heir sum and their resultant. When we have resolved the
biological aspect of phenomena into physico-chemical factors, we will
leap, if necessary, over physics and chemistry themselves; we will go
from masses to molecules, from molecules to atoms, from atoms to
corpuscles: we must indeed at last come to something that can be treated
as a kind of solar system, astronomically. If you deny it, you oppose
the very principle of scientific mechanism, and you arbitrarily affirm
that living matter is not made of the same elements as other
matter."--We reply that we do not question the fundamental identity of
inert matter and organized matter. The only question is whether the
natural systems which we call living beings must be assimilated to the
artificial systems that science cuts out within inert matter, or whether
they must not rather be compared to that natural system which is the
whole of the universe. That life is a kind of mechanism I cordially
agree. But is it the mechanism of parts artificially isolated within the
whole of the universe, or is it the mechanism of the real whole? The
real whole might well be, we conceive, an indivisible continuity. The
systems we cut out within it would, properly speaking, not then be
_parts_ at all; they would be _partial views_ of the whole. And, with
these partial views put end to end, you will not make even a beginning
of the reconstruction of the whole, any more than, by multiplying
photographs of an object in a thousand different aspects, you will
reproduce the object itself. So of life and of the physico-chemical
phenomena to which you endeavor to reduce it. Analysis will undoubtedly
resolve the process of organic creation into an ever-growing number of
physico-chemical phenomena, and chemists and physicists will have to do,
of course, with nothing but these. But it does not follow that chemistry
and physics will ever give us the key to life.

A very small element of a curve is very near being a straight line. And
the smaller it is, the nearer. In the limit, it may be termed a part of
the curve or a part of the straight line, as you please, for in each of
its points a curve coincides with its tangent. So likewise "vitality" is
tangent, at any and every point, to physical and chemical forces; but
such points are, as a fact, only views taken by a mind which imagines
stops at various moments of the movement that generates the curve. In
reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical e