Bottazzi's scientific profile: an undeserved oblivion

Filippo Bottazzi was born in a very small town (Diso, Apulia), on 23 December 1867. His father, Giuseppe Maria Antonio, was a good painter; his mother was Maria Donata Cecilia Bortone.¹ He received his MD in Rome in 1893. Early the following year, he became an assistant in physiology at the Institute of Higher, Practical, and Postgraduate Studies of Florence (now the University of Florence), and in 1896, Privatdozent in physiology. In 1902 he was appointed director of the Institute of Physiology of the University of Genoa and in 1905 director of the Institute of Physiology of the University of Naples, where his distinctive work in physiology focused on the close relationship of biological and physical chemistry. Bottazzi was also Director of the Neapolitan A. Dohrn's Zoological Station.

Despite distinguished achievements of international relevance, soon after his death Bottazzi fell into oblivion. An authoritative complaint as to Bottazzi's oblivion comes from Francesco Ghiretti, co-editor in 1986 (together with L. Donatelli and A. Russo) of Bottazzi's posthumous Leonardo scienziato (Napoli, Giannini: Società Nazionale di Scienze, Lettere e Arti). In 1992, Ghiretti, by then Professor Emeritus of General Physiology in Padua, wrote a Presentation to the very useful, but almost hagiographical book on Bottazzi by G.A. Giannuzzo and F. Corvaglia. This is his incipit:

Bottazzi's scientific career really was impressive. In February 1940, just 20 months before his death, he was short-listed as the Italian candidate for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. (Unfortunately, because of the war, the Prize was suspended until 1943.) Bottazzi was fellow of 16 scientific national and international Academies.² He was also member of 12 scientific national and international societies.³ In addition, Bottazzi held many authoritative institutional positions. More precisely, he was a member of the Commission Scientifique Interallié du Ravitallement (1917–1919);⁴ Director of the physiological section of the Neapolitan A. Dohrn's Zoological Station (1915–1923) and member of the its Administrative Board (1923–1928); Rector of the Neapolitan Federico II University (1926–1927); Member of the Consiglio Superiore della Pubblica Istruzione (1926–1927); President of the National Food Committee; President of the Comitato Nazionale per la Biologia CNR (1937).

Bottazzi's institutional role has been variously considered by historians of bio-medicine (Canali,Reference Canali⁵ Fantini,Reference Fantini⁶ PoglianoReference Pogliano⁷ and the members of a 2007 PRIN research program coordinated by M. Di Giandomenico), scientists (Chieffi,Reference Chieffi⁸ Ghiretti,Reference Ghiretti^9–Reference Ghiretti¹¹ Libonati,Reference Libonati¹² MarinoReference Marino¹³) and historians of culture (Israel,Reference Israel^14–Reference Israel¹⁶ Martirano,Reference Martirano¹⁷ HelstoskyReference Helstosky¹⁸). Bottazzi has been often criticized as directly linked to the so-called ‘medicina politica’ (political medicine) favoured by the Italian Fascist regime. In other words, today he is commonly charged with supporting the predominantly racist culture of his time (if not with being a sycophant to the ‘superior genius of the Italian race’): indeed, he figures among the signatories of the criminal Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti Reference Cuomo¹⁹ best known as the Manifest of the Race (1938).Reference Troiani and Manni²⁰ This circumstance, however, can be explained from the fact that the post-Second World War climate is largely insensitive to the fundamental distinction between ‘nationalism’ (an ideal orientation widespread in all European cultures before the Second World War) and its many faceted declinations in the Italian fascist Regime. A historically honest evaluation of intellectual figures such as Bottazzi, deeply involved in the politics of science, could be a good case study to rethink and articulate this distinction.

