KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

22 Theory of the Organism
by these factors but rather only released or triggered by them. The
life force, under whatever name, was not the result of the organization
of particles but the property of each an every particle. Only the
expression of the property is a result of the organization. Furthermore,
the level of organization at which the force is expressed is far
below the level of the individual organism. Buffon introduced
organic molecules, Haller the irritability of fibers, and Blumenbach
had his Bildungstrieb become active in cell or mucous tissue. These
theories could be strictly reductionistic in the sense that they
reduced the phenomena of a system to the properties of its parts; on
the other hand they allowed an autonomous biological level of
explanation that could not be reduced to mechanics, for although
the organism is strictly determined by the fundamental properties
and laws of matter, one of these properties is non-mechanical. In
answer to the reproach that such a life force is simply an unintelligible
qualitas occulta, the vitalists pointed to the still unclear status
of gravitation.
The analogy to Newtonian gravitation has a certain amount of
justification. As an example of the appeal to Newton let me quote a
passage from Blumenbach: 16
For most readers the reminder is hopefully quite superfluous that the word
Bildungstrieb just like the words attraction, gravity, etc., serves no other
purpose than to designate a force whose constant effect is known from
experience, but whose cause just like the cause of the above mentioned so
universally recognized natural forces is for us a qualitas occulta.
The legitimacy of the appeal to Newton by the vitalists and
such 'proto-vitalists' as Buffon and Haller lies on the one hand in a
similarity of method and on the other hand in a similarity of the
reaction to the failings of that method. Newton's method consisted
in tracing back the phenomenon to be explained to the essential
properties of particles (in the last analysis indivisible atoms).
Essential properties such as extension, impenetrability, or inertia
are attributed not merely to every body of actual experience, but also
to every imaginable body independently of the existence of other
bodies: that is, to a body even if it were the only body in an otherwise
empty absolute space. Gravity, although it belongs to every body of
experience is not an essential property of matter, because as mutual
gravitation it presupposes the existence of a system of bodies
16 Blumenbach, Bildungstrieb, 25-26. In footnotes to this and subsequent passages
Blumenbach cites Newton and Voltaire's exposition of Newton.