1.1 THE VITAL IMPETUS 93 



Now I recognize that positive science can and should 

 proceed as if organization was like making a machine. 

 Only so will it have any hold on organized bodies. For 

 its object is not to show us the essence of things, but to 

 furnish us with the best means of acting on them. Physics 

 and chemistry are well advanced sciences, and living matter 

 lends itself to our action only so far as we can treat it by the 

 processes of our physics and chemistry. Organization 

 can therefore only be studied scientifically if the organized 

 body has first been likened to a machine. The cells will 

 be the pieces of the machine, the organism their assemblage, 

 and the elementary labors which have organized the parts 

 will be regarded as the real elements of the labor which has 

 organized the whole. This is the standpoint of science. 

 Quite different, in our opinion, is that of philosophy. 



For us, the whole of an organized machine may, strictly 

 speaking, represent the whole of the organizing work 

 (this is, however, only approximately true), yet the parts 

 of the machine do not correspond to parts of the work, 

 because the materiality of this machine does not represent 

 a sum of means employed, but a sum of obstacles avoided: it 

 is a negation rather than a positive reality. So, as we have 

 shown in a former study, vision is a power which should 

 attain by right an infinity of things inaccessible to our eyes. 

 But such a vision would not be continued into action; it 

 might suit a phantom, but not a living being. The vision 

 of a living being is an effective vision, limited to objects on 

 which the being can act: it is a vision that is canalized, 

 and the visual apparatus simply symbolizes the work of 

 canalizing. Therefore the creation of the visual apparatus 

 is no more explained by the assembling of its anatomic 

 elements than the digging of a canal could be explained 

 by the heaping-up of the earth which might have formed its 

 banks. A mechanistic theory would maintain that the 



