Chapter II: Part I: Vitalism and Mechanism

SUMMARY

An uneasy recognition of the conflict between science and common sense in our generation has rekindled interest in the relation of science to moral philosophy. In this awakening the physicists have assumed the leading part. It will not be possible to predict the outcome, until the contribution of contemporary biology to natural philosophy is taken into consideration. Some writers have expressed the hope that the influence of biological concepts may assist to a reconciliation of the claims of natural science and moral philosophy. This hope is based on a failure to recognize that modern experimental biology is an ethically neutral body of enquiry. The merits of a mechanistic or vitalistic outlook in biology have been too often discussed from an ontological rather than an epistemological standpoint. Our estimate of the influence of biological concepts on the future of natural philosophy must be guided by a recognition of the essential similarity of method in biology and physics. This similarity is nowhere more evident than in those branches of physiology which lie most conspicuously outside the realm of applicability of physico-chemical hypotheses. Traditional mechanistic physiology has accepted the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter. The modern physiology of the conditioned reflex has undermined the distinction between reflex and voluntary behaviour. There is thus no nicely defined boundary at which physiology ends and philosophy begins. Biology is annexing regions of enquiry which have hitherto remained the province of moral philosophy. As a concept of biology _Mind_ is replaced by _Behaviour_. Since modern biology claims to interpret the characteristics of conscious behaviour as properties of physical objects, the advance of biological science cannot be expected to reinforce the claims of moral philosophy. How far it is possible to reduce the interpretation of behaviour to purely physico-chemical hypotheses, we have no means of predicting. At present we can foresee no limit to progress in that direction. The significant issue is not the completeness of the mechanistic solution, but whether there exists any definable method of arriving at a more complete solution than the mechanistic outlook permits.

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“It is our happiness to live in one of those eventful periods of intellectual and moral history when the fast-closed gates of discovery and reform stand open at their widest. How long these good days may last we cannot tell. It may be that the increasing power and range of scientific method with its stringency of argument and constant check of fact may start the world in a more steady and continuous course of progress than it has moved on heretofore. But if history is to repeat itself according to precedent, we must look forward to stiffer, duller ages of traditionalists and commentators, when the great thinkers of our time will be appealed to by men who slavishly accept their tenets, yet cannot or dare not follow their methods through better evidence to higher ends. In either case it is for those among us whose minds are set on the advancement of civilization to make the most of present opportunities that, even when in future years progress is arrested, it may be arrested at a higher level.”

Tylor’s _Primitive Culture_