Élan Vital and Panpsychism

Élan vital is the hypothetical “life force” that was postulated to explain the differences between living and non-living systems. Self-organization, regeneration, metabolism, replication, evolution -- prior to modern biology, these phenomena were utterly mysterious. Immanuel Kant famously said, “There will never be an Isaac Newton for a blade of grass.” In 1907, Henri Bergson coined …