It is well known how the spiritualists tried to capture Pasteur,
because his theories, denying spontaneous generation, seemed to them
his consecration of the old dogma of a Creator. Pasteur never professed
such ideas; he limited himself to pursuing brilliantly his profession
as a scientist. It was not without a feeling of sadness that, pestered
by the admiration of a too pious gentry, he wrote to Sainte-Beuve,
I believe: "Let us continue our labors, without giving heed to the
philosophic or religious deductions that may be drawn from them."
Well, here is that same gentry trying, very maladroitly moreover, to
turn to their profit the results of a new scientific theory which is
beginning to make a stir in the world,--the law of vital constancy.
M. Dastre expounded it the other day at the solemn session of the
Institute and demonstrated its supreme importance. If one is eager
to keep abreast of intellectual novelties, one should possess some
notion of this recent scientific theory; just as one would blush not
to possess any notion of Darwin's labors and the theory of evolution,
which has now become a part of general culture.
Man is the product of an evolution the origin of which is
contemporaneous with the very origins of the world. He has as ancestors
not only men, but reckons in his genealogy all manner of animal
species. His descent from the monkey through the medium of a semi-human
form that is still little known, is today authenticated. The monkey,
like all other mammals and also the marsupials (kangaroo, opossum) is
a transformation of a reptile; the reptiles, to continue, were born
of fishes, who are the first vertebrates to appear, and the fishes in
turn descend from the annelides, humble little marine animals. But let
us not go any farther back than the fishes, for, in this species we
possess a certainty that may be daily demonstrated. At a certain stage
of its development the human embryo has the chief characteristics of a
fish. All of us were, at a certain moment of our unborn life, fishes;
this is as certain as the most easily verified scientific fact. From
this piece of evidence, and a hundred others, it has been possible to
draw up this aphorism, which unites the evolution of the individual to
general evolution: "Every individual, in his embryonic development,
goes through the same phases through which the evolution of his species
has gone in traversing the ages."
This monumental discovery of the transformation of species is, as
we know, due almost entirely to Darwin. It is he who propounded
and demonstrated the principle of evolution. But if, in his so
abundant books, he explained the _how_, he did not discover the _why_.
He registered facts, but did not show why these facts should have
been absolutely necessary. It is this gap which the theories of M.
Quinton now fill, at the same time confirming in a brilliant manner
the selfsame principles of Darwinism, evolutionism and transform-ism.
Before M. Quinton, one might, strictly speaking, with a semblance
of good faith, contest _Darwin's conclusions: henceforth, it is
impossible_: the facts are interconnected; we know their necessary,
implacable cause. Thanks to M. Quinton, evolutionism should rather be
termed _revolutionism_.
There are in this theory, two things to consider: life itself, and
the environment amid which it develops. Life is a fixed phenomenon.
It began in a marine milieu, at the very beginnings of the world, and
it tends constantly to preserve, through all the transformations of a
terrestrial milieu, the original conditions of its appearance. As a
consequence, the most highly developed animals, the superior animals,
among which man takes first place, are those which have been able to
preserve in the interior of their bodies, in the form of blood, a
vital milieu almost identical with the original marine milieu,--the
environment in which life was born: in fact, the degree of saltness in
our blood represents the saltness of the sea at the moment life made
its appearance, and, moreover, our internal temperature represents the
mean temperature of the globe at the moment our species was born.
The terrestrial milieu is unstable. Its heat has constantly diminished.
Formerly, in the most remote epochs, the vicinity of the poles, now an
ice-covered and inaccessible extent, had a climate hotter than that
of the tropics. Life was born amid this tropical environment, at the
bottom of an ocean that had a far higher temperature than the Caribbean
sea or the sea of Java. Nevertheless the poles grew colder and all
the other parts of the world as well. Then animal life found itself
faced with this alternative: either to accept the new conditions of the
milieu, or to rebel against these conditions,--struggle and maintain
internally despite the external temperature, the high temperature of
its origin.
