definition anything that can alter the speed or direction of matter
in motion (briefly, that can overcome inertia), is essentially a
mechanistic conception. Here we had the New Vitalist only half
extricated from the Old Mechanist, objecting to be called either, and
unable to give a clear lead in the new direction. And there was a deeper
antagonism. The Old Vitalists, in postulating a Vital Force, were
setting up a comparatively mechanical conception as against the divine
idea of the life breathed into the clay nostrils of Adam, whereby he
became a living soul. The New Vitalists, filled by their laboratory
researches with a sense of the miraculousness of life that went far
beyond the comparatively uninformed imaginations of the authors of the
Book of Genesis, regarded the Old Vitalists as Mechanists who had tried
to fill up the gulf between life and death with an empty phrase denoting
an imaginary physical force.

These professional faction fights are ephemeral, and need not trouble us
here. The Old Vitalist, who was essentially a Materialist, has evolved
into the New Vitalist, who is, as every genuine scientist must be,
finally a metaphysician. And as the New Vitalist turns from the disputes
of his youth to the future of his science, he will cease to boggle at
the name Vitalist, or at the inevitable, ancient, popular, and quite
correct use of the term Force to denote metaphysical as well as physical
overcomers of inertia.

Since the discovery of Evolution as the method of the Life Force the
religion of metaphysical Vitalism has been gaining the definiteness and
concreteness needed to make it assimilable by the educated critical man.
But it has always been with us. The popular religions, disgraced by
their Opportunist cardinals and bishops, have been kept in credit by
canonized saints whose secret was their conception of themselves as the