32 THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 



reproduction, due to an egg issuing from it, should be 

 comprehensible to us ? Darwin, and Weismann after him, 

 advocate cellular analysis ; but there are any number of 

 other analyses having just as many philosophical reasons 

 why they should be good and chance will never make us 

 find the best. 



Weismann aggravates the error of Darwin's method in his 

 desire to make it strictly exact. He imagines in the cells 

 themselves characters represented by particles still more 

 minute than the gemmules ; and he does not see that to 

 represent a character by a particle amounts to giving to the 

 character, which is only a product of the analyst's fancy, an 

 absolute existence. This giving of names to things which 

 do not exist is beyond remedy ; for the names go on existing 

 in language and people cannot believe they mean nothing. 

 Weismann's language nowadays is used by the majority of 

 histologists. 



The mistake made by Ehrlich is of the same kind and 

 quite as fatal in the realm of general pathology. When 

 you inject into a living animal a colloid taken from another 

 animal or from microbes (poison, toxin) the animal, if it 

 remains alive, undergoes a particular modification. This is 

 shown by the fact that its serum acquires the property of 

 neutralizing henceforward the action of the toxin or poison. 



Without asking whether in this conflict of colloid sub- 

 stances the phenomenon produced belongs to the colloidal 

 or the chemical order, Ehrlich straightway accepted as a fact 

 that, in the serum of the animal receiving the injection, there 

 appears a chemically defined substance and precisely that 

 substance which is the antidote of the toxin, the latter 

 being also considered a chemical agent. 



This manner of presenting facts bestows quite gratuit- 

 ously on the animal's cellular elements a veritable genius 



