Claude Bernard and an introduction to the study of experimental medicine: ́physical vitalism,́ dialectic, and epistemology

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

Volumn 62, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 495-528

  Normandin, Sebastian ^a  

^a Hamta Group   (Hamta Business Corporation][Research and Development Department])

Author keywords

Claude Bernard; Epistemology; Experimental medicine; Nineteenth century French philosophy; science; Vital force; Vitalism

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; FRANCE; HISTORY; HUMAN; KNOWLEDGE; MEDICAL RESEARCH; PHILOSOPHY; PHYSIOLOGY; PUBLISHING;

BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH; FRANCE; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMANS; KNOWLEDGE; PHILOSOPHY; PHYSIOLOGY; PUBLISHING; VITALISM;

EID: 34548528171     PISSN: 00225045     EISSN: 14684373     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrm015     Document Type: Article

References (118)

1. Charles Coulston Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 18 Vols. (New York: Scribner's, 1970-1990).
2. Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 260. Emphasis mine.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. In his sociological, description of the "world as laboratory" and more historical exploration of the "Pasteurization" of France, Bruno Latour shows us specific manifestations of this general idea. See Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Los Angeles: Sage, 1979),
6. and Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
7. The "science studies" approach has been one of the loudest critical voices in the "science wars" chorus. Recent works have suggested a new synthesis in free and open debate. See Keith M. Ashman and Philip S. Baringer, eds., After the Science Wars (London: Routledge, 2001).
8. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity, 320-21.
9. Ibid., 322.
10. See Francois Delaporte, ed., A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
11. Much of this will figure into my analysis. A rough introduction to this argument can be found in fn. 153 of Claude Bernard, Cahier de Notes, 1850-1860, ed. Mirko D. Grmek (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 243-47.
12. This idea of Bernard's experimental skepticism has been made explicit in only one instance that I can find. See Nils Roll-Hansen, "Critical Teleology: Immanuel Kant and Claude Bernard on the Limitations of Experimental Biology," J. Hist. Biol., 1976, 9, 59-91.
13. For a recent example of the kind of positivist inspired history of scientific medicine mentioned above see William Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
14. Joseph Chiari, "Vitalism and Contemporary Thought," in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 248.
15. On Bernardian historiography see Olga Amsterdamska, "The Historiography of the Claude Bernard Industry," Hist. Science, 1978, 16, 214-21. This "dialectical" quality in Bernard was noted from the very beginnings of reflection on his oeuvres, as is evident in the following quote from an ode to him given by Henri Beaunis at the Faculté de Médecine at Nancy in the year of his death (1876): "Claude Bernard, en effect, se trouva soumis alors àdeux influences contraires, d'une part cette imagination native, audacieuse et créatrice qui entraînait vers la théorie, vers la géné ralisation, vers l'hypothèse, et d'autre part, cette influence de Magendie, froid, sceptique, raillant l'idéal et n'acceptant pas le fait. De là cette dualité intellectuelle si curieuse à observer dans les oeuvres de Claude Bernard et qui me paraît être le trait psychologique et la clef de son charactère. Il y a en lui deux hommes, l'auteur des Leçons de physiologie experimentale et l'auteur des Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie, le chercheur du. Collège de France et le généralisateur du Muséum," Claude Bernard, Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux végétaux (1878; Paris: J. Vrin, 1966), 11.
16. Claude Bernard, Pages Choisies, ed. Ernest Kahane (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1961), 9. For further discussion of Bernard's position vis-à-vis materialism and vitalism
17. see André Pichot, Histoire de la Notion de Vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 701-12.
18. Annie Petit, "Claude Bernard and the History of Science," Isis, 1987, 78, 201-19.
19. This reminds of the argument in C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (London: Cambridge University Press, 1959).
20. See also Harry Bloch, "François Magendie, Claude Bernard, and the Interrelation of Science, History and Philosophy," South. Med. J., 1989, 82, 1259-61.