Bottazzi's cultural background: scientific and metaphysical trends in the Italian debate about theoretical biology and life sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century

In Italy, as elsewhere, the Darwinian heritage exerted a very strong impact on the intellectual community. Starting from the seminal works of Giovanni Canestrini and Michele Lessona (both translators of Darwin's works), many authors tried to (re)interpret the new evolutionary thinking, extending it to the fields of anthropology (Paolo Mantegazza), of psychiatry (Cesare Lombroso), as well as of psychology and philosophy. At the same time, Darwinism elicited the polemic reactions of many catholic writers (such as the great naturalist Padre Antonio Stoppani, who cried out against ‘the natural sciences corrupted by sensism’, that is against any approach to nature, man and society, ‘supported by a naturalism which is the father of socialism and nihilism’). Any attempt to reconcile faith in Biblical narratives with an evolutionary paradigm, as proposed first by Filippo De Filippi and then by the founder of the so-called Italian ‘modernist’ movement, Antonio Fogazzaro, was destined to fail. From 1890 until the third decade of the new century, the philosophical battle of the neo-idealists Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile against the ‘old positivism’ and its misleading and a-theoretical ‘evolutionary metaphysics’ took place against this background. Indeed, the main critical argument used by Croce and Gentile in their anti-positivist crusade was the ‘lack of theoretical (i.e. conceptual) clarity’ in defining life and its specificity in respect to the physical world. In this vein, biological sciences represented for them a good opportunity to reassert the pseudo-conceptual character of naturalistic and historical-naturalistic explanations.

Notoriously, these neo-idealistic positions prevailed in the Italian philosophical culture, but many prominent scientists put up a lasting resistance against it. This resistance, even when grounded in different philosophical and ontological tenets, was always primarily founded on epistemological considerations. Its main supporters were the mathematician Federigo Enriques, the psychologist and philosopher Francesco De Sarlo, the neurologist and psychologist Father Agostino Gemelli (who founded the ‘Sacro Cuore’ Catholic University), the sociologist Eugenio Rignano (who, together with G. Bruni, A. Dionisi, A. Giardina, and F. Enriques founded, in 1907, the first Italian review in epistemology and philosophy of science: Scientia. Rivista internazionale di sintesi scientifica), and, last but not least, the physiologist and biochemist Filippo Bottazzi.

Bottazzi, Gemelli and Rignano were seriously interested in the philosophy of biology too. They paid significant attention to some crucial and open questions of the field: mechanistic versus vitalistic explanations of biological organisms, the peculiar character of biological explanations in relation to the laws of physics, the debate about neo-Lamarckian and neo-Darwinian evolutionary paradigms, the mechanisms of biological memory and of the supposed hereditary transmission of physical and mental traits.

Bottazzi's international relevance as physiologist and biochemist

Through his association with his teacher Giulio Fano, Bottazzi belonged to the physiological school of Luigi Luciani, which, with the school of Angelo Mosso, was at that time the most important in Italy. Bottazzi's work in physiology is distinguished by its close relationship to biological and physical chemistry. This relationship became evident in his Trattato di chimica fisiologica (1898–1899), and his Elementi di chimica fisica (1906), which for decades were the standard works on the subjects in Italy. Their recognition abroad is attested by H. Boruttau's German translation, Physiologische Chemie für Studierende und Ärzte (1901).

In 1894, Bottazzi's earliest investigations demonstrated the diminution of the osmotic resistance experienced by the red corpuscles as they travel through the splenic cycle: this is the haemocatatonistic function of the spleen, which is a part of the wider function of the splenic haemocatheresis and, more generally, of the endothelial reticulum.Reference Belloni²¹

A similar chemicophysical basis was demonstrated by his research on the osmotic pressure of the organic liquids, which Bottazzi explored in nearly all classes of animals, from the invertebrates to man (and in the case of man, also in a variety of physiological and pathological conditions). Particularly well-known are the experiments on osmoregulation in marine animals that, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, Bottazzi realized in the Physiology Department of A. Dohrn's Zoological Station.Reference Ghiretti²²

This line of research originated from the concept of the milieu intérieur, formulated years before in France by Claude Bernard. The results obtained caused Bottazzi to distinguish aquatic animals as homeo-osmotic and pecilosmotic, a distinction which is maintained today with the modern, if not more transparent, words: osmoconformers and osmoregulators.

Bottazzi used the same broadly comparative criterion in his investigations on the smooth and striated muscles. He was able to attribute an essentially tonic function to the sarcoplasm, that is to say to that part of the muscle cell that is not differentiated into myofibril.

