Science & Tech Quote by Johannes P. Muller

Muller’s definition looks like tidy 19th-century housekeeping, but it’s really a power move: an attempt to carve physiology into a sovereign domain at the moment “life” was being tugged between metaphysics and mechanism. By drawing a bright line between “organic bodies” and “inorganic substances,” he’s not merely sorting subjects; he’s staking a claim that living systems demand their own explanatory toolkit, their own laws, their own expert class.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Treats of the properties” sounds clinical and modest, yet it smuggles in an ambition to be comprehensive: physiology will catalog, interpret, and legislate. The triad - properties, phenomena, laws - mirrors the era’s scientific ideal of moving from observation to governing principles. Muller is signaling that physiology isn’t a descriptive pastime; it’s a law-seeking science on par with physics.

The subtext is a negotiated truce with reductionism. He nods to physics and chemistry as legitimate “other sciences” but insists they don’t own the living. This matters in Muller’s context: early-to-mid 1800s Germany, where Naturphilosophie’s vitalist haze was dissipating, and laboratory methods were rising. Muller himself is often positioned as a bridge figure - rigorous about measurement and sensory physiology, yet cautious about collapsing life into pure chemistry.

So the sentence reads like a boundary marker planted before the turf war begins. It anticipates the coming century’s tensions: are organisms special cases with emergent rules, or just complicated chemical machines? Muller’s answer is strategic: physiology earns autonomy by promising laws, not mysteries.