21. Reino Virtanen, Claude Bernard and His Place in the History of Ideas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 27-48.
22. Ibid., 13. For the original text see Henri Bergson, "La philosophie de Claude Bernard," in La pensée et le mouvant, 12th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941), 229.
23. Contrasting this epistemological view with Schopenhauer's metaphysical view provides insight into the nature of the two stances. In both cases they respond to classic assertions in vitalise thought as unsatisfying, but appreciate their importance nonetheless: "The progress made in physiology since Haller has placed beyond doubt the fact that not merely the external action, accompanied by consciousness (functiones animales), but also the vital processes occurring quite unconsciously (functiones vitales et naturales) are throughout under the guidance of the nervous system. As regards our becoming conscious of them, the difference rests merely upon the fact that the former are guided by nerves coming from the brain, the latter by nerves communicating not immediately with that chief center of the nervous system, which is directed mainly outward, but with subordinate minor centers, with the nerve-knots, the ganglia and their network. These preside as governors, so to speak, over the different provinces of the nervous system, and guide the internal processes by external stimuli, just as the brain guides the external actions by external motives. They therefore receive impressions from within and react appropriately thereon, just as the brain receives representations and thereupon makes decisions. Each of those minor centers is, however, limited to a narrower sphere of action. On this rests the vita propria of each system, and with regard to it van Helmont has said that every organ has, so to speak, its own ego. From this is also explained the persisting life that continues in amputated parts of insects, reptiles, and other lower animals, whose brain does not greatly preponderate over the ganglia of the separate parts; and in the same way also the fact that many reptiles live for weeks and even months after the removal of their brain. Now if we know from the most positive experience that the will, familiar to us in our most immediate consciousness and in a way totally different from that in which the central external world is known, is the real agent in the actions that are accompanied by consciousness and guided by the chief center of the nervous system, then we surely cannot but assume that the actions proceeding from the nervous system, but under the direction of its subordinate centers that keep the vital processes constantly going, are also manifestations of the will; especially since we know perfectly well the cause of their not being, like the others, attended by consciousness. Thus we know that consciousness has its seat in the brain and is therefore limited to such parts as have nerves that proceed to it, and that also ceases therein when those nerves are cut. In this way, the difference between what is conscious and unconscious, and with it that between what is voluntary and involuntary in the movements of the body, are fully explained. We are left with no ground for assuming two entirely different primary sources of movement, especially as principia praeter necessitatum non sunt multiplicanda [principles are not to be increased unnecessarily]. All this is so obvious that on impartial reflection it seems from this standpoint almost absurd to want to make the body serve two masters by deriving its actions from two fundamentally different primary sources. Thus it is absurd to attribute the movement of the arms and legs, of eyes, lips, throat, tongue, and lungs, of facial and abdominal muscles, to the will, while, on the other hand, the movement of the heart and arteries, the peristaltic action of the intestines, the absorption of the intestinal villi and the glands, and all the movements serving secretions are represented as coming from an entirely different, eternally mysterious principle that is unknown to us and is designated by such names as vitality, archaeus, spiritus animales, vital, force, creative impulse, all of which say nothing but x." Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature: A Discussion of the Corroboration from the Empirical Sciences that the Author's Philosophy Has Received since Its First Appearance, ed. David E. Cartwright, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 38-40.
24. Frederick L. Holmes, "Claude Bernard, the Milieu Intérieur, and Regulatory Physiology," J. Hist. Philos. Life Sd., 1986, 8, 3-25.
25. While Magendie, particularly in his well-known 1809 polemic, was deeply critical of doctrinal vitalism, he has also been interpreted as "skeptical" in regards to the experimental approach to life and "rejected a mechanistic account of... functions, and acknowledged that many physiological phenomena remained beyond experimental reach, so that it was not possible to explain them in more basic physical terms." Thus, "because he acknowledged this distance between vital functions in living organisms and what it was possible to explain in physical terms at the time, Magendie was construed by many as a vitalist" William Bechtel and Robert C. Richardson, "Vitalism," in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998), 640.
