There’s no difference unless one believes in elan vital or some other such non-materialist belief.
There’s very much a difference. And it’s got nothing to do with elan vital or materialism. It’s got to do with understanding that reality is big, human brains are small, and if you want to go seriously exploring any part of reality you need to define limits, put reality in a Venn diagram and decide “I’m studying this circle here, and yes I recognize that it intersects with these other circles, but I’m not studying those circles, I might get INFORMATION from people that do, but that’s not my area of study.”
It’s like the difference between a software developer and a chip designer. Sure you can’t run software without chips, and chips are rather boring without software, but they are 2 different things and the people who do 1 rarely know anything about the other.