this view. The opinion of the average man distrusts it. It applies the law of inertia only to inert matter. This is because the vital response does not always immediately succeed the external stimulus, and is not always proportional to it. But it is sufficient to have seen the flywheel of a steam engine to understand that the restitution of a mechanical force cannot be instantaneous. It is sufficient to have had a finger on the trigger of a firearm to know that there is no necessary proportion between the intensity of the stimulus and the magnitude of the force produced. Things happen in the living just as in the inert machine.
The faculty of entering into action when provoked by an external stimulus has received, as we have said, the name of irritability. The word is not used of inert matter. However, the condition of the latter is the same. But there is no need to affirm its irritability, because no one denies it. We know perfectly well that brute matter is inert, that all the manifestations of activity of which it is the theatre are provoked. Inertia is for it the equivalent of irritability in living matter. But while it is not necessary to introduce this idea into the physical sciences, where it has reigned since the days of Galileo, it was, on the contrary, necessary to affirm it in biology, precisely because it was in biology that the opposing doctrine of vital spontaneity ruled supreme.
Such was the view held by Claude Bernard. He never varied on this point. Irritability, said he, is the property possessed "by every anatomical element (that is to say, the protoplasm which enters into its constitution) of being stimulated into activity and of reacting in a certain manner under the influence of
