Vitalism has essentially been the foundation of medical thinking since the classical times of Hippocrates and Galen. In Western medicine, vitalism declined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the ascendancy of scientific thinking, though today it is still a central tenet of naturopathic philosophy.

The premise of vitalism considers the human body and psyche as being animated by the vital force, which starts flowing at the moment of conception and which ceases with the death of the body. The flow of vital energy through the body nourishes, heals, develops and sustains the body. This flow of vital force is synonymous with the emotional experience of the person, whereby each individual emotion is seen as a particular wave form within the flow. For example, love creates a smooth, comforting, nourishing and harmonizing flow, in contrast to anger, which generates a spiky, intense, spasmodic and disruptive flow. Every emotion has thereby a direct effect on the body's physiological function.

The Vital Force

The vital force is also seen as the substance out of which all ideas are formed. Accordingly particular mental attitudes influence emotional responses which, in turn, affects physiological function. Vitalism embraces the inter-relationship of mental, emotional and physical experience.

From a vitalistic stance, health is synonymous with the harmonious or ease of flow to the vital force through the body and psyche, while dis-ease arises when the flow of vital energy is disrupted. Therapeutically the objective of the medicine or healing is to restore the harmony to the flow.

Modern conventional medicine regards vitalism as outdated and having been disproved with the apparent success of biochemical physiology in explaining how the body functions. This is not strictly true. As physicians started using reductionist scientific ideas they simply lost the ability to understand the subtlety of vitalism. This is highlighted by contemporary medical historians being largely unable to correctly communicate the principles of vitalism. It must also be noted that, in contrast to it being out of date, vitalism is still currently found in many guises within different cultural medical traditions of the world, such as the Arabic, Chinese and Indian to mention a few.

Lost Understanding

In order to see how this understanding of vitalism became lost, it is necessary to provide a more detailed explanation of how the vital force was described and understood in the first place. In so doing it is possible to see how to reconnect with this knowledge once more. The first way that the vital force has been understood, is through the cosmology of the five Elements, Earth, Water, Air, Fire and Ether.

Though the use of the Elements is found in cultures earlier than the Greek Hellenistic era, it was the philosopher Plato who is thought to have coined the term Element. As Plato used the term, the four gross Elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire, are the universal forces upon which life depends: Earth is both the planet on which we live and mother nature upon whom we physically depend. Water is the universal solvent in which 99% of all biochemical processes take place. Air is the atmosphere by means of which all living organisms respire. While Fire is the sun in the heavens which provides heat and light, which through the photosynthesis of plants ultimately provides the energy for every creature upon the earth.

Animating the four gross Elements is the vital force, represented by the fifth Element Ether. Ether, though beyond physical manifestation, is visualized as the substance out of which the other four Elements are formed and into which they will once more dissolve. For this reason Ether has been described as the quintaessentia or fifth essence. This relationship is beautifully illustrated in the relationship of alchemical symbols for the Elements. The vital force too is linked to the caduceus, see Figure 2, the emblem of the two snakes entwined around a central stave that the god Mercury carries in his left hand. Its structure symbolically encapsulates the Hermetic principles of healing used to restore the harmonious flow of the vital force through the body. This is why the caduceus is found on many logos of medical institutions throughout the world, though ironically few doctors within them are able to explain why!

Why did Vitalism Decline?

Why did vitalism decline in Western medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? The principal reason was the redefinition of the term element as a unit of material composition by the philosopher Robert Boyle. Shortly after the Restoration of Charles II to the throne, Boyle wrote his The Skeptical Chemist in 1661 - which has come to be considered as the foundation stone of modern chemistry. In this work he took a very literal rather than symbolic understanding of the four Elements.

Figure 2: The Caduceus - borne by Mercury,
the God of Healing, in his left hand.

Boyle goes on to destructively criticize Earth, Water, Air and Fire as having no real validity whatsoever in explaining the physical world around us. He dogmatically denies the metaphysical and philosophical ideas that he acknowledged were based upon them. In his frustration to understand them, he put forward his new definition instead:

I now mean by Elements, as those Chymists that speak plainest by their Principles, certain Primitive and Simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies; which not being made of any other bodies, or of one another, are the Ingredients of which all the perfectly mixt Bodies are immediately compounded, and into to which they are intimately resolved.

In this rather convoluted definition, it can clearly be seen that an element is no longer one of the universal forces upon which life depends; instead it is defined as a unit of material composition that cannot be broken down further. If a substance can be broken down into constituent parts, then from this definition it cannot be considered an element. Astrology and Health

the vital force

The Vital Force: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | The Humours

Over a century later, in 1787, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier made his important discovery of the principles of combustion. In his most famous experiment, he heated quicksilver and air inside a retort (see Figure 3). He concluded from the experiment that the heated quicksilver reacted with a portion of the air to form a red powder (mercuric oxide) on its surface. He also noted that only a certain portion of the air inside the retort was able to react with the quicksilver in this way.

In further experimentation he found that the portion of air that reacted with the quicksilver also reacted with other heated metals, generated combustion and supported life.