He arrived at the conclusion that homeo-osmosis – that is, the constancy of the osmotic pressure of the milieu intérieur (blood and interstitial liquids) – must be considered a relatively late phylogenetic acquisition.Reference Belloni²³

On 25 July 1923, Bottazzi was honoured by the University of Edinburgh, together with the American physiologist William H. Howell, the Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven (1924 Nobel Prize for his development of the electrocardiogram), the Swedish physiologist J.E. Johansson (Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine of the Royal Caroline Institute in 1922), Albrecht Kossel (1910 Nobel Prize for his work on cells and proteins), the pharmacologist Hans Meyer; Charles Richet (discoverer of and coiner of the term ‘anaphylaxis’ and 1913 Nobel Prize), and Ivan Petrovic Pavlov (1904 Nobel Prize).

The British Medical Journal wrote:

Five years later, in 1928, The Journal of the American Medical Association announced that:

Bottazzi's national (and international) relevance in the scientific study of alimentation

Bottazzi was involved in the study of alimentation largely before the fascist era. In 1910 his first book appeared on the physiology of nutrition, Fisiologia dell'alimentazione con speciale riguardo all'alimentazione delle classi povere, written with G. Jappelli. This is the reason why, during the First World War, he was appointed (not by the government, but by the Regia Accademia dei Lincei) to the Comitato Scientifico Italiano per lo studio dell'alimentazione (National Food Committee). For his activity in the Commission Scientifique Interallié du Ravitaillement (1917–1919) he was appointed Commander of the Civil Division of the Order of the British Empire by King George the Fifth on 3 May 1919. In the same year he wrote L'alimentazione dell'uomo.Reference Bottazzi²⁶ This book was an ideal complement to the four essays which Bottazzi wrote during his appointment to the Commission.Reference Bottazzi^27–Reference Bottazzi³⁰

From the political unification of Italy onward, malnutrition had always been a real and difficult problem for the Government. More developed countries offered a number of services and programs to help those who were in need due to age, illness, poverty or adverse circumstances.³¹ In Italy, an international late-comer, individuals and communities experienced hardships due to a lack of social, health, and welfare services.

The First World War led to a massive intervention of the State in assuring food distribution and improving the quality and quantity of the food consumed by many Italians, and to ensure that food shortages did not become chronic or endanger the health of the vast majority of the population. The so-called ‘psychology of the post-war era’ (the collective hope to have more food at lower prices) created a new concern about popular welfare.

Yet post-war liberal governments could not continue to satisfy the consumers without destroying the financial stability of the state. ‘The national problem of food consumption now appeared to be an impossible dilemma for anyone to solve […] State spending and debts soared at the war's end … State expenses went from 2.5 billion lire in 1913–14 to 30.9 billion lire in 1918–19, while the falling value of the lira and the heavy demand for scarce consumer goods led to crushing inflation by 1919’ (Ref. Reference Helstosky18, pp. 52–53).³²

Workers who had become accustomed to meat and dairy products firmly wanted to continue eating them. The riots of 1919 highlighted the new political prominence of the standard of living. When Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti attempted to raise the price of bread by decree (from eighty cents to one and a half lire per kilogram), the route toward his inevitable resignation was open. Aiming to solve these difficulties, most social reformers, scientific experts and politicians at the time focused on domestic production and modernization of the productive and distributive techniques rather than on maintaining or increasing imports. After 1922 the fascist regime, fearing Italy's growing dependence on external powers, would elaborate on and codify this solution. According to Lorenzo La Via, the foremost authority on fascist food politics, speaking in 1937 (the climax of the so-called ‘consensus years’: 1929–1938), the fascist regime used food to promote public order, popular health and social equality. In other words, food policy functioned to hold people together and bind them to the regime. In order to subordinate consumer habits to the needs of the state, the regime enlisted scientific expertise, influenced housewives through domestic economic literature, and conducted propaganda campaigns promoting only foods produced in Italy. The ideal fascist diet was based on carbohydrates, very few animal proteins, and supplemented by fresh produce, vegetables, olive oil, citrus fruit and wine: the old patterns of the past turned to political ends to boost national identity. Therefore, even if for much of the 1920s fascist food policies were not at all distinctive from liberal ones (and not very successful), the intent behind these policies (self-sufficiency) remained a constant throughout Mussolini's rule, automatically becoming autarchy in the 1930s. Scientific and social-scientific researches sponsored by the regime looked at the Italian population – and its nutritional needs – as an aggregate, without considering regional differences. Their ultimate aim, i.e. the development and improvement of all material life conditions, was, according the majority of historians, closely bound up with the problem of racial integrity.

