38 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



widen rather than to narrow the enormous gap that 

 separates even the lowest forms of life from the 

 inorganic world.&quot; 



To sum up, those who are concerned only with the 

 functional activity of the living being are inclined to 

 believe that physics and chemistry will give us the key 

 to biological processes. 2 They have chiefly to do, as a 

 fact, with phenomena that are repeated continually in 

 the living being, as in a chemical retort. This explains, 

 in some measure, the mechanistic tendencies of phy 

 siology. On the contrary, those whose attention is 

 concentrated on the minute structure of living tissues, 

 on their genesis and evolution, histologists and em- 

 bryogenists on the one hand, naturalists on the other, 

 are interested in the retort itself, not merely in its 

 contents. They find that this retort creates its own 

 form through a unique series of acts that really con 

 stitute a history. Thus, histologists, embryogenists, 

 and naturalists believe far less readily than physiologists 

 in the physico-chemical character of vital actions. 



The fact is, neither one nor the other of these two 

 theories, neither that which affirms nor that which 

 denies the possibility of chemically producing an 

 elementary organism, can claim the authority of experi 

 ment. They are both unverifiable, the former because 

 science has not yet advanced a step toward the chemical 

 synthesis of a living substance, the second because 

 there is no conceivable way of proving experimentally 

 the impossibility of a fact. But we have set forth the 

 theoretical reasons which prevent us from likening the 

 living being, a system closed off by nature, to the 



1 E. B. Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, New York, 

 1897, p. 330. 



8 Dastre, La Vie et la mort, p. 43. 



