most complex, such as the human body, or the most elementary, such as the cell, we may not invoke a final cause, a vital force, external to that organism and acting on it from without, but only the connections and the fluctuations of effects which are the sole actual and efficient causes. In other words Ludwig, and Claude Bernard in particular, expelled from the domain of active phenomenality the three chimeras—Vital Force, Final Cause, and the "Caprice" of Living Nature.
But the living being is not only a completely constructed and completely constituted organism. It is not a finished clock. It is a clock which is making itself, a mechanism which is constructing and perpetuating itself. Nothing of the kind is known to us in inanimate nature. Physiology has found—in what is called morphogeny—its temporary limit. It is beyond this limit, it is in the study of phenomena by which the organism is constructed and perpetuated, it is in the region of the functions of generation and development, that philosophical doctrines expand and flourish. This is the present frontier of these two powers, philosophy and science. We shall presently delimit them more precisely. W. Kühne, a well-known scientist whose death is deplored, not in Germany alone, amused himself by studying the division of biological doctrines among the members of learned societies and in the world of academies. He summed up this kind of statistical inquiry by saying in 1898 at the Cambridge Congress, that physiologists were nearly all advocates of the physico-chemical doctrine of life, and that the majority of naturalists were advocates of vital force, and of the theory of final causes.
