9 NATURE AND LIFE. 
nearer to it. The spirit of Descartes cannot fail to arouse 
before long some genius mighty enough to revive among 
us a taste and respect for thought in all the departments 
of scientific activity. Deserted as high abstractions are for 
the moment, they are not, thank Heaven, so utterly aban- . 
doned as to deprive study of its ardor, and essays of their 
success, when these relate to the problem of the constitu- 
tion of matter. In fact, this is a question which for several 
years past has occupied some among our own savants and 
thinkers, as completely as it has employed most of those 
of the rest of Europe, a question which bears witness with 
peculiar eloquence to this fact, that, if philosophers are 
forced to borrow largely from science, in its turn science 
can retain clearness, and elevation, and strength, only by 
drawing its inspiration from, and recognizing its insepa- 
rable connection with, the abstract consideration of hidden 
causes and of first principles. 
iB 
Matter is presented under a great variety of appear- 
ances. Let us consider it in its most complicated state, in 
the human body, for instance. In this, ordinary dissection 
distinguishes organs, which may be resolved into tissues. 
The disintegration of the latter yields anatomical elements 
from which direct analysis extracts a certain number of 
chemical principles. Here the anatomist’s workends. The 
chemist steps in, and recognizes in these principles definite 
kinds arising from the combination, in fixed and determi- 
nate proportions, of a certain number of principles that can- 
not be decomposed, substantially indestructible, to which 
he gives the name of simple bodies. Carbon, nitrogen, 
oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, calcium, iron, which 
thus set a limit to experimental analysis of the most com- 
plex bodies, are simple substances, that is to say, they are 
the original and irresolvable radicals of the tissue of things, 