26. One could suggest this idea is foundational for Bernard as well, who transcends Magendie's experimental limits, but never makes a concerted effort to consciously attack vitalism. See also John E. Lesch, Science and Medicine in France: The Emergence of Experimental Physiology, 1790-1855 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
27. Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. H. C. Green (London: Henry Schuman, 1949), 112.
28. Roll-Hansen, "Critical Teleology," 73-76.
29. Ibid., 71.
30. Ibid., 72.
31. Paul Bert was instrumental in helping popularize Bernard's work in the broader intellectual realm. We find in Bert's work some interest in the historical margins of physiology as well - on. 18 January 1869 he presented the opening lecture at the Faculté des Sciences de Paris on the subject of "La physiologie générale et le principe vital." See Paul Bert, Leçons, discours et conférences (Paris: Charpentier, 1886).
32. For a description of this, and a thoroughly unsympathetic account of d'Arsonval's indirect involvement in the 1903 N-ray controversy, see Walter Gratzer, The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10-11.
33. See also Léon Delhoume, De Claude Bernard à d'Arsonval (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1939). The biophysicist Jacques Arsène d'Arsonval is an interesting figure. An aristocrat from Limoges, he met Claude Bernard in Paris ca. 1870, serving as his pré parateur in the lab. Bert and D'Arsonval thereafter established a lab for biophysics associated with the College de France in 1882. Fascinated by electricity and its possible relationship to medicine, his devices and their healing properties made him a pioneer in physiotherapy. For a time, his name became a process - D'Arsonvalization, a term synonymous with electrotherapy.
34. "D'Arsonval believed life was vital but completely deterministic." See Charles Coulston Gillispie, ed., The Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Voll (New York: Scribner's, 1970), 303.
35. D. G. Charlton, Positivist. Thought in France during the Second Empire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959); quoted in Roll-Hansen, "Critical Teleology," 77.
36. Roll-Hansen, "Critical Teleology," 79.
37. Consider this excellent description of Bernard's approach and its relationship to experimentalism and biology in the German context: "In barest terms experimentation was simply a matter of manipulative procedures. It was but one method, and was called upon to become the preponderant method for biology. Most experimentalists, despite the public glory of their procedure, were not free from metaphysical commitments. In the physiology departments of German universities and institutes, where the means and impulse towards experimental work was uncommonly great, mechanism and materialism were common goods. These usually assumed the form of reductionism, whereby vital processes would be 'reduced' to physics and chemistry and definite conceptual content ascribed or implied for these presumably more fundamental sciences. Bernard was philosophically less reckless, preferring to focus fullest attention on the relations between and not on the essence of biological phenomena. For his pains he found himself charged as the leader of a new vitalism," William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems if Form, Function and Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 13"
38. Jean Loms Faure, Claude Bernard (Paris: Crês, 1925).
39. It is also suggestive of how far these two endeavors were from each other in the public eye. One source compellingly states that while there are "attempts made throughout the century to accomplish a synthesis between clinical medicine and research," still "the repeated failure to integrate the two approaches is a significant theme of French medical culture." Ann La Berge and Mordechai Feingold, "Introduction," in French Medical Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. La Berge and Feingold (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 21.
40. See Robert Fox, "The Savant Confronts his Peers: Scientific Societies in France, 1815-1914," in The Organization of Science and Technology in France, 1808-1914, ed. Robert Fox and George Weisz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 241-82.
41. One element of this eclectic approach, it must be admitted, is a deep skepticism that is exampled in the very "stripped-down" thinking of Ernst Mach. Bernard suggests that one should be very cautious about the adoption of any philosophical and scientific systems, and that: "In education we must, therefore, take care that knowledge which should arm the mind does not overwhelm it by its weight, and that rules, intended to support weak parts of the mind, do not atrophy the strong and fertile parts." Bernard, Experimental Medicine, 224.
