Abstract
When “general physiology” emerged as a basic field of research within biology in the early nineteenth century, Henri Ducrotay de Blainville (1777–1850) on the one hand and Johannes Peter Müller (1801–1858) on the other appealed to chemical analysis to account for the properties and operations of organisms that were observed to differ from what was found in inorganic compounds. Their aim was to establish laws of vital organization that would be based on organic chemical processes, but would also be of use to explain morphological and functional differences among life forms. The intent of this paper is to specify for each of these leading physiologists the different presuppositions that provided theoretical frameworks for their interpretation of what they conceived of as laws of organization underpinning the dynamics of vital phenomena. Blainville presumed that the properties of organic compounds depended on the chemical properties of their constitutive molecules, but combined according to patterns of functional development, and that the latter could only be inferred from an empirical survey of modes of organization across the spectrum of life forms. For Müller, while all vital processes involved chemical reactions, in the formative and functional operations of organisms, these reactions would result from the action of life forces that were responsible for the production of organic combinations and thus for vital and animal functions. As both physiologists set significant methodological patterns for their many disciples and followers, their respective quasi-reductionist and anti-reductionist positions need to be accounted for.
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Notes
Only part of the Cours was published (de Blainville 1833). For an indication of the full range of issues covered, see the printed program of lessons, Plan du cours de physiologie générale et comparée fait à la faculté des sciences de Paris pendant les années 1829, 1830, 1831 et 1832, to be found in Clauzade (2009, Appendix 2, pp. 329–332). All translations from de Blainville (1833) are mine.
Though he does not speak of “vitalism” in his Cours (de Blainville 1833), Blainville is critical of theories that identify the “principle of life” as a specific agent eliciting vital processes that are unconnected with the determining conditions of their material constituents. In so doing, he seems to be in agreement with François Magendie’s (1783–1855) criticism of the “vitalists” (Magendie 1809; Rey 2000, pp. 394–401).
Blainville framed a notion of individual organism according to which it arises from generative organic matter and hierarchically develops more or less complex morphologies in harmonic connection with the conditions of its external milieu. For an analysis of this aspect of his physiology, see Balan (1979, p. 18) who quotes from Blainville (1833, II, p. 4): “Through this study, we get to understand that the relationship of functions to set arrangements of molecules and solids is one of the foremost conditions of functions. We thus get to know that such or such a form is required for the relations of organs to each other or of the same to the external world, and that on this account a perfect harmony exists between living beings and the circumstances in which they have to live”.
To be more exact, Blainville’s conceptions were partly endorsed by August Comte (1798–1857) in lessons 40–44 of the Cours de philosophie positive. As mentioned by Clauzade: “What Comte owes to his friend, as acknowledged in a note to Lesson 40, is a general conception of biology as structured by extremely efficient methodological tools, at the first rank of which the distinction static/dynamic is to be found. It may be easily shown that the plan of the lessons on biology largely resumes that of Blainville’s lectures on physiology, and even original conceptions that Comte explicitly attributes to Bichat or Barthez are presented and eventually reorganized according to a Blainvillian framework” (Clauzade 2009, p. 90). In matters of scientific methodology, Blainville would avoid resorting to hypotheses involving vital principles that would act as special agents, but, at the same time, he believed that the consequences that could be drawn from empirical and experimental facts could not but conflict with the metaphysical tenets of his Christian spiritualism (Clauzade 2102).
Müller first introduced cellular explanations in his Ueber den feinern Bau und die Formen der krankhaften Geschwülste (Müller 1838; Rather 1978). He then revised his Handbuch to take account of Schwann’s cell theory, which he reinterpreted along his own tenets (Muller 1851, I, p. 7, 42; Löhff 1978; Duchesneau 1987, pp. 215–231).
Müller refers to the series of controversies that had arisen on this issue since the publication of John Turberville Needham’s (1713–1781) Nouvelles Recherches microscopiques (Needham 1750) and Lazzaro Spallanzani’s (1729–1799) reply in the Nouvelles Recherches sur les découvertes microscopiques et la génération des corps organisés (Needham 1769), but he cites in particular the more recent contributions of Carl August Sigismund Schultze (1795– 1877) and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (1795–1876).
In fact, apart from the Kantian definition of organic body present in section 65 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Kant 1968, V, pp. 372–376), which he endorsed, Müller’s position was very different from Kant’s, for he would not distinguish, as Kant had done, between a legitimate reflective and regulative use of teleology in accounting for organic formative processes, and an undue appeal to causal efficient vital forces reaching beyond the limits of mechanistic explanations of physiological phenomena. On this account, full credit should not be granted to Timothy Lenoir’s interpretation (Lenoir 1982, pp. 140–155; Zammito 2012).
On the specificity of the reference to vital force in Müller, see Florey (1995).
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This paper is part of the topical collection “Organic/Organization/Organism. Essays in the history and philosophy of chemistry and biology.”
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Duchesneau, F. Laws of organization and chemical analysis: Blainville and Müller. HPLS 38, 20 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-016-0122-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-016-0122-1