Vitalism

Based on Wikipedia: Vitalism

In 1784, Benjamin Franklin—then seventy-eight years old and serving as the American ambassador to France—found himself in his own garden, watching a blindfolded man hug trees. The man was searching for the one that had been "magnetized" by a physician named Franz Mesmer, who claimed he could channel an invisible vital fluid through living things. The man hugged tree after tree, searching for the tingling sensation that would reveal the life force. He fainted at the foot of the wrong one.

This absurd scene captures something essential about one of the longest-running debates in the history of human thought: What makes living things alive?

The question seems almost too obvious to ask. A dog is alive. A rock is not. But what exactly is the difference? For most of human history, the answer involved something extra—a spark, a breath, a force that animated matter and made it live. This idea has a name: vitalism.

The Ghost in the Machine

Vitalism is the belief that living organisms possess something that non-living matter does not—some force or principle that cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry alone. Different cultures have called it different things. The ancient Greeks spoke of pneuma, a kind of breath or spirit that the lungs drew from the air and the blood carried throughout the body. The Chinese developed the concept of qi, a vital energy that flows through the body along specific pathways. Indian traditions describe prana, the life force that animates all living things. In European medicine, this vital principle became associated with the four humors—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—whose balance supposedly determined health and temperament.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson gave this idea its most memorable name in the early twentieth century: élan vital, the vital impulse. But the concept itself is far older than any of these terms. It appears in ancient Egyptian thought. It shapes Jain philosophy, which holds that the universe contains six eternal substances, including jīva—sentient souls that possess varying degrees of vitality.

What unites all these ideas is a simple intuition: something is missing from purely mechanical explanations of life. You can describe every atom in a dead body. The chemistry hasn't changed. But the person is gone. Where did they go?

The Rise of the Machines

The seventeenth century changed everything. Isaac Newton showed that the same mathematical laws governing falling apples also governed the motion of planets. René Descartes proposed that animals were essentially elaborate machines—automata made of flesh instead of gears. If the universe ran like clockwork, perhaps living things did too.

This mechanical philosophy posed a direct challenge to vitalism. If physics could explain planetary orbits, why couldn't it explain digestion? If chemistry could describe combustion, why not respiration?

But the mechanists had a problem. Living things did seem fundamentally different from machines. Cut a clock in half and you get two broken pieces. Cut certain creatures in half and you get two living creatures. In the 1780s, the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach performed exactly this experiment on freshwater hydra—tiny aquatic animals related to jellyfish. He cut them up and watched the pieces regenerate into complete organisms.

Blumenbach concluded that living matter must possess what he called Bildungstrieb—a formative drive. But he was careful about what this meant. It was not an explanation, he insisted, merely a name for something we observe but don't understand. The label "describes nothing," he wrote. "It serves merely to designate a peculiar power."

This was vitalism at its most intellectually honest: an acknowledgment of mystery, not a pretense of solving it.

The Urea Myth

If you've taken a chemistry class, you may have learned that vitalism died in 1828, when a German chemist named Friedrich Wöhler synthesized urea—a compound found in urine—from purely inorganic ingredients. The story goes like this: vitalists believed that "organic" compounds, those found in living things, could only be produced by living things. Wöhler proved them wrong by making urea in a flask. Vitalism was refuted. Science marched on.

It's a great story. It's also largely false.

Historians have traced this narrative to a popular chemistry textbook published in 1931, which, according to the historian Peter Ramberg, "ignored all pretense of historical accuracy" and transformed Wöhler into a crusader against vitalist ignorance. In reality, the synthesis of urea was seen at the time as interesting but not revolutionary. Vitalists simply adjusted their theories. The real decline of vitalism took another century and had more to do with the success of biochemistry than any single experiment.

The Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, one of the founders of modern chemistry and a contemporary of Wöhler, believed that a "regulative force" must exist within living matter. He was not shaken by the urea synthesis. Neither were most of his peers.

The Last Vitalists

Vitalism's most fascinating chapter may be its long defeat. Throughout the nineteenth century, as physics and chemistry grew more powerful, vitalists didn't simply surrender. They fought back with experiments.