42. Frederick L. Holmes, "Claude Bernard and the Vitalism of his Time," in Vitalisms from Holler to the Cell Theory: Proceedings of the Zaragoza Symposium. XIXth International Congress of History of Science; 22-29 August 1993, ed. Guido Cimino & François Duchesneau (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1997), 281-95, 281.
43. Ibid. This comment likely comes from the following quote by Bernard: "Il. est de la plus haute importance de considérer l'influence du système nerveux sur les phénomènes chimiques de l'organisme, car c'est par cette influence que l'être vivant touche à tout, et tout peut agir alors sur lui. C'est là le vrai terrain de l'influence du moral sur le physique. Car je suis vitaliste." Bernard, Cahier de Notes, 85. For an important subtext of the long-running history of this moral and physical schism, see Elizabeth A. Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
44. Bernard, Experimental Medicine, vii.
45. Ibid., xiv.
46. William Coleman, "The Cognitive Basis of the Discipline: Claude Bernard on Physiology," Isis, 1985, 76, 49-70.
47. Bernard, Experimental Medicine, 10.
48. Ibid., 37.
49. Ibid., 59.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 60.
53. See Geoffrey Sutton, "The Physical and Chemical Path to Vitalism: Xavier Bichat's Physiological Researches on Life and Death" Bull. Hist. Med., 1984, 58, 53-71.
54. Ibid., 66. This position and Bernard's struggle with its implications is discussed in Holmes, "Claude Bernard and the Vitalism of His Time," 281-95. For the mid-century "materialistic" controversy that doubtless led Bernard in the direction of such a statement see Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century (1975; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 165.
55. Bernard, Experimental Medicine, 67.
56. Ibid., 68.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 69. Ian Hacking sees determinism as having important roots in the history of French physiology, suggesting that it is Claude Bernard who first gives the word currency in his "immensely influential" 1865 Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. Hacking argues that for Bernard the word had a meaning that brought it close to the notion of "mechanism," and "the doctrine that everything is caused by mechanical means." As Hacking says: "'Déterminisme' for Bernard denotes that which actually does the determining, although he also holds, as a doctrine that came to be known as Déterminisme, that there is such a determining for every physiological event. This is in part an anti-vitalist opinion."
59. Ian Hacking, "Nineteenth Century Cracks in the Concept of Determinism," J. Hist, Ideas, 1983, 44, 455-475, 459.
60. Bernard, Experimental Medicine, 67.
61. Holmes, "Claude Bernard, the Milieu Intérieur," 3-25.
62. Claude Bernard, Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie. communes aux animaux et aux végétaux (Paris: Bailliere, 1878), 113,
63. quoted in Holmes, "Claude Bernard, the Milieu Intérieur" 3.
64. See Holmes, "Claude Bernard, the Milieu Inté rieur"
65. and Mark D. Sullivan, "Reconsidering the Wisdom of the Body: An Epistemological Critique of Claude Bernard's Concept of the Internal Environment," J. Med. Philos., 1990, 15, 493-514.
66. Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1988), 62.
67. Ibid., 64.
68. Ibid., 63. Bernard was not alone holding this position. Sigismond Jaccoud, a student of the famous physiologist François Malgaigne, was resistant to aspects of the germ theory because of his devotion to vitalism. See George Weisz, The Medical Mandarins: The French Academy of Medicine in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 203.
69. Holmes, "Claude Bernard, the Milieu Intérieur," 3-25.
70. Ibid., 19.
71. Jean Gayon, "The Concept of Individuality in Canguilhem's Philosophy of Biology," J. Hist. Biol., 1998, 31, 305-25, 318.
72. Bernard, Calúer de Notes, 1850-1860, 39,
73. quoted in Holmes, "Claude Bernard, the Milieu Intérieur" 7.