Figure 3: The Apparatus of Antoine Lavoisier.

The remaining portion of air that was left after combustion did not support life. He called the portion of the air that supported life oxygen and the portion that did not support life, azote. Azote was later understood by chemists to be predominantly composed of nitrogen. Against Boyle's chemical definition of an element, this demonstration that air is composed of two portions meant that it could no longer be considered to be an element. A similar story can be told for water.

Inflammable Air...

In 1766 the English philosopher Henry Cavendish discovered a gas which he called "inflammable air". He found the gas was given off when dilute sulphuric acid was dripped onto zinc, as in Figure 4. On burning the gas in the air, he observed that it formed water droplets. In 1788 Lavoisier repeated Cavendish's experiment and realised that the "inflammable air" reacted with the oxygen in the air to form water. Lavoisier then renamed the "inflammable air" hydrogen after the Greek meaning "water producer". Once again with the chemical definition of an element, this demonstration of water being composed of hydrogen and oxygen meant that water could no longer be considered as an element.

Figure 3: The Apparatus for extracting Hydrogen.

Furthermore, against this new definition, Earth obviously was no longer seen as a pure element, since it embraces a bewildering range of naturally occurring substances. Similarly Ether, an Element that lacks form and substance, was instantly dismissed as having any validity whatsoever. This is why scientific historians are able to describe Ether as "a hypothetical substance, that has no reality".

The combined effect of this definition of a chemical element, along with the applied zeal of the early scientists in making their explorations of the material world, apparently shattered the ancient Elemental cosmology. Within a few decades, several dozen new chemical elements were identified. In retrospect, explaining material composition only in terms of four, possibly five, elements seems incredibly naive! Here is the so called "triumph of reason over the superstitions of the past". Furthermore, students of chemistry today will learn of the existence of 100+ atomic units, known as elements. Thus to the contemporary scientific mind Elemental cosmology seems even more obsolete.

Whilst it is true that in the last three centuries chemistry has made enormous developments in understanding the material world around us, using its insights based upon the chemical definition of an element, it is not true to say that chemistry has triumphed over the naive superstitions of the ancients. This only appears to be true when the chemical definition is projected into the minds and work of the ancient philosophers. This projection in fact constitutes a huge cultural anachronism.

Triumph of Reason...?

In stark contrast to the chemist's "triumph of reason over the past", paradoxically it is science that also most compellingly reveals the validity of Elemental knowledge today. It is found in the relatively youthful discipline of ecology - the study of the relationship of living things to their environment and to other species. Ecology breathes new life into Elemental knowledge; however, the Elements are notably disguised as "ecological factors" and include light, heat, moisture, soil and wind.

Generally in the botanical world, soil is the Earth that a plant sinks its roots into, providing anchorage and minerals. Water is the moisture derived from the soil and drawn up from the roots, through the stem and leaves. It provides the turgor pressure that maintains its structure and the medium of its physiology. Fire is the heat and light of the sun, the powerhouse of photosynthesis. Finally wind is Air from which the carbon dioxide for making sugar during photosynthesis is obtained. Where these Elements are in balance, then the quintessential nature of Ether is revealed by the plant flourishing and growing abundantly. By contrast, too much or too little of any one of these Elements severely compromises growth and may even destroy the plant. Ether is unable to become manifest.

It is well recognized that the form and structure of a plant is inseparable from the microclimate of the plant's environment. The most successful plants are the ones whose form has adapted to the specific balance of Elements in their habitat. Ecology well recognizes that the effectiveness of a plant's life cycle is dependant on the scale and strength of these ecological factors.

The ancient philosopher's conception of an Element as one of the universal forces upon which life depends is much greater and more profound than Boyle's intellectual definition. What science has subsequently gained has gained in materialistic knowledge through its chemical definition is in fact inversely proportional to what it has lost in terms of the metaphysical insights of how consciousness is interconnected with the material world.

Nowhere is the inability to understand the relationship of consciousness with matter more acutely shown than the application of materialistic thinking to understanding the functioning of the body. In conventional medicine, the physiology of the body is described with tremendous biochemical detail, but, despite all the technological advances and developments, the more metaphysical aspects of human nature are woefully unanswered, even denied as ever existing in the first place. In spite of all the insights into our DNA and chromosomes that genetics provides, the true nature of life is as illusive as ever. Furthermore, despite psychosomatic medicine recognizing that mental and emotional states have a profound effects on the health of the physical body, the exact mechanism whereby each individual's mental and emotional state contributes to their illness is still inadequately explained.

This is precisely where the metaphysical knowledge of the Elements that enabled physicians to gain their important insights into the functioning of the vital force are once again enormously valuable. This knowledge will enable herbalists, naturopaths, healers, doctors and others involved in the caring professions to gain the mental and emotional perspectives of each individual accompanying their physiological patterns. An awareness of the vital force gradually trains students to intuitively grasp the metaphysical insights that accompany disease and subsequently realize what needs to be done to heal the patterns.