Vitalism : a brief historical and critical review (1) / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
[1897?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vitalism : a brief historical and critical review (1) / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The archei, diffused through the tissues of organisms in living nature, build up their home by ferment action on other matter and direct the growth, movement and other functions of the part. Ferments cause the shaping, Bias the movement of matter. The stomach and spleen are the duumvirate. The former contains the great archeus which presides over the lesser and secondary archei and is domin¬ ated by the sensitive and mortal soul, the spirit of Paracelsus. A rational and immortal soul is added by van Helmont to the sensitive soul. These two souls, joined in marital equality, conjugal unity and by other quaint metaphorical ties, live together in the stomach, directing the organism in harmony. The archei when imperfect causes disease. They are ever trying to conform to the type of the seminal image (imago seminalis), which is the form whereof the vital breath (aura vitalis) is the matter. To combat the reigning theories of principal and subsidi¬ ary archei, Bene Descartes (1596-1650) opposed the famous system on which subsequently were based the iatrophysical school of Borelli (1608-1679) and the iatrochemical school of Sylvius (1614-1672). He maintained that life, both human and animal, was a purely mechanical process and that the soul, which was absent in animals, did only that of which it was conscious, knew of what it thought and had no concern in vital activity. So revolutionary a standpoint could not but provoke a vigorous opposition, notably in Cambridge at the hands of Cudworth and Glisson. Balph Cudworth (1617-1688) condemned the Cartesian denial of unconscious processes to the soul, and the mechanical explanation of the phenomena of life. In his attempt to steer a middle course between the debasement of soul and the rejection of mechanism, he established a universal plastic matter, intermediate between the world and God, immaterial and acting purposefully without will or reason. Even as this universal plastic nature is an inferior property of the soul of the world, so every human and animal soul has its plastic nature which bridges over the gulf between mechanism and thought. Francis Glisson (1597-1677) foreshadowed Leibnitz when, re-echoing Heraclitus, he proclaimed that everything that has substance and existence has activity. He considered the activity of life (j ^iap^id) to be inherent not only in spiritual, but in material form. “ Matter is not only capable of life but is also actually living.” To this activity of substance are bound three faculties, perceptive, appetitive and motive. Nature, thus constituted with life and faculties has gradually developed her powers, until slae
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