Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Biological Lectures Delivered at the Marine Biological Laboratory of Wood's Holl in the Summer Session of 1894
The inexperienced reader may need to be reminded that our standpoints with reference to organic development are not necessarily mechanical for the physicist, and vitalistic for the biologist. Transcendental vitalism has just as little standing on the biological as on the physical side. Indeed, if we were to draw the line between mechanism and vitalism, it would be found, unless I am much mistaken, that there are more physi cists than biologists on the side of vitalism. No less a physicist than Lord Kelvin has recently declared that the in?uence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific inquiry hitherto entered on. Its power of directing the motions of moving particles is infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concourse of atoms. 1 This may not be vitalism, but it does not look like mechanism.
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