researches. He had asserted, apropos of animal heat and respiration, the identity of the action of physical agents in the living body and in the external world. On the other hand, Bichat, by a flash of genius, decentralized life, dispersing the vital properties in the tissues, or, as we should now say, in the living matter. It was from the comparison between the constitution and the properties of living matter and those of inanimate matter that light was to come.
§ 3. Scientific Neo-Vitalism.
We can now understand the nature of modern neo-vitalism. It borrows from its predecessor its fundamental principle—namely, the specificity of the vital fact. But this specificity is no longer essential, it is only formal. The difference between it and the physical fact grows less and almost vanishes. It consists of a diversity of mechanisms or executive agents. For example, digestion transforms the alimentary starch in the intestines into sugar; the chemist does the same in his laboratory, only he employs acids, while the organism employs special agents, ferments, in this case a diastase. It is a particular form of chemistry, but still it is a chemistry. That is how Claude Bernard looked at it. The vital fact was not fundamentally distinguished from the physico-chemical fact, but only in form.
This expurgated and accommodated vitalism (Claude Bernard pushed his concessions so far as to call his doctrine "physico-chemical vitalism") was revived a few years ago by Chr. Bohr and Heidenhain.
Other biologists, instead of attributing the difference
