In the September 1898 issue of The Nineteenth Century, John Haldane's essay ‘Vitalism’ chronicles that ‘about the middle of the present century a great change occurred in the general trend of investigation … in animal physiology’ away from a model that understood ‘life as something essentially different from the phenomena met with in the inorganic world’ (Haldane 1898: 400). Instead of this model that held life apart from inorganic phenomena, or vitalism, science had moved toward a model called mechanism, which held that everything ‘must ultimately be susceptible of analysis into a series of physical and chemical processes’ (400). As we have seen throughout this book, the materialism of the Associationists places them firmly in this latter camp, as they sought physical explanations for mental phenomena.

Curiously, The Nineteenth Century makes an exception for the mind, one motivated by the fin de siècle desire to preserve within mechanism a space for vitalist psychology. The Nineteenth Century actually says that everything ‘apart from consciousness, which of course stands by itself’, must submit to mechanical analysis. This gesture is distinctly late-1890s, as the end of the decade saw a resurgence of new vitalist thought. These thinkers found philosophical grounds in the 1840s work of Hermann Lotze, who denounced vitalism, but nevertheless maintained the importance of something he called ‘vital force’. On the one hand, Lotze maintained that ‘vital force is not to be understood as any distinct force, but rather as the sum of the effect of numerous partial forces acting under given conditions’ – a decidedly mechanistic approach to the abstract (Mivart 1887: 696, Mivart's translation). Nevertheless, he also argued that these various forces and conditions did not ‘attach themselves to a lifeless inner nature of things, but must arise out of them, and nothing can take place between the individual elements until something has taken place within them’ (699, Mivart's translation). Lotze offered a strong basis for the late-nineteenth-century return to vitalist understandings of consciousness even while they maintained mechanistic approaches to physics and chemistry.

This Lotze-inspired vitalism bookends the nineteenth century. Vitalism dominated before the 1830s publications of Marshall Hall and Thomas Laycock on reflex actions of the brain, and returned in the 1880s and 90s.