Quotes on vitalism and positivism from Kevin’s lecture on 4-11-07

Proponent of Vitalism: Justus Liebig (1842)

“There is nothing to prevent us from considering the vital force as a peculiar property, which is possessed by certain material bodies, and becomes sensible when their elementary particles are combined in a certain arrangement or form. This supposition takes from the vital phenomena nothing of their wonderful peculiarity; it may therefore be considered as a resting point, from which an investigation into these phenomena, and the laws which regulate them, may be commenced.”

Opponent of Vitalism: Emil du Bois-Reymond (1848)

“Physiology must fulfill her destiny…If one observes the development of our science he cannot fail to note how the vital force daily shrinks to a more confined realm of phenomena, how new areas are increasingly brought under the dominion of physical and chemical forces…It cannot fail that physiology, giving up her special interests, will one day be absorbed into the great unity of the physical sciences; it will in fact dissolve into organic physics and chemistry.”

Positivism: August Comte (1830)

“Only the knowledge of facts is fertile; that the ultimate form for certitude is furnished by the experimental sciences; that the mind, in philosophy as in science, avoids mere verbalism and error only on condition of ceaselessly adhering to experience and renouncing everything which is given a priori; that, finally, the domain of ‘things in themselves’ is inaccessible and our thought may attain only to relations and to laws.”

Positivism?: Claude Bernard (1875)

“We cannot attain to the principle of anything, and the physiologist has nothing more to do with the principle of life than the chemist has with the principle of the affinity of bodies. First causes elude us everywhere, and everywhere alike we can reach only the immediate causes of phenomena. Now, these immediate causes, which are nothing less than the very conditions of phenomena, are capable of as rigorous ascertainment in the sciences of living bodies as in those of lifeless ones.”