' Roule, L'EmbryotogU gfnirate. Paris, 1893, p, 319.
'The irrevermbility of the eeries of living beings has been well set forth by Baldwin {Dev^pment and Evolution, New York, 1902; ia puticulAT p. 327).
Lm,
life r-
Ihe
sm I-
lOHAF.
be foreseen if we could know, in all their details, the con- ditions under which it will be produced. But these con- ditions are built up into it and are part and parcel of its being; they are peculiar to that phase of its history in which Ufe finds itself at the moment of producing the form; how could we know beforehand a situation that is unique of its kind, that has never yet occurred and will never occur again? Of the future, only that is foreseen which is like the past or can be made up again with elements like those of the past, Such is the case with astronomical, physical and chemical facts, with all facts which form part of a system in which elements supposed to be unchanging are merely put together, in which the only changes are changes of position, hi which there is no theoretical absurdity in ima^ning that thuigs are restored to their place; in which, consequently, the same total phenomenon, or at least the same elementary phenomena, can be repeated. But an original situation, which imparts something of its own ori^nality to its elements, that is to say, to the partial views that are taken of it, how can such a situation be pictured as ^ven before it is actually produced?' All that can be swd is that, once produced, it will be explained by the elements that analysis will then carve out of it. Now, what is true of the production of a new species is also true of the production of a new individual, and, more generally, of any moment of any living form. For, though the variation must reach a certain importance and a certain generality in order to give rise to a new species, it is being produced every moment, continuously and insensibly, in every living being. And it is evident that even the sudden "mutations" which we now hear of are possible only if a process of incubation, or rather of maturing, is going
We have dwelt on this point and tried to make it clear i mr U> do7tn£es imntiiOates de la conscience, pp. 140-151.
I the btsat
I 1.1 BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 29 an throughout a series of generations that do not aeem to change. In this sense it might be said of life, as of con- sciousness, that at every moment it is creating something.' But against this idea of the absolute originality and un- foreseeability of forms our whole intellect rises in revolt. The essential function of our intellect, as the evolution of hfe has fashioned it, is to be a light for our conduct, to make ready for our action on things, to foresee, for a given situation, the events, favorable or unfavorable, which may follow thereupon. Intellect therefore in- stinctively selects in a given situation whatever is Uke something already known; it seeks this out, in order _ that it may apply its principle that " like produces like. " ■. In just this docs the prevision of the future by common H sense consist. Science carries this faculty to the highest possible degree of exactitude and precision, but does not alter its essential character. Like ordinary knowledge, in dealing with things science is concerned only with the aspect of repetition. Though the whole be original, science will always manage to analyze it into elements or aspecta which are approximately a reproduction of the past. Science can work only on what is supposed to repeat it- self — that is to say, on what is withdrawn, by hypothesis, from the action of real time. Anything that is irreducible
' In his fine work on Genius in Art (Le Gdnie dans I'art), M. S^illes develops this twofold thesis, that art is a continuation of nature and th»t life is cieation. We should willingly accept the second formula; but hy creation must we uuderEitand. as the author does, a synfhem of elementaT Where the elements pre-exist, the synthesis that will b* tiude is virtuallj givea, being only one of the possible arrangements. This arrangement a superhuman intellect oonld have perceived in ad- vance among all the possible ones that suiround it. We bold, on the eontrary, that in the domain of life the elcn^enta have no real and sepa- nte enstenM. They are manifold mentnl views of an indivisible process. And for that reason there is radical contingency in progress, incommensurability between what goes before and what follows — in abort, duration.
