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Show 410 THE VITAL FORCE. appears to be self-determining." (Henle, Allgemeine Anatomie, 1841, s. 216-219.) The difficulty of satisfactorily referring the vital phenomena of organic life to physical and chemical laws consists chiefly (almost as in the question of predicting meteorological processes in the atmosphere), in the complication of the phenomena, and in the multiplicity of simultaneously acting forces and of the conditions of their activity. I have remained faithful, in "Cosmos," to the same mode of viewing and representing what are called "Lebenskrafte," vital forces, and vital affinities (Pulteney, in the Transact. of the Royal Soc. of Edinburgh, vol. xvi. p. 305), the formation-impulse, and the active principle in organization. I have said, in Cosmos, bd. i. s. 67 (English ed. vol. i. p. 62), "The myths of imponderable matter and of vital forces peculiar to each organism have complicated and perplexed the view of nature. Under different conditions and forms of recognition, the prodigious mass of our experimental knowledge has progressively accumulated, and is now enlarging with increased rapidity. Investigating reason essays from time to time with varying success to break through ancient forms and symbols, invented to effect the subjection of rebellious matter, as it were, to mechanical constructions." Farther on, in the same volume (p. 339 English, and 367 of the original), I have said, "In a physical description of the universe, it should still be noticed that the same substances which compose the organic forms of plants and animals are also found in the inorganic crust of the globe; and that the same forces or powers which govern inorganic matter are seen to prevail in organic beings likewise, combining and decomposing the various substances, regulating the forms and properties of organic tissues, but acting in these cases under complicated conditions yet unexpected, to which the very vague terms of 'vital phenomena,' 'operations of vital forces,' have been assigned, and which have been systematically grouped, according to analogies more or less happily imagined." (Compare also the critical no1Jices on the assumption of proper or peculiar vital forces in Schleiden's Botanik als inductive Wissenschaft (Botany as an Inductive Science), th. i. s. 60, and in the recently published excellent Untersuchungen iiber thierische Elektricitat (Researches on Animal Electricity), by Emil du Bois-Reymond, bd. i. s. xxxiv.-1.) |