Chapter 9

Confirmation of the proposition 'The phenomena of
the living body cannot be explained apart from
a single sensitive principle'

1871. Having explained the laws of animality, I now have to show: 1. that they are necessary for the explanation of animal phenomena and 2. that they are sufficient for this purpose. I begin from the fundamental proposition of the theory I have already explained: 'Animal phenomena cannot be explained unless there is a single principle on which they depend; this principle must be sensitive.'

1872. I said that even if we succeeded in explaining individual phenomena by recurring to different principles, the harmonious complex of phenomena and their wonderful unity would still remain unexplained. This complex and unity can find its sufficient reason only in a single principle, which must also be sensitive. Here, our attention must focus on the marvellous agreement between different living organisms which was proclaimed so solemnly from remotest antiquity. Hippocrates' opinion is well-known(*) ,(30) that is, 'a single convergence, a single conspiration, in which all things agree.'

1873. There has certainly been no lack of attempts to provide an explanation of such a solemn fact. Recourse has been made to the wonderful, harmonious ingenuity of the animal machine, to the common origin of certain parts of the body, to the proximity of other parts,(31) to communication between the vessels, to the continuation of fibres and membranes, and so on.(32)

1874. There can be no doubt that the living body must be brought together in a wonderful mechanism if the phenomena of sympathy between its various members are to take place. I have already spoken of the need of organisation in general if life-phenomena are to be manifested. Nevertheless, a full, sufficient cause of such sympathy can never be found in mechanism alone. No mechanism has the unity of cause which is required to produce this sympathy. If we were dealing solely with the explanation of harmony amongst extrasubjective movements which correspond to the different parts composing the machine called 'animal body', the supposition of some divine, extremely ingenious mechanism might seem sufficient to solve the problem. But the sympathy and consonance manifested in the human body is not only extrasubjective; it is principally subjective, in feeling. Indeed, careful consideration shows that such sympathy lies in the correspondence between external motions and feelings, that is, between extrasubjective and subjective phenomena. This communication is such that its laws prove the presence of a single principle, lacking parts, and sensitive.

1875. I would go further. Even the harmonic movements which take place contemporaneously in different organs of the machine of the animal body could never be explained by the mechanical laws of motion, which produce only successive movements. The affections of the human body, however, are very often permanent, contemporaneous and harmonious. Successive movements move but do not modify, perfect and form the organs of the machine. Such modification, perfection and formation is proper to animal movements which influence the machine itself in such a way that their proper effect is to form it in one way rather than another.

1876. Moreover, in the motions of the human machine, as Cheyne noted, continual loss of force comes about through friction and wear of the parts. Hence the need for an inexhaustible principle of force, extraneous to the mechanism, which continually supplies for this deficiency.(33)

1877. Finally, the efficacy of Clark's demonstration of the impossibility of the presence of continual motion as a result of purely mechanical forces is undeniable. This proof rests on the thesis: 'Such continual motion would suppose a weight heavier than itself or an elastic force more elastic than itself.' From this contradiction William of Portfield concludes that continuous movements in the animal suppose an altogether hyper-mechanical principle.(34) We still have to investigate, therefore, the nature of this single force which, applied to an organised body, produces the innumerable, complicated, incessant phenomena of sympathy and synergy between all the parts of the body.

1878. Doctors themselves are gradually coming to accept and affirm that we need a single principle to explain this stupendous fact.
The fundamental principle of vitalism is not mistaken: organic motion is the origin of all functions of life. But it does err in this respect: the speculative investigations of the pathologist must not go further than this vital motion. The mistake is made because this motion is not the first origin of organic phenomena, but is itself a phenomenon. It is indeed true that all the functions of organised bodies are tied in with vital motion. Nevertheless, it is still not the first step from which all the other steps proceed in the general chain of phenomena of organised nature. It is not the final point of our analytic investigations because vital movement itself is produced by VITAL FORCE.(35)