74. Stuart E Spicker, "An Introduction to the Medical Epistemology of Georges Canguilhem: Moving beyond Michel Foucault," J. Med. Philos., 1987, 12, 397-411, 404.
75. Bernard, Experimental Medicine, 78.
76. Ibid., 79.
77. Ibid., 80. This would be, in a manner of saying, a way Bernard understood "nature."
78. Ibid., 87.
79. Ibid., 88. This evokes the archetype of the mandala or ouroboros. See Carl G. Jung, Psychology and the East, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 24.
80. See also Ronald E Fox, Energy and the Evolution of Life (New York: W H. Freeman, 1988).
81. It also prompts a reflection on the influence of early dynamic physiology in areas like systemic thinking and cybernetics in, for example, Walter B. Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W.W. Norton, 1932)
82. and Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1948).
83. Bernard, Experimental Medicine, 91.
84. Ibid., 92-93. Emphasis mine. In Bergson's arguments about the basic behaviorist principle of psycho-physical parallelism, there is a challenge to the conflation of internal process and external appearance, but the debate proceeds on the metaphysical, not the epistemological, level. "Everything seems ... to happen as if consciousness sprang from the brain, and as if conscious activity were modeled on that of cerebral activity. In reality, consciousness does not spring from the brain; but brain and consciousness correspond because equally they measure, the one by the complexity of its structure and the other by the intensity of its awareness, the quality of choice that the living being has at its disposal." Henri Bergson, Creature Evolution [L'Evolution Creatrice], trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henri Holt, 1911), 262. See also the pragmatic idealism ("factionalism" in the author's words) of a German response to this notion of as if that also pays homage to the importance of British empiricism (specifically Hume, John Stuart Mill, and the central importance of English and Scottish jurisprudence) in Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of "As If": A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden (1924; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935).
85. Ibid., 93. This could also be viewed as an attempt to situate medicine as dependent on physiology.
86. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn Fawcett (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978). See also Gayon, "The Concept of Individuality."
87. On the "eclectic spiritualism" of nineteenth-century academic philosophy and its relationship to the emerging human sciences, see John I. Brooks III, The. Eclectic Legacy: Academic Philosophy and the Human Sciences in Nineteenth-Century France (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1998).
88. The role of Bernard as a. scientist in the larger "intellectual scene" of nineteenth-century French philosophy is expertly explored in S. I. M. Du Plessis, The Compatibility of Science and Philosophy in France, 1840-1940 (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1972). This view may also connect to Bernard's affinity with medicine, an endeavor that, as described in François Dagognet's Philosophie Biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), constantly struggles with the opposed poles of skepticism and materialism, often settling on eclecticism as a middle ground.
89. Bernard, Experimental Medicine, 93.
90. This idea also finds echoes in Bernard's 1878 work, Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux végétaux. In the preface to the 1966 edition of this work, Georges Canguilhem states that "la conception fondamentale de la vie exposée dans les Leçons tient dans l'affirmation que tout organisme offre à. considérer deux sortes de phénomè nes, des phénomènes de création vitale ou de synthèse organisatrice, des phénomènes de mort ou de destruction organique. 'Le premier de ces deux ordres de phénomè nes, dit Claude Bernard, est seul sans analogue direct; il est particulier, spécial, à l'être vivant; cette synthèse évolutive est ce qu'il y a de véritablement vital.'" Claude Bernard, Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux végétaux (Paris: J. Vrin, 1966), 11.
91. Hans Driesch, The History and Theory of Vitalism, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Macmillan, 1914).
92. Bernard, Experimental Medicine, 93
93. Again in the preface to Leçons, Canguilhem quotes Bernard from the 1867 Rapport sur la marche et les progrès de la physiologie générale en France: "Si les conditions matérielles spécialles sont nécessaires pour donner naissance à. des phénomènes de nutrition ou d'évolution dé terminés, il ne faudrait pas croires, pour celà, que c'est la matière qui a engendré la loi d'ordre et succession qui donne le sens ou la relation des phénomènes; se serait tomber dans l'erreur grossière des matérialistes." Bernard, Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie, 13.
