Vitalism

Aristotle and the soul as the principle of life

Aristotle's De Anima ties living things to the soul rather than to a separate force. In J. A. Smith's translation of Book II, chapter 1, the soul is described as the first grade of actuality of a natural body that has life potentially in it, and life is defined as self-nutrition and growth, with their correlative decay. The passage treats the soul as an organizing principle, not as a force acting apart from matter.

Galen's physiology, set out in On the Natural Faculties in Arthur John Brock's 1916 translation, distinguishes kinds of pneuma. Natural spirit is carried by the veins and presides over vegetative life. Vital spirit is inspired air drawn into the left side of the heart and carried through the body by the arteries. Animal spirit is carried by channels in the nerves. Here pneuma is an airlike substance carried by vessels.

Montpellier and the vital principle

The Montpellier medical tradition is central to the French form of the idea. Waisse, Amaral and Alfonso-Goldfarb describe Montpellier physicians as drawing on Georg Ernst Stahl's animism, which reached them through François Boissier de Sauvages, and on Albrecht von Haller's concepts of irritability and sensitivity. Théophile de Bordeu, in their account, held that sensitivity explains glandular secretion rather than mechanical compression, and kept Stahl's view of a continuity between health and disease.

Paul-Joseph Barthez, trained at Montpellier and later shaped by Paris encyclopedists, is the figure most associated with the vital principle. He argued that the thinking soul cannot account for all bodily movements, so a distinct vital principle must be posited. Its inner nature is unknowable, and only its laws and forces can be studied. The same source notes that Barthez resisted being labeled a vitalist and described the principle as a heuristic abstraction.

Bichat and life as a set of functions

Xavier Bichat's Physiological Researches on Life and Death, in the English translation by F. Gold, is a public-domain text on Project Gutenberg. Bichat defines life as the sum of the functions by which death is resisted, and he states that life, unknown in its nature, can be appreciated only through its phenomena. The text places the study of living functions at the center of physiology.

Wöhler's urea synthesis

A 2002 review in EJIFCC describes vitalism as the belief that living organisms contained a vital force that was the essence of life, and that no substance produced by living organisms could be synthesized. It reports that in 1828 Friedrich Wöhler (1800 to 1882) synthesized urea, an organic substance, in vitro, without any vital force or living organism.

The sources reviewed do not treat the synthesis as an immediate end of the idea. Waisse and colleagues describe vitalism as a term applied loosely to several positions, and they cite Duchesneau for the view that there were several vitalisms rather than one. Historians therefore differ over how decisive the 1828 result was, and this record does not settle that question.

Vital force, vital principle and vitalism

Vital force and vital principle are the most common historical labels for the idea that life depends on an agent distinct from ordinary physical causes. The Montpellier term vital principle is associated with Barthez, whose own account treated it as a principle whose nature is unknown and whose laws can be studied. The word vitalist, according to Waisse and colleagues, was coined in 1800 by Charles-Louis Dumas, who alluded to Montpellier and to Barthez without naming him.

The authors cite Coleman (1977) and Duffin (1997) to show how vague the term became. This record uses the words as the sources do, and it does not treat them as one fixed doctrine. Vitalism is therefore a family of positions rather than a single theory.

Distinct meanings in scholarship and in energy-based writing

Waisse and colleagues report that François Duchesneau argues for several vitalisms, that Charles Wolfe and Motoichi Terada read Montpellier vitalism as a form of expanded mechanism, and that Elizabeth Haigh contrasts Bordeu's immanent principle with Barthez's principle, which is separate from matter. These readings disagree, and the disagreement is part of the term's history.

Energy-based practices use the word energy in ways that resemble vital-force language, but the sense is different. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) states that there is no scientific evidence supporting the existence of the energy field thought to play a role in Reiki. Vitalism is a claim about living organisms in historical physiology; energy-field language in Reiki and similar practices is a separate usage that should not be read back into the historical term.

Where the idea appears

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the idea appeared in medical teaching and physiological writing, most clearly at Montpellier and in Paris circles associated with the Encyclopédie. Waisse and colleagues describe Montpellier as a practical, clinical tradition that stressed individual patients, and they note that Bordeu, Venel and Barthez moved between Montpellier and Paris. The idea was therefore part of a debate about how medicine should explain life, not a single practice.

This draft did not verify a current philosophy-of-biology account, so this page does not describe present positions in that field in detail. Readers who want contemporary debates about emergence, organization and reductionism should consult specialist philosophy-of-biology sources.

Energy-based writing today

NCCIH's Reiki page refers to the energy field thought to play a role in Reiki and notes that the practice is usually delivered by light touch or by holding the hands near the body. Advocates describe the energy as a life energy that the practitioner channels. These are practitioner descriptions, and the sources reviewed do not verify the energy claim itself.

The Reiki and Energy Healing pages on this site describe related practices, and readers can compare them with this page. Some energy-medicine writing uses vital-energy language, but this record does not show that such writing shares the historical framework of Barthez or Bichat, and it should be read as a separate set of claims.

Historical explanatory uses

Historical writers used vital force and vital principle to explain why living bodies differ from inanimate matter. According to Wilkinson, vitalism held that substances produced by living organisms could not be made in the laboratory, which is the claim Wöhler's 1828 result addressed. Barthez used the vital principle to explain bodily movements that he thought the thinking soul could not account for alone.

Bordeu used sensitivity, rather than the vital principle as such, to explain glandular secretion, a point of disagreement with Boerhaave's mechanical view as reported by Waisse and colleagues. These are historical explanations offered by particular authors, not tested claims about living systems in general.

Modern energy-based claims

NCCIH reports that Reiki has not been clearly shown to be effective for any health-related purpose, and that the studies of conditions such as pain, anxiety and depression are mostly of low quality with inconsistent results. Practitioners of Reiki describe benefits that include relaxation and wellbeing, and these are practitioner and participant reports rather than established outcomes.

Vitalism as a historical position does not make a specific health claim in the sources reviewed. Claims about pain, quality of life or mood belong to specific practices and must be read with their trial designs, which the research section describes.

Testing a historical idea

A general thesis such as vitalism is not tested by one experiment. Wöhler's 1828 result tested a narrower claim, namely that a substance characteristic of living organisms could be made from non-living materials. Wilkinson reports the result as challenging the vital-force belief, and historians differ on how far it settled the broader question, so the synthesis is evidence about one claim rather than a verdict on the whole idea.

Searches for this draft included a PubMed search for Galen pneuma vital spirits history, which returned four historical articles; none is cited here because their full text was not confirmed as free to read. A PubMed search for Reiki systematic reviews with randomized trials returned sixteen records. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy vitalism entry was not available at the expected address, and web searches on Wöhler, Barthez, Bichat and contemporary vitalism returned mainly secondary material.

Reiki trials and reviews

A 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials of reiki and prayer during cesarean hospitalization reported a statistically significant reduction in pain scores, with a pooled mean difference of -1.68 (95% CI -1.92 to -1.43), but the authors concluded that this evidence had a high risk of bias. It found no statistically significant difference in heart rate or blood pressure. The finding concerns pain after cesarean delivery and should not be transferred to other conditions.

A 2025 meta-analysis of randomized trials in Systematic Reviews found a small improvement in quality of life after Reiki (SMD 0.28, 95% CI 0.01 to 0.56, P = 0.043) across 661 participants. Heterogeneity was substantial (I2 65.1%), and the authors noted that blinding was difficult. Four studies did not clearly describe blinding of outcome assessment.

A 2025 systematic review in Frontiers in Public Health pooled randomized trials of several mind-body therapies in menopausal women, including Reiki. The authors reported moderate-to-large pooled effects on sleep, depression and anxiety, but they rated most of the 18 included trials as having some concerns, reported heterogeneity of 85 to 92 percent across outcomes, and noted small samples. The Reiki subgroup is not a separate estimate in the abstract, so these findings are not Reiki-specific evidence of benefit.

Harms and the historical idea

The historical and philosophical sources reviewed for this page do not document harms from holding a belief that life depends on a vital force. They also do not evaluate such harms. This absence of reported harm is a limit of the sources, not evidence that the belief has no effects on how people think about illness or treatment.

Where the idea is attached to a practice, the safety questions belong to that practice, and the relevant sources are those for the practice itself. The Reiki entries above are an example.

Reported safety of Reiki and care boundaries

NCCIH states that Reiki has not been shown to have any harmful effects. That statement reflects the limited trial record; the same page describes most research as low quality, so the absence of reported harm is not a strong safety finding. The abstracts of the reviews cited above do not report adverse events in the text reviewed for this draft, and that silence does not establish that adverse events did not occur.

NCCIH's material states that it is not intended to substitute for the medical expertise and advice of a person's health care providers, and encourages readers to discuss decisions about treatment or care with a health care provider. This page is educational and is not individualized medical advice. Energy-based practices should not replace assessment or treatment for a symptom, and a person with a health concern should seek appropriate professional care.