PHYSIOLOGY, CHEMISTRY, AND MORPHOLOGY. 389 



iiitelligeuce, tliey construct systems much more ingeuious than vera- 

 cious, and then display them before a public that only applauds readily 

 constructed automata presented to it as living beings. I must confess 

 that I always look with extreme distrust upon systems. I can not for- 

 get that if they have a didactic importance they never correspond 

 exactly to the truth, especially in what concerns living beings, so (M^m- 

 plex in their great simplicity. Technical necessities often oblige us to 

 separate functional elements from each other; but we then ought to 

 seek to reunite them, because it is from their union that springs that 

 resultant complex of reciprocal influences that constitutes a living- 

 organism. Thus to the cool, impartial, aiul sagacious work of the 

 experimenter the physiologist must bring the assistance of a high 

 ])hilosophical culture and a certain breadth of intuition and imagina- 

 tion, that faculty which Tyndall ' lauds as one of the most powerful 

 aids to hunum i^rogress. "Without imagination," says he, "we could 

 not make a step beyond the animal world; we could hardly reach its 

 confines. I do not here allude to that irregular power that plays 

 capriciously with facts, l)ut to that orderly, disciphned capacity whose 

 only function is to create the ideas imperiously demanded by the 

 intellect." 



Certainly, looked at in this way, the goal of physiology is very diffi- 

 cult to reach, and I should be the last to remind you of it, being myself 

 unequal to the task. But inability to attain an ideal ought not to pre- 

 vent you from having it constantly before your eyes, from clinging to 

 and proclaiming it, in hopes that others with greater iiowers than your- 

 self may reach it. High ambitions are allowed to all, provided that 

 they are sincere and disinterested, and I do not think that doubt can 

 be entertained of the sincerity of a lover of physiology, particularly in 

 this age of sharp struggle for material existence. 



'Tyndall. Notes ou Light, Paris, 1875, page 46. [Note by Translator. — The 

 passage here cited does not appear in any English or American edition of Tyndall's 

 Lectures on Light. It is probably taken in substance, though not in exact form, 

 from some jjassages in his lecture "On the scientific use of the imagination," a 

 translation of which was published in Paris bound up with the Lectures on Light.] 



