in organisms similar to themselves. They grow, evolve, and generate as they themselves were generated. In other words, while their acts separate plants from animals, their mode of origin and evolution alone bring them together. Such analogies are of no slight importance; but they were neutralized by their dissimilarities, which were exaggerated by the dualistic school.
It is clear that the word life would lose all actual significance to those who would reduce it to the faculty of evolution, and who would separate all its real manifestations in animated beings and in plants. If there are two lives, the one animal and the other vegetable, there are no more; or, what comes to the same thing, there is an infinite number of lives which have nothing in common but the name, or at most, the possession of some secondary characteristics. There are as many of them as there are different beings, for each has its own particular evolution. Here the specific is the negation of the general and it destroys it instead of being subordinate to it. The principle of life becomes for each being something as individual as its own evolution. And this, if we think it out, is how the philosophers look at life, and it is the real reason of their disagreement with the physiological school.
Proof of the Monistic Theory.—On the other hand, under the disguise of living forms, the physiologist recognizes the existence of an identical basis. His trained ear marks amid the overcharged instrumentation of the vital work the recognizable undertones of a constant theme. It was the work of Claude Bernard to bring this common basis to light. He shows that plants live as animals do,
