Hi.j LAWS AND GENERA 225 



eyes the very type of the generic: the inorganic genera 

 seem to us to take living genera as models. Thus the 

 vital order, such as it is offered to us piecemeal in experi- 

 ence, presents the same character and performs the same 

 function as the physical order: both cause experience to 

 repeat itself, both enable our mind to generalize. In reality, 

 this character has entirely different origins in the two 

 cases, and even opposite meanings. In the second case, 

 the type of this character, its ideal limit, as also its founda- 

 tion, is the geometrical necessity in virtue of which the 

 same components give the same resultant. In the first 

 case, this character involves, on the contrary, the interven- 

 tion of something which manages to obtain the same 

 total effect although the infinitely complex elementary 

 causes may be quite different. We insisted on this last 

 point in our first chapter, when we showed how identical 

 structures are to be met with on independent fines of evo- 

 lution. But, without looking so far, we may presume 

 that the reproduction only of the type of the ancestor 

 by his descendants is an entirely different thing from the 

 repetition of the same composition of forces which yields 

 an identical resultant. When we think of the infinity 

 of infinitesimal elements and of infinitesimal causes that 

 concur in the genesis of a living being, when we reflect 

 that the absence or the deviation of one of them would 

 spoil everything, the first impulse of the mind is to consider 

 this army of little workers as watched over by a skilled 

 foreman, the "vital principle," which is ever repairing 

 faults, correcting effects of neglect or absentmindedness, 

 putting things back in place: this is how we try to express 

 the difference between the physical and the vital order, 

 the former making the same combination of causes give 

 the same combined effect, the latter securing the con- 

 stancy of the effect even when there is some wavering 



