IDEAS OF CLAUDE BERNARD ON FERMENTATION 207 



were in the living organism two kinds of phenomena: 

 the phenomena of construction or synthesis, which alone 

 he considered as truly vital, and the phenomena of or- 

 ganic destruction, which he considered to be of a physico- 

 chemical order. In a word, it was life alone which was 

 constructive, leaving to the forces of death the work of 

 destruction. These phenomena, different in origin, were, 

 nevertheless, not separated in space and time. Bernard 

 admitted that there were phenomena of destruction in 

 the living cell, and that whenever a muscle contracts, 

 a gland secretes or the mind works, there is a portion of 

 the tissue, muscular, glandular or cerebral, which is 

 destroyed. But although simultaneous and correla- 

 tive to a certain degree, these phenomena of synthesis 

 and decomposition were none the less of different essence, 

 and not obedient to the same mechanism. 



Pasteur, in his refutation of these ideas, does not seem 

 to me to have perfectly understood them. Bernard 

 does not believe at all as Pasteur thought,^ ''in a forced 

 opposition between the phenomena of life and synthe- 

 sis and the phenomena of death and destruction, be- 

 tween life, properly speaking, and fermentation." At 

 least he nowhere says so. On the contrary they were, 

 according to his conception, two machines which con- 

 curred in the same work, propelled b}^ two different 

 motive forces. When death occurs and the life-motor 

 ceases to act, the second motor which is fed by com- 

 bustions and fermentations, remains in action, and it is 

 that which, in ways purely physical or chemical, having 

 no longer anything vital, presides at the return of dead 

 matter to the ambient nature. 



This conception did not contravene, as one might 

 believe at first, the demonstrations of Pasteur on the 



1 Examen critique d'un ecrit posthume de M. Bernard sur la fermenta- 

 .tion. p. 47. 