1879. Amongst the ancients, still unprejudiced by the materialistic, gratuitous assertions of certain sophists, the great philosophers and doctors were always aware of the necessity of recurring to a primitive, single force, altogether different from every other, to explain the operations of the animal body. The father of medicine appealed to an original force, posited from the beginning, to explain how the different parts of the body are nourished. He called this (*) (facultas quae ab initio adest) [a faculty present from the beginning],(36) and added: 'The beginning of all things is one, and the end of all things is one, and the end is the same as the beginning.'(37)

1880. But the concept of this force which students of natural science formulated over different periods was often imperfect.
It was noticed that this force, and even the first movements it produced, did not fall under the senses, although the movements initiated sensible motion.(38) But no one perhaps ever saw clearly and fully how movement and feeling are essentially different phenomena [App., no. 1], and even opposite to one another. Moreover, people were unaware that movement is not the first step and feeling the second, as though feeling were generated by movement. It was not understood that the truth lay in exactly the opposite direction. In other words, feeling comes first and has as its activity the production of the animal movement(39) which is present in the body to extrasubjective observation.

It is indeed an undeniable fact, posited in our consciousness, that we can move our body. When I say 'we' I am referring to a substantial feeling, which I have already explained. It is an undeniable fact that no new feeling arises in us without new, corresponding movements in our body. This can be seen, for example, in our passions: fear makes the blood course from our extremities to the heart, and so on. It is a definite fact, therefore, that feelings and their consequent instincts, together with emotions which themselves pertain to rational feelings, produce movements in the human body. This is a conclusion based solidly and stably on reasoning which moves from definite facts.

1881. Philosophers, however, left aside such an enlightening and undeniable truth ascertained by consciousness and concentrated their attention solely on the phenomenon of accidental, passing sensation. Having observed that such sensation is necessarily conditioned by movement impressed on the nerve fibres, they hastily concluded that this movement of the fibres is a primary phenomenon and cause whose effect is feeling. They did not reflect that the fibre would not provide sensation unless it first possessed sense and that movements in a dead, insensitive fibre produce nothing. Nor did they consider the nature of sensation, which can only be a modification and excitation of some preceding feeling. In a word, they did not grasp the great truth of a fundamental feeling which, having as its term an extended corporeal element, is bound to be modified and excited by movements provoked in this term. The true, efficient cause of sensation, therefore, is not movements, but preceding feeling which is modified when its extrasubjective body is moved. Feeling adheres to this body or, better, the continuous body subsists in feeling itself.

1882. Another cause of the illusion to which philosophers were subject in such an important matter was this. Extrasubjective bodies exist whose movements present us with no sensation. Our consciousness is unaware of such sensation, and analogy does not conjecture it because we cannot observe in those bodies extrasubjective movements similar to those in our own body which, as we know through our own internal awareness, are the effects of feeling. These philosophers concluded, therefore, that no feeling exists in these extrasubjective bodies and that apparent movements come from something unknown, from some unsensed force. They IMAGINED the existence of a brute force, that is, a cause of solely local movements, unattached to feeling or not referred to some feeling. This HYPOTHESIS was not examined to see if it contained anything bizarre or indeed absurd, as if an ens, which exists merely relatively to another which observes it, need not be joined to any INTERNAL principle.

If we meditate on the nature of an internal principle, we shall inevitably find that only a sensitive or resultative subject can be an internal principle in a true, rigorous sense. Although we can consider one body within another, and therefore a contained body - which we call 'internal' relative to that which contains it (the container we call 'external') - the only notion we can have of this contained body is that it is an external ens, an ens falling under extrasubjective observation. Accurately considered, all our experimental information about bodies is reduced to information about surfaces. Dividing a body means only discovering new surfaces. We never find anything except surfaces; nothing truly internal is ever found in a body; the inside is never seen. Only human IMAGINATION supposes the existence of some substratum constantly kept from the senses, and hidden ever deeper in bodies, something which is per se internal to bodies.

But even granted the possibility of this internal something which forms the essence of bodies and is called brute force, it will never be more than a mere hypothesis, a gratuitously affirmed ens, when it is considered separately from every other principle, from the corporeal principle(40) and existing per se.