The risks of the political implementation of science: Bottazzi's physiology of nutrition and the fascist regime

This feature was very much reflected in the work that the CNR's Food Committee undertook: massive studies of dietary habits from 1926 onward, finding that the Italian population finally met minimum international nutritional standards.

Since the ‘Battle for Grain’ decreased Italy's financial dependency on wheat imports, but did not completely replace their volume, nutritionists criticized white bread for causing malnutrition and favouring diseases.³³ Giuseppe Tallarico, member of the Food Committee, asserted that whole wheat boosted fertility levels among men and woman. (But Italians continued to associate whole wheat bread with the monotonous and inadequate meal of the poor rural people!) The founder of Italian Futurism, Tommaso Marinetti, in 1932 wrote The Futurist Cookbook, in which he claimed that pasta was ‘an absurd gastronomic religion’, which drained Italians of their creativity and intelligence. This was a really original and aesthetic adhesion to the governmental imperative to free Italy from wheat imports. It also illustrates how the ‘cooking of consent’ was an eclectic process, in which nutritionists, housewives, experts in domestic economy, and intellectuals discussed the main fascist alimentary ideal: self-sufficiency. Obviously, after the International Sanctions against Italy (18 November 1936), the ‘cooking of consent’ becomes simply the ‘cooking with nothing’.³⁴

An international study week (VII Volta Conference) took place in Rome from 26 September to 2 October 1937 under the heading Lo stato attuale delle conoscenze sulla nutrizione. Bottazzi, at the time ‘accademico d'Italia, dei Lincei e della Pontificia Accademia delle Scienze’, Presided over the Conference. In order to understand Bottazzi's involvement in the ‘racial question’ as a nutritonist, let me quote just a passage from the official web site of the Italian Accademia dei Lincei:³⁵

And in fact, Mussolini – who established, with law n. 496 of 25 March 1926, the Reale Accademia d'Italia – in a discourse held at the Camera on 30 January 1926 illustrated the character and the mission of the new institution as follows:

Both ends (‘to promote the intellectual movement according to the genius and the tradition of our people’; and ‘to help the Government in the study and resolution of the hardest problems of national culture’) had surely been familiar to Bottazzi for a long time. In the more than 50 years of his pre-fascist life span he had always been a nationalist and a patriot. And the historical moment (Italy's transition to modernity together with the imperialist conflicts between the major European countries) was notoriously such that a significant portion of the intellectual world upheld these same ideas.

Bottazzi's political life starts in the post-First World War period; as already mentioned, it is marked by his growing engagement in various academic and extra-academic institutions. In the period 1928–1941 he published 60 pieces: of these, 31 were on various nutritional topics.³⁶ In 1933, as a member of the CNR's Commissione dell'alimentazione, he edited, together with A. Niceforo and G. Quagliarello, the first scientific and statistical study about the dietary status of the Italian population in the preceding 50 years.Reference Bottazzi, Niceforo and Quagliarello³⁷ But he was not completely prone toward the autarchic restrictions imposed by the regime. During the period of the Ethiopian invasion and the sanctions therefore imposed upon Italy by the international community, the regime's propaganda overruled any scientific criticism that the popular diet was becoming less varied and less nutritious. The regime's defenders saw austerity as a necessary discipline that ‘imposes a certain parsimony that is a tradition of our race’. On his part, Bottazzi spoke firmly against this orientation: ‘restrictions of any kind cannot be but temporary and they cannot constitute normal consumption levels’.

