In this case,
therefore, M. Comte made a mistake: and he will be found to have made
many similar ones. But in the science next after chemistry, biology, the
empty mode of explanation by scholastic entities, such as a plastic
force, a vital principle, and the like, has been kept up even to the
present day. The German physiology of the school of Oken,
notwithstanding his acknowledged genius, is almost as metaphysical as
Hegel, and there is in France a quite recent revival of the Animism of
Stahl. These metaphysical explanations, besides their inanity, did
serious harm, by directing the course of positive scientific inquiry
into wrong channels. There was indeed nothing to prevent investigating
the mode of action of the supposed plastic or vital force by observation
and experiment; but the phrases gave currency and coherence to a false
abstraction and generalization, setting inquirers to look out for one
cause of complex phaenomena which undoubtedly depended on many.
According to M. Comte, chemistry entered into the positive stage with
Lavoisier, in the latter half of the last century (in a subsequent
treatise he places the date a generation earlier); and biology at the
beginning of the present, when Bichat drew the fundamental distinction
between nutritive or vegetative and properly animal life, and referred
the properties of organs to the general laws of the component tissues.
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