Note 134 — THE INDIVIDUAL ORGANISM WITH REGARD TO FORM AND METABOLISM (continued 4)

The first proof of vitalism, indeed, rests upon the analysis of the differentiation of an harmonious-equipotential system as a whole: this whole cannot be a machine that would relate to differentiation as a whole; the question whether there might be any machines distributed in the whole, in the form of the nuclei is of no importance at all in this argument. Moreover the pressure experiments (see page 63) prove the unimportance of such “machines” for the specificity of differentiation, and the second proof of vitalism shows that the nuclei cannot be regarded as machines accounting for differentiation in any way.