Vital forces: regulative principles or constitutive agents? A strategy in German physiology, 1786-1802.

Abstract

JN ALL OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY science there is apparently no more authentic example of the use of purpose as a regulative principle than J. F. Blumenbach's doctrine of vital forces. In the Institutionesphysiologicae Blumenbach states that an indefinable vital energy manifests itself in various ways in various processes of the living body. The term force, applied to the observed effects of this energy, unifies those effects by interpreting them as purposeful.' Kant himself endorsed this proposal for what he called its problematic applications. Blumenbach, he wrote, had rightly declared contradictory to reason the ideas that life had sprung from the nature of what was lifeless, and that matter had disposed itself in the form of self-maintaining purposiveness. At the same time Blumenbach had left to natural mechanism,