36 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 



has devoted to the development of the cell: "The study 

 of the cell has, on the whole, seemed to widen rather than 

 to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest 

 forms of life from the inorganic world. 1 " 



To sum up, those who are concerned only with the 

 functional activity of the living being are inclined to be- 

 lieve 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 physiology. On 

 the contrary, those whose attention is concentrated on 

 the minute structure of living tissues, on their genesis 

 and evolution, histologists and embryogenists 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 constitute a history. Thus, histologists, em- 

 bryogenists, 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 possi- 

 bility of chemically producing an elementary organism, 

 can claim the authority of experiment. They are both 

 unverifiable, the former because science has not yet ad- 

 vanced 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 systems which our science isolates. These 



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

 1897, p. 330. 



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



