Anti-Vitalism

A Collection of Endlessly Repeated

Falsehoods Purporting to Disprove
a Truth of Science

Great is the power of repeated misrepresentation.

Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species

Peter Jones

C O R E Publications
Preston, Lancashire

Introduction
As some of my readers will know, I have been involved in orgonomic
experimentation and research for many years now, making it my business to bring
before the public the pioneering scientific research of Wilhelm Reich, This body
of knowledge we now call orgonomy, the name given to it by Reich himself in his
own lifetime. While repeating Reichs bion experiments and reading round the
subject I have come to repeat the experiments of some of his predecessors who
also claimed to have witnessed the origin of primordial living forms in their
preparations. I also came to read many of the commonly available textbooks on
the study of life, both ones written in earlier times, in particular the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries and also some contemporary ones.
I soon found that they all, especially the earlier ones, contained in some
form or other, sometimes in outline, sometimes in great detail, a refutation of the
claims of spontaneous generation. They also often contained a ridiculing
demolition of vitalism, the belief that there exists in nature some unknown lifeforce that drives the workings of life. Books written in our own times tend to omit
these items, doubtless because modern writers, if they are even aware of such
beliefs and claims, consider them so discredited and disproved that they are no
longer worthy of refutation. Many scientists trained in recent times have very
little knowledge of the history of their subject and it may well be that modern
editors and compilers of textbooks do not even know about these controversies.
The innocence of many of these extracts will strike the reader sceptical
towards the outpourings of modern science. Many of the books quoted are
delightful texts and a joy to read. It is sad that there are now hardly any texts
available to the modern young microscopist that revel so unashamedly in the
delights of microscopical water-life. Imagine a book published now called
Evenings with the Microscope or Half-Hours with the Microscope. Yes, you are
laughing, even sniggering, arent you? The idea of a teenager sitting down
seriously and silently in the evening in their own home to study a blob of smelly
water is inconceivable today and any student who did that would certainly keep
his or her activities to themselves or be branded as a hopelessly unsexy anorak.
The fact is that the pulsatory movements of many of the creatures seen under the
microscope are more connected to real sexuality than the gyratings of our alcoholsoaked clubbers on their evenings out and that our imaginary anorak looking
down her microscope might actually be closer to life than the clubbers.

These now classical researches of Pasteurs on the presence of microorganisms in the atmosphere were undertaken in connection with the fierce
controversy which raged some thirty years ago, on the Spontaneous Generation
of Life.
As most of you are doubtless aware it was contended by the teachers of
this doctrine, that the presence of the smallest particle of air was sufficient to
determine the generation of low forms of life in certain highly putrescible
substances such as milk, blood, infusions of meat and the like. The opponents of
this doctrine, marshalled by M Pasteur, contended on the other hand, that it was
not the air, but certain living germs in the air, which, gaining access to those
putrescible materials, gave rise to those growths which make their appearance in
them.
Were this the case, replied his antagonists, the preachers of spontaneous
generation, these aerial germs would give rise to a fog as opaque and as
impenetrable as steel. But Pasteur was not to be shaken in his conviction by
dogmatic and baseless assertions of this kind, and he therefore undertook to prove
his case by experiments so clinching and unanswerable, that they could leave no
shadow of doubt in any unbiased mind.
The methods by which Pasteur not only revealed the presence of microorganisms in the atmosphere, but, at the same time roughly mapped out their
distribution, are so striking for their beautiful simplicity, that I must run the risk of
being charged with telling again an oft-told tale, and refer to them in detail.
From Our Secret Friends and Foes by Percy Faraday Frankland, pages 25-26,
1893, SPCK, London.
For the rest of the story, if you have no copy of the above work to hand, see the
introductory chapters of any undergraduate textbook on biology or microbiology.
The protozoa and other simple organisms which were considered to be
related to them were formerly classified in one heterogeneous group, the
Infusoria, because they appear in a hay infusion; that is, water in which a small
quantity of hay or other dried vegetable matter is left for a few days.
They nearly all possess the ability to withstand drying up by surrounding
themselves with a resistant covering, and their desiccated forms, left perhaps on
aquatic vegetation by the lowering of the water level, or maybe stranded on the
mud at the edge of a pond, are blown about in the air in such numbers that almost
any plant will be covered with them. When an infusion is made, they burst into
activity again as if nothing had happened.

From The Freshwater Life of the British Isles by J Glegg, Warne, 1965,
London.