Domain of the Morphogenic Idea as the Last Sanctuary of Vital Force.—We see the reason for this. Physiology, in fact, has taken up its position in the explanation of the functional activity of the constituted organism—i.e., on a ground where intervene, as we shall show further on, no energies and no matter other than universal energies and matter. Naturalists, on the other hand, have more especially considered—and from the descriptive point of view alone, at least up to the times of Lamarck and Darwin—the functions, the generation, the development and the evolution of species. Now these functions are most refractory and inaccessible to physico-chemical explanations. So, when the time came to give an account of what they had done, the zoologists had substituted for executive agents nothing but vital force under its different names. To Aristotle it is the vital force itself which, as soon as it is introduced into the body of the child, moulds its flesh and fashions it in the human form. Contemporary naturalists, the Americans C. O. Whitman and C. Philpotts, for example, take the same line of argument. Others, such as Blumenbach and Needham, in the eighteenth century, invoked the same division under another name, that of the nisus formativus. Finally, others play with words; they talk of heredity, of adaptation, of atavism, as if these were real, active, and efficient beings; while they are only appellations, names applied to collections of facts.
This region was therefore eminently favourable to the rapid increase of hypotheses, and so they abounded. There were the theories of Buffon, of Lamarck, of Darwin, of Herbert Spencer, of E. Haeckel, of His, of Weismann, of De Vries, and
