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Nature and Life Nature and Life FACTS AND DOCTRINES RELATING TO THE CONSTITUTION OF MATTER, THE NEW DYNAMICS, AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE. BY FERNAND PAPILLON. TRANSLATED FROM THE SECOND FRENCH EDITION, BY A. R. MACDONOUGH, Esq . November 2005 For Free Distrubution Only Created By Arfalpha.com All Rights Reserved NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 548 AND 551 BROADWAY. 1875. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by D. Appleton & Company. In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, At Washington Thanks to Cam Scott Who Helped Make This Book Possible PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR. This volume contains a series of essays written and published at different times, some of a general character, and others more special, and all relating to the activity of natural forces, especially those of life. The mere bringing together of these fragments has presented an opportunity of completing a methodical and uniform whole, combining exactness in details with generality of doctrines, and distinctly tracing the precise aspect of each group of phenomena in the picture of the close and universal relations that bind the whole together. An exposition is thus offered under an elementary form, in language freed from technical dress, of the most essential truths established of late by physics, chemistry, and biology, regarding the mechanism of natural forces, and the arrangement and combination of the fundamental springs of being in the world, especially in the living world. I indulge the hope that such a work might meet a kindly welcome from minds, ever increasingly numerous, that regard science as the subject neither of idle curiosity nor of passing entertainment, but as the object of earnest sympathy and of serious examination. Such, at least, is the principal purpose of this book. It has another, also. The evident disposition of the present day is to repose infinite hopes on the natural sciences, and to expect unlimited benefits from them. I certainly shall not view this inclination as an illusion, and this volume sufficiently attests the high value I set upon all that can encourage and foster such feelings. But precisely because I am not suspected of enmity to those sciences, it has seemed to me the more necessary to indicate a fatal mistake accompanying those commendable sentiments; I mean the mistake of those who, after loudly praising the excellence of science, denounce the weakness and deny the authority of metaphysics. Now, my reader will come upon more than one page manifestly inspired by the conviction that science, properly so called, does not satiate the mind eager to know and to understand, and that therefore metaphysics holds a large and an authorized place in the activity of human thought. 3 BY THE AUTHOR. While I have retouched every thing in these essays which seemed to me, from an exclusively scientific point of view, susceptible of a higher degree of exactness and precision, I have, on the contrary, reserved with jealous care the literal tenor of all the passages expressly written under the influence of that conviction. And I have done so, not because of any peculiar value in those reflections, many of which are nothing more than a very imperfect representation of my way of seeing, but because those reflections were then made for the first time, with absolute spontaneousness, and without the slightest system or premeditation. The reader will thus be able to see how general ideas naturally emerge from deep and close contemplation of a group of various details, how forcible their unsought impression is; in other words, how surely thought, following orderly and regular evolution, without studied intention as without dogmatic aim, arrives at the loftiest philosophic certainties. The thinker who freely seeks for truth, continuously changes his position in his aspirations toward mind and the ideal. He deserts the regions of phenomena and concrete things, to rise to those of the absolute and eternal. The farther he withdraws from the former, which had at first absorbed all his attention, the more strikingly does the perspective in which he viewed them alter. At last, he discerns nothing else in them but spectres without substance, and delusive phantoms. And in the degree and extent of his drawing near to the eternal and the absolute, reality comes more surely within his ken, and he gains a more vivid feeling and a keener conception of it. He measures the distance he has traversed, and values the worth of his own contemplations by the fullness of lucid clearness which enlightens his faint view of the first principles of things, and by the depth of humble reverence with which he bows before the mysterious Power which created all! CONCARNEAU (FINISTERRE), May, 1878. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ______________________ PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR. ....................................... 3 THE CONSTITUTION OF MATTER, AND THE NEW DYNAMISM. ....... 6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE, AND LEIBNITZ'S IDEAS. ............ 33 THE GENERAL CONSTITUTION OF LIVING BEINGS. ................ 61 LIGHT AND LIFE ................................................ 97 HEAT AND LIFE. ............................................... 123 ELECTRICITY AND LIFE. ........................................ 147 ODORS AND LIFE. .............................................. 170 MEDICAMENTS AND LIFE. ...................................... 193 ANIMAL GRAFTS AND REGENERATIONS. ........................ 215 FERMENTS, FERMENTATIONS, AND LIFE. ........................ 239 GREAT EPIDEMICS-ASIATIC CHOLERA. .......................... 260 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF DEATH. ................................... 283 HEREDITY IN PHYSIOLOGY, MEDICINE & PSYCHOLOGY. .......... 308 INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES ............................ 340 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON THE "INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES" ....................................................... 342 THE CONSTITUTION OF MATTER, AND THE NEW DYNAMISM. WHATEVER empirics and utilitarians may say on the subject, there are certainties apart from the experimental method, and there is progress disconnected with brilliant or beneficent applications. The mind of man may put forth its power in laboring in harmony with reason, yet discover genuine truths in a sphere as far above that of laboratories and manufactures as their sphere is above the region of the coarsest arts. In a word, there is a temple of light that unfolds its portals to the soul neither through calculation nor rough experiment, which the soul nevertheless enters with authority and confidence, so long as it holds the consciousness of its sovereign prerogatives. When will professed scientists, better informed of the close connection between metaphysics and science, whence our modern knowledge of Nature has sprung, better taught in the necessary laws that govern the conflict of reason with the vast unknown, confess that there are realities beyond those they attain? When will science, instead of the arrogant indifference it assumes in presence of philosophy, admit the fertility beyond estimate of the latter ? It may be that the hour of this reconciliation, so much to be longed for, is less remote than many suppose; at least, every day brings us nearer to it. The spirit of Descartes cannot fail to arouse before long some genius mighty enough to revive among us a taste and respect for thought in all the departments of scientific activity. Deserted as high abstractions are for the moment, they are not, thank Heaven, so utterly abandoned as to deprive study of its ardor, and essays of their success, when these relate to the problem of the constitution of matter. 6 NATURE AND LIFE. In fact, this is a question which for several years past has occupied some among our own savants and thinkers, as completely as it has employed most of those of the rest of Europe, a question which bears witness with peculiar eloquence to this fact, that, if philosophers are forced to borrow largely from science, in its turn science can retain clearness, and elevation, and strength, only by drawing its inspiration from, and recognizing its inseparable connection with, the abstract consideration of hidden causes and of first principles. I. Matter is presented under a great variety of appearances. Let us consider it in its most complicated state, in the human body, for instance. In this, ordinary dissection distinguishes organs, which may be resolved into tissues. The disintegration of the latter yields anatomical elements from which direct analysis extracts a certain number of chemical principles. Here the anatomist's work ends. The chemist steps in, and recognizes in these principles definite kinds arising from the combination, in fixed and determinate proportions, of a certain number of principles that cannot be decomposed, substantially indestructible, to which he gives the name of simple bodies. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, calcium, iron, which thus set a limit to experimental analysis of the most complex bodies, are simple substances, that is to say, they are the original and irresolvable radicals of the tissue of things. We now know that matter is not indefinitely divisible, and that the smallest parts of the various simple substances existing in those that are naturally compound have not all the same dimensions, nor equal weights. Chemistry, by a course of analyses and measurements, has succeeded in determining the weights of atoms of the different elements, that is to say, taking as a unit an atom of the lightest element, hydrogen, in determining the weight of the atoms which are equivalent to this conventional
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