Vitalism

Vitalism is the doctrine that living organisms depend on a special life force beyond ordinary physical and chemical processes. It contrasts with accounts that explain life through physical and chemical mechanisms alone.

Aristotle: An ancient Greek philosopher whose account of living things included a soul as the principle of life. His account of the soul helped establish early ideas that life requires a distinct principle.
Entelechy: Aristotle’s principle by which a living being realizes its characteristic form and capacities. Driesch used this term for the organizing agency he believed shaped embryonic development.
Materialism: The philosophical view that reality consists of matter and its physical processes. Materialism rejects the extra nonphysical agency central to vitalist doctrine.
Vitalism (chemistry): The claim that substances produced by living organisms require a special vital force and cannot be synthesized from inorganic matter. This chemical form of vitalism was directly tested by laboratory synthesis.
Élan vital: Henri Bergson’s proposed vital impetus, an irreducible force driving the evolution of life. Bergson gave vitalism one of its most influential modern formulations.
Embryonic development: The process by which an embryo forms and develops into an organism. Vitalists treated the coordinated formation of an embryo as evidence of nonmechanical organization.
Physicalism: The view that everything is physical or depends on the physical. Physicalism rules out an irreducible life force while allowing complex biological organization.
Friedrich Wöhler: A German chemist who synthesized urea from ammonium cyanate in 1828. His synthesis undermined the claim that a compound associated with life could only be made by living organisms.
Hans Driesch: A German embryologist who argued that embryonic development could not be explained by physical mechanisms alone. His experiments and arguments made vitalism a live controversy in early twentieth-century biology.
Regulative development: Development in which an embryo can compensate for the loss or rearrangement of cells to form a complete organism. Driesch cited this capacity as evidence that development exceeded fixed mechanical pathways.

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