The existence of merely motor forces has not been proved, therefore. Consequently, the assumption that such abstract entities (similar to the hidden qualities propounded by the Peripatetics) explain the movements of the animal body implies recourse to a cause which is at least uncertain and totally unknown and cannot in any way render impossible the contrary opinion which asserts that a sensitive, living principle is the cause even of movements originating in bodies where phenomena analogous to those in our feeling are not manifest. The difference between these two opinions lies here: we know for certain that a locomotive activity exists in feeling and consequently, to explain the phenomena, have recourse in the opinion I support to a cause whose existence is proved. In the other opinion, no argument can prove the existence of a cause altogether devoid of feeling but suitable for producing local movement, nor that this cause is of its very nature an ens. The second hypothesis is therefore defective from many points of view, but above all because it lacks the principal condition necessary to any hypothesis, that is, proof of the existence of the cause hypothetically assumed to explain a given class of facts.

1883. That said, it is possible to see in physiology evident progress towards the truth. Physiologists have taken a great step forward by realising that the explanation of animal phenomena, especially the phenomena of sympathy, requires a single principle. This is now accepted in France. Bichat's error, which distinguished animal from organic life,(41) and granted both the two properties of sensitivity and contractility (thus distinguishing sympathy of sensibility and animal contractility from sympathy of sensibility and organic contractility), is recognised in his own country. It is accepted that abuse of abstraction led him to separate that which is one and simple in nature. G. B. Monfalcon wisely notes:

Both in Italy and in France, therefore, there is final agreement about a single principle to which animal phenomena and especially sympathy are referred.
Nevertheless, the fundamental classification of animal phenomena into extrasubjective and subjective phenomena has still not been seen.

Notes

(30) De Aliment., 4.

(31) Cf. Baglivi, De fibra motrice, and especially the chapter entitled: De consensu solidorum jure originis, vicinitatis usus et communicationis officii.

(32) Henr. Jos. Raega, De sympatia seu consensu partium corporis humani etc. (c. 3).

(33) English Maladies, London 1773, p. 80. - Portfield, too, demonstrated the necessity of a principle in the human body extraneous to mechanism from the very fact of reproduction of the mechanism of the human body. Sui movimenti interni dellocchio, a little work inserted in the Esperienze ed osservazioni mediche dEdimburgo, vol. 4.

(34) Op. cit.

(35) Bufalini, Fondamenti di Patologia analitica, Milan 1833, p. 114.

(36) De alimento, 1.

(37) (*) De alimento, 2.

(38) 'Indeed, the sensible phenomena of living machines are not properly speaking the pure action of excitability which is rather a hidden movement obedient to particular laws and excited in the primitive, organic fibre as a result of impulses from external objects. Such a movement neither falls under the senses nor has constant relationships with the apparent phenomena of our machine. It cannot, therefore, be measured in any way' (Memoria intorno al tema proposto dalla societ italiana delle scienze residente in Modena: 'Determinare se le idee delleccitabilit ecc. sono abbastanza esatte ecc', Modena 1823, p. 16).

(39) I say 'animal' because not every bodily movement is animal. Only that produced by the animal principle is animal movement. - Note, however, that the life instinct which posits feeling gives the body which it invades a certain aptitude, a certain tone, a certain collocation or intestine position of the molecules. This aptitude renders the body capable of being enlivened and felt. Cf. AMS, 367-379.

(40) I do not deny the existence of brute force, nor do I deny that it is conceived by the human mind and hence rightly called substance. But I do deny that this substance can really exist on its own without being joined to a sensitive, active principle which remains unknown. I argue the existence of this principle solely from ontological principles.

(41) AMS.

(42) Article Sympathie in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Mdicales. - This well-founded observation that vital forces, and indeed any single vital force devoid of feeling, is a mere abstraction was already noted at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries. This was the point made by George Ernest Stahl, a wise man bitterly and unjustly attacked by the sensism prevalent at the time, when he fought against the abuse of abstraction by those who posited life in motion. In fact, establishing a cause of motion altogether devoid of feeling means establishing an abstract cause, an arbitrary, secret creation of the mind, a name and nothing more. Cf. Stahl's dissertation De febris rationali ratione, Magdeburg, 1702. I have already shown where Stahl was mistaken, 391-419.