EMANCIPATION OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. 45 



most complex, such as the human body, or the most 

 elementary, such as the cell, we may not invoke a 

 final cause, a vital force, external to that organism 

 and acting on it from without, but only the con- 

 nections and the fluctuations of effects which are the 

 sole actual and efficient causes. In other words 

 Ludwig, and Claude Bernard in particular, expelled 

 from the domain of active phenomenality the three 

 chimeras Vital Force, Final Cause, and the " Caprice '' 

 of Living Nature. 



But the living being is not only a completely con- 

 structed and completely constituted organism. It is not 

 a finished clock. It is a clock which is making itself, 

 a mechanism which is constructing and perpetuating 

 itself. Nothing of the kind is known to us in inani- 

 mate nature. Physiology has found in what is 

 called morphogeny its temporary limit It is beyond 

 this limit, it is in the study of phenomena by which 

 the organism is constructed and perpetuated, it is in 

 the region of the functions of generation and develop- 

 ment, that philosophical doctrines expand and flourish. 

 This is the present frontier of these two powers, 

 philosophy and science. We shall presently delimit 

 them more precisely. W. Kiihne, a well-known 

 scientist whose death is deplored, not in Germany 

 alone, amused himself by studying the division of 

 biological doctrines among the members of learned 

 societies and in the world of academies. He 

 summed up this kind of statistical inquiry by 

 saying in 1898 at the Cambridge Congress, that 

 physiologists were nearly all advocates of the physico- 

 chemical doctrine of life, and that the majority of 

 naturalists were advocates of vital force, and of the 

 theory of final causes. 



