The Organisation of Matter 



have been of the greatest use to science. They 

 are not intended to give us, like Vaucanson's 

 automata, a sterile imitation of life, but to 

 supply us with information respecting the forces 

 at work in the living being; and one is surprised 

 to see, from the observations and experiments 

 which we have related, all that inert matter is 

 capable of doing and the extraordinary power 

 of organisation which resides in it. 



The vitalist mysticism, which solves the 

 problem of life by words, is thus disappearing 

 before the evidence of facts; and the discovery, 

 on the one hand, of simple forms of life, and on the 

 other of increasingly complex states of matter, 

 is gradually filling the abyss which, in our 

 earlier thought, separated living beings from the 

 mineral kingdom. 



The tendency of science is thus leading us 

 to consider life as a physico-chemical phe- 

 nomenon. But because we have carried the 

 analysis of life so far, it does not follow that we 

 are certain to succeed with its synthesis, and that 

 some day a living cell, capable of reproduction, 

 will be seen issuing from dead matter. Be that 

 as it may, nobody has the right to treat as 



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