94. Virtanen, Claude Bernard, 58-59.
95. Bernard, Experimental Medicine, 138.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid., 139.
98. Ibid., 140. This view of determinism cuts to the heart of the epistemological differences between Bernard and Comte.
99. Auguste Comte, "The General View of Biology," in Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, ed. Gertrude Lenzer (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), 165.
100. Ibid., 169. The resonance between Comte and Canguilhem is taken up in the context of a particular tradition of French philosophy of medicine in J. E Braunstein, "L'école française de philosophie de la médecine," Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 1.990, 74, 35-44. Braunstein also includes François Dagognet and Michel Foucault in this lineage.
101. One late nineteenth-century physician, M. G. Audiffrent (1823-1909) was actually directly inspired by Comte, who suggested that he study medicine at Montpellier. From this experience he produced a book about the social origins of mental diseases. See M. G. Audiffrent, Des maladies du cerveau et de l'innervation d'après Auguste. Comte (Paris: Leroux, 1.874). See also Audiffrent, Appels aux medicines (Paris: n.p., 1862).
102. In an essay entided "Pragmatism and Philosophy," Richard Rorty sees the characteristic division of nineteenth-century philosophy as one between "transcendental philosophy" and "empirical philosophy" (i.e. between "Platonists" and "positivists"). He further proposes his own particular brand of "pragmatism" as an antidote to this age-old Platonic malaise. What he does not address, however, is the question of how it is that this schism can be found within the work of individual thinkers. This internalized mental struggle would seem to be one of the most interesting questions to try and. answer in fashioning an innovative history of nineteenth-century philosophy. See Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism and Philosophy," in After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, ed. Kenneth. Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1987), 29.
103. Claude Bernard, Leçons sur les propriétés des tissus vivants (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1866), 4. "Tout le monde s'accorde à reconnaître que le(s) corps vivant (s) obéissent à des lois qui leur sont propres, et que les phénomènes qu'ils présentent dans leurs développement son infiniment plus complexes et plus difficiles à approfondir que ceux de la nature inorganique."
104. Bernard expands on this historical portrayal in the posthumously published Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie (1878; Paris: J. Vrin, 1966).
105. Bernard is undoubtedly referring to the 1672 Tractatus de natura substantiae energetica, seu de vita naturae, ejusque tribus primis facultatibus. This almost hylozoic work attempts to prove that there is life in all physical bodies - what Glisson calls the vita insita (the implanted life). Using a scholastic style of argumentation, Glisson also makes reference to the vis plastica, which is connected to Van. Helmont's archeus.
106. Bernard, Leçons sur les propriétés, 65.
107. They are perhaps not so strange bedfellows insofar as they both stand as major vitalist figures. Their methods, however, differ drastically despite this relative theoretical harmony. Bichat's "pleurimtalisme" and Stahl's animism are quite different, if only because the latter is holistic and the former is reductionist.
108. Bernard is reliant on Bichat's definition: "la vie est l'ensemble des fonctions qui résistent à la mort." He translates this, for polemical purposes, to "la vie est l'ensemble des proprié tés vitales qui résistent aux propriétés physiques." Bernard, Pages Choisies, 53.
