PERSISTENT VITALIST WORDS. “Naturalists trying to explain living processes like generation and growth drew on a language of active principles to explain how matter could come to organise itself. Apothecaries, herbalists, and chemists also used a language of principles when studying the virtues of plants, although it was not always clear what they meant.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786