444 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



lies in his mania for formally reducing to simple formulas all phenomena, 

 even those of the most complex character. He thus forgets Galileo's second 

 great exhortation: to measure what is measurable and to make measurable 

 what is not. He believes, for instance, that every being, and especially every 

 living being, can be studied from two sides, the static and the dynamic — 

 that is to say, as potentially active and as actually active. Thus, biology has 

 a static side, anatomy, and a dynamic side, physiology, and other sciences in 

 like manner. Conite himself declares that he borrowed this division into 

 static and dynamic from Blainville; it again occurs in Haeckel's Generelle 

 Morpbologie. According to Comte, all science should be classified after the 

 method employed by botanists and zoologists; by this method we get six 

 separate branches of science: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, 

 biology, and social physics, or, in a single word, invented by Comte and 

 now generally accepted, sociology. Each of these sciences is based on all 

 the previous ones in the series and cannot be mastered without a knowledge 

 of them. The biological section is, of course, the one that affords chief in- 

 terest to the present history. 



His biological ideas 

 As he repeatedly asserts, Comte's biological speculations are most closely 

 associated with those of Blainville, but are, of course, entirely outside the 

 scope of the control which the theories of that distinguished zoologist 

 exercised in his special research-work. Blainville's view that life consists of 

 "composition et decomposition ' is thus embraced by Comte, who with its 

 support rejects both Stahl's vitalism and Boerhaave's mechanism. On the 

 other hand, he accepts Bichat's tissue theory, strongly supporting the idea 

 of structure's being the essential factor in the living organism; Bichat's 

 "organic and animal life" is also adopted by Comte. Life itself he defines as 

 "the relation between organism and environment." It can be studied, as to 

 both its static and its dynamic side, after three different methods: observa- 

 tion, experiment, and comparison. Observation is the fundamental method 

 and should be carried out with all available technical appliances. Experiment, 

 on the other hand, is condemned, especially vivisection, which disturbs the 

 relation between the organism and its natural environment and thus merely 

 creates abnormal states and, moreover, leads to cruelty — Comte does not 

 mention Magendie's name, but obviously refers to him. — The finest biologi- 

 cal method is the comparative, which is applicable, on the one hand, to dif- 

 ferent parts and stages of development in the same individual, and, on the 

 other hand, to different life-forms. The latter type of comparison should be 

 concerned with both organs and tissues; Comte assumes a primal tissue from 

 which all other forms of tissue and organ can be derived, but he rejects the 

 cell theories that were just then making their appearance. This derivation, 

 however, turns out to be as idealistic as Cuvier's comparative anatomy; 



