i BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 33 



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 endeavour to reduce it. 

 Analysis will undoubtedly resolve the process of organic 

 creation into an ever-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 of the straight line, as you please, for in each 

 of its points a curve coincides with its tangent. So 

 likewise &quot; vitality &quot; 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, life is no more made 

 of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed 

 of straight lines. 



In a general way, the most radical progress a science 

 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 strict- 



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