This type of mind is bound to have trouble in accepting the physico-chemical theory of the nature and origin of life.  It visualizes life, sees it as a distinct force or principle working in and through matter but not of it, super-physical in its origin and psychological in its nature.  This is the view Henri Bergson exploits in his “Creative Evolution.”  This is the view Kant took when he said, “It is quite certain that we cannot even satisfactorily understand, much less explain, the nature of an organism and its internal forces on purely mechanical principles.”  It is the view Goethe took when he said, “Matter can never exist without spirit, nor spirit without matter.”

Tyndall says Goethe was helped by his poetic training in the field of natural history, but hindered as regards the physical and mechanical sciences.  “He could not formulate distinct mechanical conceptions; he could not see the force of mechanical reasoning.”  His literary culture helped him to a literary interpretation of living nature, but not to a scientific explanation of it; it helped put him in sympathy with living things, and just to that extent barred him from the mechanistic conception of those of pure science.  Goethe, like every great poet, saw the universe through the colored medium of his imagination, his emotional and aesthetic nature; in short, through his humanism, and not in the white light of the scientific reason.  His contributions to literature were of the first order, but his contributions to science have not taken high rank.  He was a “prophet of the soul,” and not a disciple of the scientific understanding.

If we look upon life as inherent or potential in the constitution of matter, dependent upon outward physical and chemical conditions for its development, we are accounting for life in terms of matter and motion, and are in the ranks of the materialists.  But if we find ourselves unable to set the ultimate particles of matter in action, or so working as to produce the reaction which results in life, without conceiving of some new force or principle operating upon them, then we are in the ranks of the vitalists or idealists.  The idealists see the original atoms slumbering there in rock and sea and soil for untold ages, till, moved upon by some unknown factor, they draw together in certain fixed order and numbers, and life is the result.  Something seems to put a spell upon them and cause them to behave so differently from the way they behaved before they were drawn into the life circuit.

When we think of life, as the materialists do, as of mechanico-chemical origin, or explicable in terms of the natural universal order, we think of the play of material forces amid which we live, we think of their subtle action and interaction all about us—­of osmosis, capillarity, radio-activity, electricity, thermism, and the like; we think of the four states of matter,—­solid, fluid, gaseous, and ethereal,—­of how little our senses take in of their total activities, and we do not feel the need of invoking a transcendental principle to account for it.