Some historians have downplayed the more authoritarian aspects of fascist rule, depicting its cruel policies, such as the deportation of Italian Jews, as imports, adopted so that Mussolini could gain Hitler's approval. But the contradictions of fascist ideology³⁸ and Mussolini's politically extreme opportunism were both real: therefore the impact of Italian ‘racial nationalism’ remains difficult to evaluate. Anti-Semitism and/or racist prejudices pre-existed the Italian racial laws and were influential in many countries. On the European continent, the phenomenon is well known. But even in the USA fascism had its supporters. Henry Ford disseminated the famous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion forgery in the 1920s, employed the leader of the Bund, and accepted a medal from Nazi Germany in 1938. Famed aviator and isolationist Charles Lindbergh likewise accepted a medal, as did IBM president Thomas J. Watson, although Watson returned his in 1940. In all scientifically developed (western and not western) countries ‘the improvement of the race’ was often, but not always, intended as synonymous with ‘the superiority of the race’: it was in fact the justification of the so-called ‘negative eugenics’, at the time almost universally adopted.Reference Foà³⁹ (German ‘positive eugenics’, which advocated the elimination of the ‘undesirable’, was supported by many other political, social and intellectual leaders, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.⁴⁰) In Italy, the statement that there were no Italian, Jewish and Arian races, but only Italian, Jewish and Arian populations and cultures was expurgated from the Italian Encyclopaedia only in the edition of 1940. Therefore:

In any event, there is no doubt that the academic world was (almost) collectively guilty in obeying and respecting the racial laws. Most members of Academia, grateful for the opportunity to fill vacancies created by the removal of the Jews and to advance their career and that of their students, remained silent. But Gemelli's and Bottazzi's cases deserve special attention. Their strong friendship lasted until Bottazzi's death.Reference Petacco⁴¹ When, in July 1926, an anonymous handbill denounced Bottazzi as a not sincere fascist and for having put into his pocket both the salaries of his assistants at the University Laboratory and the financial resources of the A. Dohrn's Physiology Department, Gemelli, together with two of Bottazzi's Jewish friends, Carlo Foà and A. Herlitzska, overtly sided with the victim of the impeachment. Both Gemelli and Bottazzi were nationalists and patriots, but their political involvement with the regime was different. When the latter was appointed as President of the Fourteenth International Conference in Physiology, to be held in Rome (September 1932),Reference Franklin⁴² coincident with the decennial of the Fascist Revolution, he disregarded any pressure from the regime and held the conference at a purely scientific level. The regime's interest in using science as a means to institutionally promote the well-being and the health of the Italian population did not prevail upon Bottazzi's firm conviction that Life Sciences were ‘pure science’ – and had to be treated as such.

The intégriste Father Gemelli had a definitively more complex and ambiguous personality. Many years ago, the well-known catholic politician Giulio Andreotti defined Gemelli's peculiar mentality as ‘a sort of catholic Machiavellism, where ends justify the means’.Reference Gambino⁴³ He fully shared the theological anti-Judaism of the editors of Civiltà Cattolica and of some other preachers. Roberto Farinacci, mentioned just above, who at the time was pressing Mussolini to introduce racial laws in Italy, defined Gemelli ‘a trustworthy catholic, overtly professing his ‘anti-Semitic racism’,⁴⁴ as apparent in Father Gemelli's famous comment on the suicide of the Jewish writer Felice Momigliano.Reference Gemelli⁴⁵ On 10 January 1939, Gemelli held a discourse at Bologna's University in which he lamented ‘the tragic and painful situation of those who, because of their blood and their religion cannot be a part of this great fatherland’; ‘a tragic situation once more reflecting the terrible sentence that the deicidal people called upon itself: to wander without peace for their horrible crime’.⁴⁶ Still, he was also a close friend of Carlo Foà and is credited with having supported the admission of T. Levi Civita and V. Volterra to the Pontificia Accademia delle Scienze. Even after the promulgation of the racial laws, Gemelli helped other eminent Jewish figures such as the surgeon Prof. Mario Donati, Prof. G. Todesco, Prof. Rodolfo Allers, Prof. Gino Sacerdote and the psychoanalyst C. Musatti.⁴⁷ As soon as the regime collapsed with Mussolini's impeachment by the Gran Consiglio del Fascismo, Gemelli actively favoured the anti-fascist clandestine resistance in his Catholic University of Milan.Reference Mecacci⁴⁸