109. Bernard, Leçons sur les propriétés, 67.
110. Ibid., 71.
111. Schopenhauer, being more animist than vitalist, sees Haller as ending the investigation too soon, and raises the notion of the will as response to the classical idea of the soul. He sees this project as beginning with Kant: "The three assumptions criticized by Kant in the 'Transcendental Dialectic' under the name of the ideas of reason and accordingly set aside in theoretical philosophy, had always stood in the way of a deeper insight into nature until this great man had brought about in philosophy a complete transformation, Such an obstacle to the subject of our present investigation was the so-called rational idea of the soul, of that metaphysical entity in whose absolute simplicity knowing and willing were united and fused into an eternally inseparable unity. As long as this idea existed, no philosophical physiology was possible, the less so, as its correlative, real and purely passive matter, had necessarily to be assumed simultaneously therewith as the substance of the body, as an entity existing in itself, as a think-in-itself. That rational idea of the soul, was therefore responsible for the fact that the celebrated chemist and physiologist, Georg Ernst Stahl, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had to miss the truth to which he had come so near, and which he would have reached, had he been able to put in place of the anima rationalis the bare will that is still without knowledge, which alone is metaphysical. But under the influence of the idea of reason he could teach only that it was this simple rational soul that built for itself the body and directed and carried out all. the inner organic functions of it, but that in this connection, although knowledge was the fundamental determination and, as it were, the substance of its true nature, this simple rational soul knew nothing of all this. In this there was something absurd that rendered the doctrine utterly untenable. It was superseded by Haller's irritability and sensibility which, to be sure, are understood purely empirically, but, to make up for this, there are also two qualitates occultae, with which explanation is at an end. The movement of the heart and the intestines was now attributed to irritability. The anima rationalis, however, remained untouched in its honor and dignity as a strange guest in the house of the body, where it dwelled in the attic. 'Truth lies at the bottom of a well,' said Democritus, and with a sigh the millenia have repeated his words; but no wonder, when truth gets a rap on the knuckles as soon as it tries to come out. The fundamental feature of my teaching, placing it in opposition to all that have ever existed, is the total separation of the will from knowledge." Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, 34-35.
112. For an example of how this concern plays itself out in the work of an individual early nineteenth-century French physiologist see J. V Pickstone, "Vital Actions and Organic Physics: Henri Dutrochet and French Physiology during the 1820s," Bull. Hist. Med., 1976, 50, 191-212.
113. Virtanen, Claude Bernard, 135.
114. L. Richmond Wheeler, Vitalism: Its History and Validity (London: H. F. G. Witherby, 1939).
115. This idea follows "popular" and received academic opinion on vitalism. A. contemporary encyclopedia entry on the subject concludes, contrary to the idea that vitalism is "devoid of empirical meaning" and "offers no definite predictions," that "many vitalists were in fact accomplished experimentalists, including most notably Pasteur and Driesch." "Moreover, vitalists took great pains to subject their views to empirical test. Magendie, for example, insisted on the importance of precise quantitative laws. Vitalism, as much as mechanistic alternatives, was often deeply embeded in an experimental and empirical programme." William Bechtel and Robert C. Richardson, "Vitalism," 642. This may be true, but it was definitively at odds with the emerging epistemological designs of "experimentalism." However, grudgingly agreeing with this assessment, one would argue that the ultimate example of such a personage is Claude Bernard, a figure who is, strangely, not at all mentioned in the above source. One can trace this struggle, informed by vitalism, on through Bernard to Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. The critical questions these thinkers share regarding the idea of a purely materialist metaphysics, and the "in-between" blending of "pure spiritualism and radical materialism" as a response, merits consideration, In a recent biography, one author describes Deleuze's work as both vitalism and, in a very interesting turn of phrase, as "transcendental empiricism." This seems to encapsulate an important element of the vitalist discourse, particularly as it engages with issues relating to epistemology. See John. Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (London: Pluto Press, 1998). The phrase, I would add, also captures, in the fashion of a caricature, the sense of an important element of French epistemology as historically conceived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at least in so far as it appears to be situated between the traditions of British Empiricism (Bacon, Locke, Hume) and German Idealism (Kant, Hegel, Schelling).
116. This is certainly the argument made about the development of biology in Coleman's classic treatment. See Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, especially the last chapter, 160-66.
117. Joseph Chiari, "Vitalism and Contemporary Thought," in Burwick and Douglass, The Crisis in Modernism, 245.
118. Ibid., 248. As Chiari says: "The discoveries of the workings of the cell in the second half of the nineteenth century established the preeminence of chemistry, and vitalism took new directions."