Professor Henderson concedes very little to the vitalists or the teleologists.
Now if Sir Oliver or any one else could tell us what force is, this difference between the vitalists and the mechanists might be reconciled.
Is not this conceding to the vitalistsall that they claim?
Among the vitalists of to-day, one of the most frequently cited, perhaps, except Driesch the most frequently cited, is G.
And yet he must undoubtedly be regarded as a vitalist by mechanists and vitalists alike.
It is true the philosophical standpoint is on the whole different, for while many of that older generation were vitalists Hertwig belongs to the mechanistic school.
Subtle fluids play a great part in Lamarck's biology: they take the place of the soul or entelechy which the vitalists would postulate to explain organic happenings.
The real ground of the opposition of Neumeister and other vitalistsis their dualistic conception of nature, which will maintain at all costs the deep gulf between the organic and inorganic worlds.
Even if the vitalists were right in despairing of further scientific discoveries, they would be wrong in offering their verbiage as a substitute.
The Vitalists said that a dead body and a live one are physically and chemically identical, and that the difference can be accounted for only by the existence of a Vital Force.
This seems simple; but the Anti-Mechanists objected to be called Vitalists (obviously the right name for them) on two contradictory grounds.
A great deal of needless ingenuity has been wasted, both by the vitalists and materialists, in formulating impossible definitions of life--in attempts to tell us what life is.
It presents no such formidable antagonism as the vitalists would expect to encounter from them.
But they manifestly array their opinions against the vitalists on the assumption that there is no scientific value whatever in the many and singularly diversified statements respecting "life" in both the Old and New Testaments.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "vitalists" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