What about Bottazzi? In application of the circular letter n. 11836 sent on 19 August 1938 by the Ministry of Education to the Accademia d'Italia, a list of all its Jewish members was compiled. In the next year, together with the chemist Francesco Giordani,⁴⁹ the admiral Giancarlo Vallauri and the mathematician Francesco Severi, Bottazzi was charged with purging their works from the Accademia's scientific archive,Reference Fabre⁵⁰ thus earning the qualification of ‘notoriously anti-Jewish’ attributed to him by, amongst others, Israel. As he died in 1941, Bottazzi did not have the opportunity to be honestly judged for his political commitment to the fascist regime and eventually to be restored in his institutional role, as was the case with other members of the same commission.

Bottazzi's ‘wild flowers’: his studies in the history and philosophy of science and their relevance to the evaluation of the Italian national culture

Bottazzi translated Michael Foster's Treatise on Physiology in 1899. He and Foster, who in 1894 invited him to teach a practical course on physiology for advanced students at Cambridge, shared a keen interest in the history of science. The main results of this interest were the numerous studies that Bottazzi wrote on Leonardo da Vinci from 1902 to the eve of his death,⁵¹ and the new national edition of the works of Lazzaro Spallanzani (1932–1936).⁵² The relevance of these studies lies in the fact that they are both clear evidence of the internationally up-to-date training of the best Italian scientists and proof of the pervasiveness of the nationalistic ideals in Italy (and other countries) well before the catastrophic rise of fascism in Europe. Being, as Ghiretti poetically called them, ‘wild flowers’ (i.e. spontaneous expressions of a private intellectual curiosity, which in Bottazzi went very far beyond his disciplinary boundaries) they are even more revealing than Bottazzi's scientific and institutional works. They have been extensively studied, to the best of my knowledge, only in an upper degree thesis discussed with me by Giuseppina Piras – a work that, unfortunately, is not yet published.Reference Piras⁵³ On my part, I studied the relationship between Bottazzi and Eugenio Rignano (and their polemics on vitalistic versus mechanistic explanations of living organisms), as well as the biological thought of Federigo Enriques in an unpublished contribution to the 2003 Vienna Meeting promoted by The International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB).

Bottazzi's most relevant (and now really almost forgotten) extra-scientific contribution was his methodological and philosophical book (an excerpt of a much larger essay that gained the Bufalini Prize promoted by the Istituto Superiore di Firenze in 1905) The Experimental Method in the Biological Disciplines.Reference Bottazzi⁵⁴ Here, the argumentative style is always twofold: theoretical and historical. The historical parts are clearly intended to celebrate the priorities of Italian scientists (Leonardo, Galileo, Spallanzani, Bufalini) in elaborating the ‘true’ scientific method to be used in all natural sciences, biology and medicine included.Reference Grassi⁵⁵

From a philosophical point of view, this short work, written by a young physiologist, is incredibly clear and up to date.Reference Landucci⁵⁶ Starting from Whewell and Bacon, he affirms that ‘there is no method which could teach to anyone how to make a discovery’ and that ‘in principle, the scientific method derives from experimental researches, on which it is based; only some time after, when it is already firmly established, it becomes a guide which turns the researches in a precise direction’ (Ref. Reference Bottazzi54, p. 2).

Bottazzi was a supporter of the universal validity of physicochemical explanations (i.e. of the so-called Mechanistic Model) in any biomedical field but, like many Italian post-positivist thinkers, he considered the human mentality something of a very different nature.Reference Bottazzi⁵⁷ The main historical and epistemological theses of the book are:

1. (1) There is no method for scientific discovery. In addition, Baconian inductive recommendations are insufficient in the experimental field.

2. (2) Prejudices are unavoidable and necessary (as in E. Mach's opinion), but they are to be corrected according to sound experimental results and theoretical insights.

3. (3) Scientific theories are open to change. There is no definitive scientific truth.

4. (4) In physics and chemistry, the theoretical approach is fully accomplished when their theories became ‘deductive’; in biological sciences the comparative component of inquiry is both necessary and useful.

