Relations between the Physical and the Moral. 243 



to which it affirms that everything can be reduced. So long as it 

 holds to the inorganic world it is not easily assailable ; to motion, 

 in fact, the properties of brute matter may be reduced heat, 

 light, cohesion, sound, and, probably, also the phenomena of 

 electro-magnetism. It is even known with exactitude what nu- 

 merical ratio subsists between a given quantity of motion and a 

 given quantity of heat. As regards chemical action, its reduction 

 to motion is less clear ; but suppose that all this should one day be 

 explained, the inorganic would be reduced to simple bodies and 

 motion. According to the mechanical hypothesis, the world of 

 life is reducible to the same terms. In the first place, since the 

 researches of Wohler, chemical synthesis has effaced every line 

 of demarcation between organic and inorganic chemistry. The 

 ternary and quarternary compounds which constitute organic 

 matter are chiefly confined to oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and 

 nitrogen. Their elements, therefore, are not bodies of a peculiar 

 kind. Living substance possesses no properties due to any imagi- 

 nary 'vital principle.' Life, together with the play of the 

 functions which compose it, is but a very complicated chemistry 

 and mechanism. But if we were to admit that this mechanical 

 conception of life is confirmed in all its details (which is not the 

 case), it would still have to explain what is most essential in living 

 beings, their unity. To say, as has been said, that living matter 

 is endowed with the peculiar property of 'adapting itself to ends/ 

 explains nothing. We thus attribute to it an unconscious intelli- 

 gence, but in so doing we go beyond the bounds of mechanism. 

 This unity, this consensus, is so important in the living creature that 

 Auguste Comte himself admits that here 'we must substitute 

 for analytic study synthetic considerations' that is to say, instead 

 of passing from the lower to the higher, from the components to 

 the resultant, we must descend from the higher to the lower, from 

 the end to the subordinated means. 1 But if we suppose that 

 mechanism explains life, and endeavour, with its assistance, to 



1 In his Rapport sur la Physiologic Gentrale, Claude Bernard thinks that we 

 are justified in reducing life to the laws of inorganic nature, but that we have 

 no right to say that the processes are identical. Life has processes of its own 

 See also some excellent observations in Renouvier, Critique Generale, tome iii. 

 p. 90, et seq. 



