88 PASTEUR : THE HISTORY OF A MIND 



sources of life, before this phenomenon which endows 

 with a new existence the organic atoms which death has 

 just dissociated and liberated? There is no death, said 

 the believers in this doctrine. When an animal dies, 

 the life of the whole vanishes but not the life of the 

 elements, not that of its ultimate molecules. Scarcely 

 are they set at liberty by death, than they at once begin 

 an independent life, become isolated, and then give birth 

 to vibrios, to monads, or else they join already formed 

 aggregations which attract them, and thus produce the 

 large Infusoria. " Therefore," said Buffon, "it is in- 

 evitable that one should encounter all imaginable grada- 

 tions in this chain of organisms which descends from 

 the most completely organized animal to the simple 

 organic molecule." 



We see the connection between these ideas and those 

 which during the same epoch explained the mystery of 

 fermentations. It was the same organic molecules, 

 dissociated by putrefaction, which provoked the decom- 

 position of fermentable substances by communicating 

 to them their own movement, and which, on the other 

 hand, became organized into living animalculse. Sin- 

 gularly, this idea of a common origin did not prevent the 

 fermentation of a liquor from being considered as some- 

 thing quite independent of the Infusoria which might 

 appear therein, and these two kinds of evolution of the 

 organic molecule were even regarded as opposed to each 

 other, and the Infusoria as harmful to the fermentation 

 which was called the principal phenomenon. 



What a strange way of looking at things ! we might say 

 to-day. Why turn the carpet over in order to see the 

 design? When we know a little of the history of science, 

 we are no longer astonished at this kind of blindness. 

 Our conceptions of things are generally more compli- 

 cated than the things themselves. It is rare that the 



