Chapter IV: The Vital Impetus 120

_Argument._--The notion of the organism as a physico-chemical
mechanism is a deduction from the methods of physiology, and
not from its results. The notion of vitalism is a natural or
intuitive one. The historic systems of vitalism assumed the
existence of a spiritual agency in the organism, or of a form of
energy which was peculiar to the activities of the organism.
Modern investigation lends no support to either belief. But the
study of the organism as a whole, that is, the study of developmental
processes, or that of the organism acting as a whole, afford a
logical disproof of pure mechanism. It shows that there cannot
be a functionality, in the mathematical sense, between the inorganic
agencies that affect the whole organism and the behaviour or
functioning of the whole organism. Mechanism is only suggested
in the study of isolated parts of the organism. We are compelled
toward the belief that there is an agency operative in the activities
of the organism which does not operate in purely inorganic becoming.
This is the Vital Impetus of Bergson, or the Entelechy of
Driesch.