plan and the universal architect of the organic edifice; it is now only the architect directing his workmen, and they are physical and chemical agents. It is now reduced to the plan of the work, and even this plan has no objective existence; it is now only an idea. It has only a shadow of reality. To this it has been reduced by certain biologists. For this we may thank Claude Bernard; and he has thereby placed himself outside and beyond the weakest form of vitalism. He did not consider the idea of direction as a real principle. The connection of phenomena, their harmony, their conformity to a plan grasped by the intellect, their fitness for a purpose known to the intellect, are to him but a mental necessity, a metaphysical concept. The plan which is carried out has only a subjective existence; the directing force has no efficient virtue, no executive power; it does not emerge from the intellectual domain in which it took its rise, and does not "react on the phenomena which enabled the mind to create it."
It is between these two extreme incarnations of the vital principle, on the one hand an executive agent, on the other a simple directing plan, that the motley procession of vitalist doctrines passes on its way. At the point of departure we have a vital force, personified, acting, as we have stated, as if with human hands fashioning obedient matter; this is the pure and primitive form of the theory. At the other extreme we have a vital force which is now only a directing idea, without objective existence, and without an executive rôle; a mere concept by which the mind gathers together and conceives of a succession of physico-*chemical phenomena. On this side we are brought into touch with monism.