and irreversible in the successive moments of a history eludes science. To get a notion of this irreducibility and irreversibility, we must break with scientific habits which are adapted to the fundamental requirements of thought, we must do violence to the mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect. But that is just the function of
In vain, therefore, does Ufe evolve before our eyes as a continuous creation of unforeseeable form : the idea always persists that form, unforeseeability and continuity are mere appearance — the outward reflection of our own ig- norance. 'S\'hat is pr&sented to the senses as a continuous history would break up, we are told, into a series of suc- cessive states. "What gives you the impression of an original state resolves, upon analysis, into elementary facts, each of which is the repetition of a fact already known. What you call an unforeseeable form is only a new arrangement of old elements. The elementary causes, which in their totality have detennined this arrangement, are themselves old causes repeated in a new order. Know- ledge of the elements and of the elementary causes would have made it possible to foretell the hving form which is their sum and their resultant. When we have resolved the biological aspect of phenomena into physico-chemical factors, we will leap, if necessary, over physics and chenus- try themselves; we will go from masses to molecules, frcMn molecules to atoms, from atoms to corpuscles: we must indeed at last come to something that can be treated as a kind of solar system, astronomically. If you deny it, you opptose the very principle of scientific mechanism, and you arbitrarily affirm that living matter is not made of the same elements as other matter. " — We reply that we do not question the fundamental identity of inert matter and organized matter. The only question is whether the
i.l BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 31
natural systems which we call living beings must be as- similated to the artificial systems that science cuts out within inert matter, or whether they must not rather be compared to that natural system which is the whole of the universe. That hfe is a kind of mechanism I cordially agree. But is it the mechanism of parts artificially isolated within the whole of the universe, or is it the mechanism of the real whole? The real whole might well be, we con- ceive, an indivisible continuity. The systems we cut out , within it would, properly speaking, not then be parts at ' all; they would be partial views of the whole. And, with these partial views put end to end, you will not make even a beginning of the reconstruction of the whole, any more than, by multiplying photographs of an object in a thousand different aspects, you will reproduce the object itself. So of life and of the physico-chemical phenomena to which you endeavor to reduce it. Analysis will un- doubtedly resolve the process of organic creation into an e\'er-growing number of physico-chemical phenomena, and chemists and physicists will have to do, of course, with nothing but these. But it does not follow that chemistry and physics will ever give us the key to life.
A very small element of a curve is very near being a straight line. And the smaller it is, the nearer. In the limit, it may be termed a part of the curve or a part i of the straight line, as you please, for in each of its points ' ft curve coincides with its tangent. So likewise "vitality" is tangent, at any and every point, to physical and chemical forces; but such points are, as a fact, only views taken ' by a mind which imagines stops at various moments ' of the movement that generates the curve. In reality, Bfe is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a eurve is composed of straight lines.
In a general way, the most radical progress a science
(OHAF.
can achieve is the working of the completed results into a new scheme of the whole, by relation to which they become instantaneous and motionless views taken at in- tervals along the continuity of a movement. Such, for example, is the relation of modern to ancient geometry. The latter, purely static, worked with figures drawn once for all; the former studies the varying of a function — that is, the continuous movement by which the figure is described. No doubt, for greater strictness, all con- siderations of motion may be eliminated from mathe- matical processes; but the introduction of motion into the genesis of figures is nevertheless the origin of modem mathematics. We believe that if biology could ever get as close to its object as mathematics does to its own, it would become, to the physics and chemistry of organized bodies, what the mathematics of the modems has proved to be in relation to ancient geometry. The wholly super- ficial displacements of masses and molecules studied in physics and chemistry would become, by relation to that inner vital movement (which is transformation and not translation) what the position of s. moving object is to the movement of that object in space. And, so far as we can see, the procedure by which we should then pass from the definition of a certain vital action to the system of physico- chemical facts which it implies would be like passing from the function to its derivative, from the equation of the curve (i.e. the law of the continuous movement by which the curve is generated) to the equation of the tangent giving its instantaneous direction. Such a science would be a mechanics of transformation, of which our mechanics of trarislation would become a particular case, a simpli- fication, a projection on the plane of pure quantity. And just as an infinity of functions have the same differential, these functions differing from each other by a constant,
Biology, Physics and Chemistry 33
perhaps the integration of the physico-chemical ele- ments of properly vital action might detennine that action
Eonly in part— a part would be left to indcterminatioa.
KBut such an integration can be no more than dreamed of;
■We do not pretend that the dream will ever bo realized.
Ne are only trying, by carrj'ing a certain comparison as
possible, to show up to what point our theory goes
with pure mechanism, and where they part company.
Imitation of the living by the unorganized may, how-
'ever, go a good way. Not only does chemistry make organic syntheses, but we have succeeded in reproducing artificially the external appearance of certain ftLcts of organization, such as indirect cell-division and proto- plasmic circulation. It is well known that the protoplasm of the cell effects various movements within its envelope; on the other hand, indirect cell-division is the outcome of very complex operations, some involving the nucleus and others the cytoplasm. These latter commence by the doubling of the centrosome, a small spherical body alongside the nucleus. The two centrosomes thus ob- tained draw apart, attract the broken and doubled ends of the filament of which the original nucleus mainly con- ^sted, and join them to form two fresh nuclei about which the two new cells are constructed which will succeed the first. Now, in their broad lines and in their external appearance, some at least of these operations have been successfully imitated. If some sugar or table salt is pulverized and some very old oil is added, and a drop of the mixture is observed under the microscope, a froth of alveolar structure is seen whose configuration is like that of protoplasm, according to certain theories, and in which movements take place which are decidedly like those of protoplasmic circulation.' If, in a froth of the same kind,
Biitschll, UnlersMchungen iiber raikroakoptKhe Schaunu and dot Pro- toplatma, Leipzig, 1892, First Fort.