EMANCIPATION OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. 49 



ology, and to have them, as it were, thrown back into 

 its hinterland. This is the work of the scientific men 

 of the first half of the nineteenth century, and parti- 

 cularly of Claude Bernard, who has thereby won 

 the name of the founder or lawgiver of physiology. 

 They found in the old medical school an obstinate 

 adversary glorying in its sterile traditions. In vain 

 was it proved that vital force cannot be an efficient 

 cause; that it was a creation of the brain, an insub- 

 stantial phantom introduced into the anatomical 

 marionette and moving it by strings at the will of 

 any one — its adepts having only to confer upon it a 

 new kind of activity to account for the new act. All 

 that had been shown with the utmost clearness by 

 Bonnet of Geneva, and by many others. It had also 

 been said that the teleological explanation is equally 

 futile, since it assigns to the present, which exists, an 

 inaccessible, and evidently ultimately inadequate cause, 

 which does not yet exist. These objections were in 

 vain. 



Determinism. — And so it was not by theoretical 

 arguments that the celebrated physiologist dealt with 

 his adversaries, but by a kind of lesson on things. In 

 fact he was continually showing by examples that 

 vitalism and the theory of final causes were idle errors 

 which led astray experimental investigation ; that 

 they had prevented the progress of research and the 

 discovery of the truth in every case and on every 

 point in which they had been invoked. He laid down 

 the principle of biological determinisju, which, is nothing 

 but the negation of the "caprice" of living nature. 

 This postulate, so evident that there was no need to 

 enunciate it in the physical sciences, had to be shouted 

 from the housetops for the benefit of supporters of 