5. (5) The historical-comparative method and its ‘retrodictions’ are not sufficient: the framework of evolutionary and comparative biology (in Mayr's terminology ‘the biology of final causes’) has to be based on the insights of experimental physiology (Mayr's ‘biology of the proximate causes’). The post-Darwinian evolutionary theories are to be tested against our best experimental knowledge in the physico-chemical and physiological fields.

6. (6) The experimental method cannot exhaust the requirements of logic, ethics and aesthetics (there is a jump from the ‘is’ to the ‘ought’: we cannot commit, as some positivists do, the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ exporting the naturalistic knowledge to the field of the normative sciences, but it is relevant in evaluating the descriptive part of these disciplines).

Now, let me turn to the already mentioned polemic on ‘vitalism versus mechanism’ (at the time a hotly debated question) Bottazzi engaged in with Eugenio Rignano.Reference Bottazzi⁵⁸ The polemic was published by Scientia, the review RignanoReference Brown, Collison and Wilkinson⁵⁹ had been a co-founder of, and Bottazzi one of its first collaborators.

In a sequel of books (starting in 1920), RignanoReference Rignano⁷¹ elaborated a kind of biological metaphysics, which posits a nervous energy as the foundation of life and evolution as capable of moulding matter and directing it via adaptation. Indeed, life in its entirety shows an end-directedness that would be inexplicable without this directing force, a force that continues into moral life so as to guarantee to individuals the satisfaction of their needs in more harmonious societies. Therefore, Rignano will be later quoted by NeedhamReference Needham⁶⁰ among the major figures of a school:

In Rignano's opinion, the essential difference between living and non-living things was that living things remember and dead matter does not. But what does the word ‘memory’ mean here? According to Rignano, the term was commonly employed to denote two different things: the sensorial memory (as when we are recalling the experiences of our past life) and the habitudinal memory. (Thanks to the latter, for example, a great deal of the skill we acquire in our youth remains with us even if for many years we have had no opportunity to exercise it.⁶³) In saying that memory is a universal attribute of living substance, Rignano was obviously referring to the habitudinal memory. Therefore, the open problem was: how to consider the habitudinal memory not only ontogenetically, but also phylogenetically relevant? The answer originally proposed by Rignano was his ‘centro-epigenetic’ theory. It runs as follows: the fertilized egg embodies in its nucleus all the memories acquired during the past history of the race. When development begins all these memories are handed on, because any cell division leaves the cellular nucleus intact, but very soon one part of the growing embryo acquires dominance over the rest.⁶⁴ When the germ cells develop, the ‘traces’ they contain become active one after another, and bring about responses in the growth of the embryo, which cause it to pass through a series of stages that represent the stages through which the race passed when these memories were originally acquired.

Bottazzi criticized Rignano's mnemonic theory of the purposefulness (finalism) of life asserting that he had no knowledge of ‘nervous energy’ and that the statement that this energy is the basis of life has no meaning for the scientist. Bottazzi admitted that physiologists are ignorant of the physiological basis of the mnemonic faculty, but he maintained that non-living colloidal systems also manifest clear mnemonic properties. He raised the objection that what organisms strive to preserve is not a determinate physiological state, but just simply an equilibrium, as also do all inorganic systems. He compared the organism with a vessel in which is contained a mixture of non-living materials developing a gas, and which has a valve permitting this gas to escape when it exceeds a certain pressure. According Bottazzi, we ought to cease to attribute purposefulness to the phenomena of life: purposefulness is a peculiar attitude of our own minds and does not correspond to the reality of facts.

RignanoReference Rignano^65, Reference Rignano⁶⁶ explicitly responded to Bottazzi's criticism. In the first book, Rignano challenges any mechanist to find him some process such as metabolism in the inorganic world. As Needham (Ref. Reference Needham67, pp. 62–63) points out:

In Ref. Reference Rignano66 there is a slightly different argumentation. In the chapter called ‘Finalism of the generative and regenerative phenomena’ Rignano writes:

In Bottazzi's and Needham's opinion, Rignano's arguments are open to grave objections on two main grounds: first, that he regards biology as suffering more than physics from the teleology of things, and, second, that he wishes to bring the concept of purposiveness back into natural science.Reference Needham⁶⁸ Absolutely interesting is Needham's ‘hermeneutical’ conclusion:

Bottazzi vindicatus!