an idealistic current in biology which posits the existence of a special nonmaterial life force in organisms. Vitalism originated in primitive animism, the idea that all bodies of nature have a conscious life. Elements of vitalism are revealed in the ideas of the greatest thinkers of classical Greece, in Plato’s concept of immortal soul (psyche) and in Aristotle’s concept of a particular nonmaterial force, entelechy, which controls the phenomena of living nature. After the Renaissance the idea of the animation of nonliving bodies gave way to a mechanistic interpretation of inorganic, as well as organic, phenomena. In the 17th century a dualistic doctrine arose which drew a sharp boundary between nonliving bodies in nature and living things. J. B. van Hel-mont established the doctrine of archei, spiritual principles that regulate the activity of body organs. This vitalistic concept was developed in more detail in the beginning of the 18th century by the German doctor G. Stahl, who believed that the soul directs the life of organisms and also ensures their complete structure. In the beginning of the 19th century there was a renaissance of vitalistic ideas as a reaction against the oversimplified mechanistic ideas of such 18th-century French materialists as D. Diderot and J. La Mettrie. The nonmaterial life principle was called formative striving by the German anatomist J. F. Blumenbach; the German naturalist G. R. Treviranus called it a life force (vis vitalis)—from which the name of the whole movement was derived. The vitalistic views of the German physiologist J. Müller were regarded by Lenin as physiological idealism. Müller attributed to living things a creative force that determined unity and harmony. In the second half of the 19th century, oversimplified and distorted mechanistic materialism was again supplanted by a wave of vitalism, called at that time neovitalism. It was inspired by the German biologist H. Driesch, who believed that the essence of living phenomena consists of so-called entelechy (that which contains or realizes its own end), which functions outside time and space and is unknowable. The existence of unknowable life factors was also acknowledged by other vitalists, who called them “life energy,” “life surges,” and “dominant idea.”
In refusing to explain living phenomena, vitalism demonstrates the weakness of idealism in resolving the question of the essence of life and of its origin and development. The source of the vitalistic views that reappear from time to time is the vitalists’ dissatisfaction with mechanistic explanations of living phenomena and their inability to apply the methodology of dialectical materialism to these explanations. Vitalism criticizes the shortcomings of mechanistic materialism’s interpretations of the essence of life and of the main properties of living things; vitalism itself, however, does not transcend the bounds of metaphysical mechanistic methodology. While asserting that life cannot be reduced to the sum total of chemical, physical, and mechanical phenomena, vitalism regards as an absolute the qualitative uniqueness of living phenomena and draws upon invented nonmaterial factors to explain this unique quality. A characteristic of vitalism is its disregard of historical method, first in rejection of C. Darwin’s theory by H. Driesch and his fol-lowers and, later, in the teleological interpretation of evolution by contemporary idealists. Vitalists have always based their position on the fact that certain problems have not been solved, for example, on the supposed impossibility of synthesis of organic substances outside of the organism. As soon as a particular characteristic of life received a scientific, materialist explanation, vitalism appealed to other, still un-studied areas. Vitalism interpreted from an idealistic stand-point not only the nature of living organisms in general but also the nature of consciousness. After the victory of evolutionary ideas in biology, vitalism penetrated into this area in the form of various anti-Darwinian concepts of evolution, such as psycholamarckism and the creative evolution propounded by, among others, the French philosopher H. Bergson.
L. IA. BLIAKHER