Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/237

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favourite formula. It never entered his head that there could be a confusion instead of a correlation, and that there might be only one and the same act, the phases of which would be indistinguishable. This unfortunate idea, which was fated to be so rapidly contradicted, is due to Le Dantec. Far from it being the case, Pasteur had distinguished the ferment function from the life of the yeast. According to him, the yeast may exist sometimes as a ferment and sometimes otherwise.


§ 3. Correlation of Two Orders of Vital Facts.

It is this correlation between acts distinct in themselves but usually connected that was announced by Claude Bernard. And, mirabile dictu—and this is the natural outcome of the perfect sanity of mind of this great physiologist—it happens that not only Pasteur's researches, but the development of a new science, Energetics, and Büchner's discovery lend support to his views, and that, too, in a field where one would have thought they had no application. Le Dantec is wrong when he declares that these ideas only apply to vertebrates. "It is clear," he says on several occasions, "that the author has in view the metazoa and even the vertebrates." Well! no. All that is general, universally applicable, and universally true. So that there are two orders of distinct phenomena energetically opposed and certainly connected. We need only repeat Claude Bernard's own words quoted by Le Dantec in order to confute them.

Law of Connection of Two Orders of Vital Facts.—"These phenomena [of organic destruction and of