ere the same, hovering
over life and over matter alike. Hence our habit of designating by the
same word and representing in the same way the existence of _laws_ in
the domain of inert matter and that of _genera_ in the domain of life.

Now, it will be found that this confusion is the origin of most of the
difficulties raised by the problem of knowledge, among the ancients as
well as among the moderns. The generality of laws and that of genera
having been designated by the same word and subsumed under the same
idea, the geometrical order and the vital order are accordingly confused
together. According to the point of view, the generality of laws is
explained by that of genera, or that of genera by that of laws. The
first view is characteristic of ancient thought; the second belongs to
modern philosophy. But in both ancient and modern philosophy the idea of
"generality" is an equivocal idea, uniting in its denotation and in its
connotation incompatible objects and elements. In both there are grouped
under the same concept two kinds of order which are alike only in the
facility they give to our action on things. We bring together the two
terms in virtue of a quite external likeness, which justifies no doubt
their designation by the same word for practice, but which does not
authorize us at all, in the speculative domain, to confuse them in the
same definition.

The ancients, indeed, did not ask why nature submits to laws, but why it
is ordered according to genera. The idea of genus corresponds more
especially to an objective reality in the domain of life, where it
expresses an unquestionable fact, heredity. Indeed, there can only be
genera where there are individual objects; now, while the organized
being is cut out from the general mass of matter by his very
organization, that is to say naturally, it is our perception which cuts
inert matter into distinct bodies. It is guided in this by the interests
of action, by the nascent reactions that our body indicates--that is, as
we have shown elsewhere,[85] by the potential genera that are trying to
gain existence. In this, then, genera and individuals determine one
another by a semi-artificial operation entirely relative to our future
action on things. Nevertheless the ancients did not hesitate to put all
genera in the same rank, to attribute the same absolute existence to
all of them. Reality thus being a system of genera, it is to the
generality of the genera (that is, in ef