The Mechanistic Conception of Life

An early 20th Century expansion of some of the mechanistic principles that underlay the17th Century natural philosophy of Rene Descartes, with more attention to scientific reduction than to mere suggestions that life is "nothing but...", though Loeb nonetheless did maintain that life emerged from non-living matter, is composed of such matter with no vital essence added, and that all life sciences therefore ultimately reduce through chemistry to physics.