, would be sufficient to characterize the social and scientific reactionary nature of this doctrine. To no lesser degree does this reactionary nature manifest itself in another feature of V., which runs like a red thread through its entire history—the constant tendency to set a limit to natural-scientific knowledge precisely at the point and time when, in the process of continuous and infinite penetration into the secrets of nature, it approaches phenomena the laws of which require for their disclosure new technical and gnoseological methods. V. puts a stop here and declares everything beyond this turning point to be the sphere of activity of the supersensory, unknowable, metaphysical 'life force,' 'dominants,' 'entelechy,' 'divine creativity,' and 'principally inexplicable' from a materialist point of view. It is quite natural that it is precisely on this soil that vitalism suffered its most severe defeats: during the 150 years that have passed since the discovery of oxygen and the analysis of respiration and heat production in animals, V. has had to surrender so many positions that in 1924 Driesh, as we have seen, was forced, albeit with reservations, to melancholily admit that 'physiology, in the narrow sense of the word, cannot provide proof of the autonomy of the life process'... He and others like him now try in every way to 'prove' the unknowability of the phenomena of morphogenesis, heredity, and neuropsychic life, in the field of which scientific thought still encounters the greatest difficulties. But even that relatively little which has already been achieved in these fields at the present time (the influence of hormones on morphogenesis, the exact study of the phenomena of restitution, Pavlov's doctrine of conditioned reflexes, and many others), clearly demonstrates that V. again put a stop in the wrong place, and Driesh is already beginning to look for a way out in the event that it becomes possible to synthetically produce an 'artificial egg that will begin to live.' Is this not an explanation for the 'clearing the way for occultism,' for the study of which 'it would not be a pity to spend the efforts of several generations'? Indeed, in this field V. will finally be able to find for itself a safe refuge where scientific thought will not try to penetrate. Despite its basic idealistic and reactionary nature, V. nevertheless has a certain historical merit, and it should not be overlooked in the struggle against it. This merit is the concept of the specific regularity of life processes that does not fit into the framework of the presently known physicochemical regularities. The disclosure of this regularity and mastery of it, which is the goal of biology and justifies its existence as a special science, can, however, be achieved not by means of overt or disguised idealistic speculations and a priori theories, but only by means of the method of materialist dialectics. It has long been applied here 'spontaneously'; the nearest task of natural-scientific and, in particular, medical thought is its conscious application.

Ya. Chernyak.