ADAPTATION 211 



personally should not hesitate to say so. But that is not 

 the question. We have to ask : Is any new proof, in- 

 dependent of every other, to be obtained from the facts of 

 physiological adaptation in themselves ? And there is really 

 none. Mere regulatory correspondence between stimuli and 

 reactions, even if it be of the adaptive type and occur in 

 almost indefinite forms, never really disproves a machine 

 as its basis so long as the stimuli and reactions are simple 

 and uniform. Next summer, however, we shall see that 

 vitalism may be proved by such a correspondence if the 

 two corresponding factors are not simple and not uniform. 



We most clearly see at this point what it really was 

 in our analysis of differentiation that allowed us to extract 

 a real proof of vitalism from it. ISTot the mere fact of 

 regulability, but certain specific relations of space, of locality, 

 lay at the very foundation of our proof. These relations, 

 indeed, and only these relations, made it possible to reduce 

 ad absurdum any possible existence of a machine as the 

 actual basis of what we had studied. In our next chapter 

 again it will be space-relations, though analysed in a different 

 manner, that will enable us to add a second real proof 

 of vitalism to our first one. 



With this chapter we conclude the study of organic 

 regulation in all its forms, as far as morphogenesis and 

 metabolism are in question. 



But our analysis of these regulations would be incom- 

 plete and indeed would be open to objections, if we did not 

 devote at least a few words to two merely negative 

 topics, which will be taken more fully into consideration 

 later on. 