That is a solemn moment in the drama of the world. What is to happen?
If the new conditions are accepted, it spells fatal decline. If they
are repulsed, it means a magnificent future development. Almost all
animal life submitted: it is today represented by the lowest class of
living creatures: the invertebrates. A single representative of the
animal world revolted, made a prodigious effort, entered into strife
with the hostile milieu and dominated it: the vertebrate. Thus life, in
its superior aspects, affirmed itself from the very earliest times as
an insurrection.
M. Quinton, says: "The vertebrate stands forth as marked by a
particular character, which distinguishes him from the rest of the
animal kingdom, giving him a position apart, above. While the balance
of the animal kingdom accepts, or rather undergoes, in the face of the
progressive shrinking of the seas and the cooling of the globe, the
new conditions that have come about, and to which it can yield only
at the cost of intense suffering, the vertebrates give evidence of a
special power; they refuse to accept the conditions and confronted by
hostile circumstances maintain the sole conditions favorable to their
existence.... They are not, then, like the invertebrates, the passive
toys of circumstances that dominate them, but, in part, the masters of
the fundamental conditions necessary to their welfare. In the midst of
the physical world that surrounds him, ignores him and oppresses him,
man is not the _sole insurgent_, the only animal in revolt against the
natural conditions, the only one tending to found, in an instable,
hostile medium, the fixed elements of a superior life. The simple
fish, the simple mammal ... hold the essential physical laws in check.
When man attacks the natural forces that surround him, in order to
dominate the hostile elements in them, he first participates of the
genius of the vertebrate."
I have purposely underscored the words _sole insurgent_. These words,
in fact, indicate the orientation of our efforts the moment we attempt
to apply the biological principles enunciated by M. Quinton to the
social domain. Far from teaching stagnation, resignation, acceptation,
he counsels on the contrary, if one understands him, revolt against
all that bars the progress of life and the maintenance of its highest
conditions of power and intensity. These ideas are related to the basic
ideas of Nietzsche's philosophy: we must grow or succumb. It is the
same with individuals and persons as with the animal species: those who
accept the conditions provided by their traditional environment, those
who do not react, are condemned to decadence: they are invertebrates.
The traits of a superior organism, on the contrary, are reaction
through deep, continued evolution, or by a brusk revolution against the
mediocrity of the milieu which tends to dominate and reduce it.
In certain places it is freely asserted that the peoples of the future
are the wise peoples slumbering in the tradition of a political
order, of a religious order, or a moral order: those peoples, on the
contrary, are in their decline. But there is something worse: there are
political--or social groups that dream, not of attaining to the genius
of the vertebrate, which spells perpetual combat against the hostility
of the environment, but of becoming once again invertebrates, and of
falling asleep gently in the lap of ancient traditions.
There is, according to the theories of M. Quinton, in the social realm
as in the biological, a fixed point, and one that must remain fixed
unless decline is to set in, and that is life; but we must not confuse
life with the environment in which it evolves. Life is constant and the
milieu is variable. The most diverse political and social institutions
have been successively imagined by man to assure, according to the
needs of the moment, the development of his life. And as, in the course
of time, they have appeared to him insufficient, he has rejected them
to imagine others more in confirmity with his requirements: and thus
social progress appears as a necessity, in the same way that anatomical
progress has transformed an ocean worm into a fish and the fish into a
mammal or a bird. In the two cases there is a certain end sought. It is
for man to create for himself the social conditions that will permit
his life to maintain its loftiest aims.
When the social conditions that the old regime brought about in France
appeared to men unsuited any longer to the maintenance of their life,
they acted like good vertebrates,--they revolted. Civilization is
nothing but a succession of insurrections, now against the hostility
of physical forces,--especially against the cold,--now against social
forces, which, after a period of usefulness, tend almost always to
evolve in the direction of parasitism.