Illustrations of positivism : a selection of articles from the "Positivist review" in science, philosophy, religion, and politics / by John Henry Bridges.
- John Henry Bridges
- Date:
- 1915
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Illustrations of positivism : a selection of articles from the "Positivist review" in science, philosophy, religion, and politics / by John Henry Bridges. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![Boerhaave may be taken as the representative of the former school ; Van Helmont, Stahl, and Barthez of the latter. To Boerhaave, eagerly availing himself of the physical attainments of his time, and more especially of Harvey’s discovery of the circulation as resulting from the muscular forces of the heart, the human body presented itself as an engine working on mechanical principles. Animal heat, for instance, was caused and maintained by the friction of particles in the rapid movement of the blood. Again, towards the close of the seventeenth and during the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, chemistry began to emerge as a distinct science. Its discoveries, imperfect as they were, attracted another school of physicians, who used them as a mode of explaining vital action by ferments and by conflicting action of salts. Against these crude attempts to reduce life to a play of physical and chemical forces a memorable and persistent protest was raised by Stahl, and after Stahl by Barthez. Stahl put forward the conception of an Arché pervading the organism, relaxing this part, bracing that, and thus regulating their supply of blood or the activity of their secretion. It was in many respects analogous to the Psyché of Aristotle. Barthez, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, was far better equipped than Stahl with philosophical principles and scientific knowledge. But the Vital Principle by which he accounted for the unity of the organism, for the consensus of its functions and the regulation of molecular change, was essentially identical with the arché of Stahl. Both thinkers were at one in their conviction that the organic world exhibited phenomena for which mathematical, physical, and chemical sciences could not account. In equal contrast with these opposing schools, the one crude, mechanical, and incomplete, the other nebulous and incompre- hensible, Bichat endeavoured to present the laws of phenomena characteristic of living things, without attempting to penetrate their primal cause. Most physicians [he says] have begun by looking for this primal principle; they have tried to descend from the study of the nature of life to that of its phenomena, instead of rising from observation of these to the formation of their theory. The psyché of Stahl, the arché of Van Helmont, the vital principle of Barthez, looked at as the central source of vital action, have been the foundations on which all physiological discussion has rested. But each of these foundations has given way in turn, and of their ruins nothing has been left except facts of sensibility and mobility tested by rigorous experiment. The narrow limits of man’s understanding almost always debar](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32785756_0024.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
