guide. It seems as if a double accompanies them like a shadow. This intelligent guide of blind, material force is what Reinke calls a dominant. Nothing could be more like the blas and the archeus of Van Helmont. Material energies would thus be paired off with their blas, their dominants, in the living organisms. In them there would therefore be two categories of force: "material forces," or rather, material energies obeying the laws of universal energetics; and in the second place, intelligent "spiritual forces," the dominants. When the sculptor is working his marble, in every blow which elicits a spark there is something more than the strong force of the hammer. There is thought, the volition of the artist, which is realizing a plan. In a machine there is more than machinery. Behind the wheels is the object which the author had in view when he adjusted them for a determined end. The energies spent in action are regulated by the adjustment—that is to say, by the dominants due to the intellect of the constructor.
Thus it is in the living machine. The dominants in this case are the guardians of the plan, the agents of the aim in view. Some regulate the functional activity of the living body, and some regulate its development and its construction. Such is the second form, the philosophical form, extreme and teleological, of contemporary neo-vitalism.
