on
independent lines of evolution. But, without looking so far, we may
presume that the reproduction only of the type of the ancestor by his
descendants is an entirely different thing from the repetition of the
same composition of forces which yields an identical resultant. When we
think of the infinity of infinitesimal elements and of infinitesimal
causes that concur in the genesis of a living being, when we reflect
that the absence or the deviation of one of them would spoil everything,
the first impulse of the mind is to consider this army of little workers
as watched over by a skilled foreman, the "vital principle," which is
ever repairing faults, correcting effects of neglect or
absentmindedness, putting things back in place: this is how we try to
express the difference between the physical and the vital order, the
former making the same combination of causes give the same combined
effect, the latter securing the constancy of the effect even when there
is some wavering in the causes. But that is only a comparison; on
reflection, we find that there can be no foreman, for the very simple
reason that there are no workers. The causes and elements that
physico-chemical analysis discovers are real causes and elements, no
doubt, as far as the facts of organic destruction are concerned; they
are then limited in number. But vital phenomena, properly so called, or
facts of organic creation open up to us, when we analyze them, the
perspective of an analysis passing away to infinity: whence it may be
inferred that the manifold causes and elements are here only views of
the mind, attempting an ever closer and closer imitation of the
operation of nature, while the operation imitated is an indivisible act.
The likeness between individuals of the same species has thus an
entirely different meaning, an entirely different origin, to that of the
likeness between complex effects obtained by the same composition of the
same causes. But in the one case as in the other, there is _likeness_,
and consequently possible generalization. And as that is all that
interests us in practice, since our daily life is and must be an
expectation of the same things and the same situations, it is natural
that this common character, essential from the point of view of our
action, should bring the two orders together, in spite of a merely
internal diversity between them which interests speculation only. Hence
the idea of a _general order of nature_, everywh