Louis Pasteur, the man who famously disproved spontaneous generation, also conducted experiments he believed supported vitalism. Fermentation, he argued, was not merely a chemical process but a "vital action" that only living organisms could perform. He was wrong about this—fermentation can occur through isolated enzymes, without intact cells—but his instinct that life involved something special was widely shared.

The German biologist Hans Driesch conducted some of the most elegant experiments in the history of developmental biology. He took sea urchin embryos at their earliest stages—just two or four cells—and separated them. Mechanistic theory predicted that each isolated cell should develop into a partial organism, since it was only part of the original whole. Instead, each cell developed into a complete, normal sea urchin.

Driesch concluded that embryos possess what he called an "entelechy"—an Aristotelian term for a goal-directed vital force that guides development toward its proper end. The embryo somehow knows what it's supposed to become and reorganizes itself accordingly. No machine could do this.

Driesch's experiments were brilliant. His interpretation was not. As the biochemistry of development became clearer—as scientists discovered genes, proteins, and the molecular mechanisms of cell signaling—it became possible to explain his results without invoking any vital force. Cells communicate. Genes switch on and off. The "knowledge" of the embryo is encoded in chemistry.

By 1931, biologists had "almost unanimously abandoned vitalism as an acknowledged belief."

The Kindness of Hindsight

It would be easy to mock the vitalists. But the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, writing in the twentieth century, urged caution:

It would be ahistorical to ridicule vitalists. When one reads the writings of one of the leading vitalists like Driesch one is forced to agree with him that many of the basic problems of biology simply cannot be solved by a philosophy as that of Descartes, in which the organism is simply considered a machine. The logic of the critique of the vitalists was impeccable.

The vitalists were wrong about the existence of a special life force. But they were right that something was missing from the clockwork universe of early mechanistic science. That something turned out to be information—the genetic code, feedback loops, emergent properties of complex systems. Life is not animated by a mysterious force, but it is organized in ways that simple machines are not.

The Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane spent his career attacking both vitalism and mechanism, arguing that neither could account for what he observed in living organisms. He treated the organism as fundamental—"a self-regulating entity" that could not be fully understood by reducing it to parts. His work influenced the development of organicism, a philosophy that seeks middle ground between vitalist mysticism and mechanistic reductionism.

The Ghost at the Séance

While academic vitalism faded, popular vitalism flourished. Franz Mesmer's "animal magnetism" was only the beginning. The nineteenth century saw an explosion of theories about vital energies, life forces, and healing powers.

Carl Reichenbach, a German industrialist and chemist, developed the theory of "Odic force"—a life energy that he claimed permeated all living things and could be detected by sensitive individuals. His experiments involved placing subjects in darkened rooms and asking them to describe the luminous emanations they perceived around magnets, crystals, and human bodies. Critics noted that the results were highly subjective and could not be replicated under controlled conditions.

This pattern repeated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Someone would propose a new vital force—sometimes with scientific credentials, sometimes without—and claim to detect it through methods that resisted objective verification. The forces had many names: Odic force, orgone energy, biofields, subtle energy. The story was always the same.

The Franklin commission's investigation of Mesmer in 1784 established the template for debunking these claims. The commissioners didn't argue about theory. They simply ran controlled experiments. When patients didn't know which cup of water had been "magnetized," they couldn't tell the difference. When they thought plain water had been treated, they convulsed anyway. "The fluid without imagination is powerless," the commissioners concluded, "whereas imagination without the fluid can produce the effects of the fluid."

In other words: the placebo effect is real. The vital fluid is not.

Vitalism Today

No mainstream biologist today identifies as a vitalist. The term has become, as Mayr noted, something of a "pejorative epithet." And yet vitalist thinking persists, sometimes in surprising places.

Complementary and alternative medicine is suffused with vitalist concepts. Homeopathy, founded by Samuel Hahnemann in the late eighteenth century, explicitly describes disease as a "spirit-like derangement" of an immaterial "vital principle." Practitioners of therapeutic touch claim to manipulate a patient's "biofield"—a subtle energy field that supposedly exists beyond the electromagnetic fields produced by the heart and brain. Reiki, chakra healing, and external qi therapy all rest on similar foundations.

Traditional Chinese medicine's concept of qi, traditional Indian medicine's concept of prana, and the Yoruba concept of ase all continue to inform healing practices around the world. Whether these should be classified as vitalism is partly a semantic question. They are certainly pre-scientific in their origins, but they are also embedded in rich cultural and philosophical traditions that resist easy dismissal.

Critics point out that these practices face the same problem as Mesmer's animal magnetism: when tested under controlled conditions, the proposed vital forces cannot be detected and the treatments perform no better than placebos. Proponents counter that Western science may simply lack the tools to measure these energies—an argument that, whatever its merits, is difficult to distinguish from a refusal to be tested.

Emergence and Its Discontents

There is one area where something like vitalist thinking has made a quiet return to respectable science: the study of emergence.

Emergence is the idea that complex systems can exhibit properties that cannot be predicted from, or reduced to, the properties of their components. Water is wet, but neither hydrogen nor oxygen is wet. Consciousness arises from neurons, but no single neuron is conscious. Life emerges from chemistry, but no single molecule is alive.

Is emergence just vitalism in disguise? Scientists and philosophers disagree. Some see emergence as a genuine phenomenon that requires new explanatory frameworks—not a mystical vital force, but a recognition that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts in ways we don't yet fully understand. Others see it as a temporary placeholder for ignorance, a name for something we will eventually explain through conventional physics and chemistry, just as we explained away the élan vital.

The debate continues. But it's worth noting how different the conversation is today. No one is proposing that emergent properties involve nonphysical forces or supernatural principles. The question is not whether life obeys the laws of physics—it does—but whether those laws, applied to sufficiently complex systems, can produce genuinely novel phenomena that require new concepts to describe.

The Dormitive Virtue

There's a famous scene in Molière's play The Imaginary Invalid, written in 1673. A medical student is asked why opium causes sleep. He answers gravely: "Because of its dormitive virtue."

This is circular reasoning dressed up in Latin. "Dormitive virtue" just means "sleep-causing power." The answer restates the question without explaining anything.

Thomas Henry Huxley—the Victorian biologist known as "Darwin's bulldog"—accused vitalism of exactly this error. Saying that life is caused by a "vital force" is like saying that water is wet because of its "aquosity." You've given a name to your ignorance, not an explanation for it.

Huxley's grandson Julian extended the analogy in 1926. Explaining a locomotive by its "élan locomotif"—its locomotive force—tells you nothing about pistons, steam pressure, or combustion. The vital force, the élan vital, was equally empty.

This criticism stings because it's largely fair. Vitalism never explained how the vital force worked, only that it must exist. When mechanistic biology began to explain the same phenomena through chemistry and physics, vitalism had nothing left to offer.

What Remains

And yet something does remain—not a force, but a question. What is the relationship between the physical world we can measure and the felt experience of being alive?

Science can describe, in exquisite detail, the chemistry of a neuron firing. It cannot yet explain why that firing is accompanied by the sensation of seeing red, or feeling pain, or thinking about the future. This is the "hard problem" of consciousness, and it bears a family resemblance to the questions that motivated vitalism.

The vitalists were wrong about the answer. They may not have been entirely wrong about the question.

When we speak of "giving up the ghost," we use a phrase that predates modern biology by millennia. The ghost in question is not a haunting spirit but the vital breath, the life force, the animating principle that departs when we die. The phrase preserves, in amber, an ancient intuition about the mystery of being alive.

Modern science has not solved that mystery. It has dissolved part of it—the part about how bodies work, how cells divide, how genes encode proteins, how brains process information. But the feeling of being a living thing, the experience of consciousness, the sense that there is something it is like to be you—these remain as puzzling as ever.

Perhaps the vitalists were reaching for something real, even if they grasped it with the wrong hands. Not a force, but a phenomenon. Not a substance, but a perspective. Not something added to matter, but something that emerges when matter is organized in certain extraordinarily complex ways.

The ghost in you is not a visitor from another realm. It is what matter does when it becomes sufficiently intricate, sufficiently organized, sufficiently alive. That this is possible at all may be the deepest mystery of the universe—one that neither vitalism nor its critics have yet fully illuminated.