action of these two elements that all vital phenomena inevitably result." The environment furnishes the living being with three things:—its matter, its energy, and the exciting forces of its vitality. All vital manifestation results from the conflict of two factors: the extrinsic factor which provokes its appearance; the intrinsic factor, the very organization of the living body, which determines its form. Bichat and Cuvier saw in the phenomena of life the exclusive intervention of a principle of action entirely internal, checked rather than aided by the universal forces of nature. The exact opposite is true. The protozoan finds the stimuli of its vitality in the aquatic medium which is its habitat. The really living particles of the metazoan—that is to say, its cells, its anatomical elements—meet these stimuli in the lymph, in the interstitial liquids which bathe them and which form their real external environment.
Auguste Comte thoroughly understood this truth, and has clearly expressed it in the passage we have just quoted. Claude Bernard has fully developed it and given it its classical form.
In order to manifest the phenomena of vitality, the elementary being, the protoplasmic being, requires from the external world certain favourable conditions; these it finds there, and they may be called the stimuli, or extrinsic conditions of vitality. This being possesses no initiative or spontaneity in itself, it has only a faculty of entering into action when an external stimulus provokes it. This subjection of the living matter is called irritability. The term expresses that life is not solely an internal attribute, but an internal principle of action.
