L’ombre, sommeillant dans les creux des toitures, multipliait la forêt des piliers, élargissait à l’infini les nervures délicates, les galeries découpées, les persiennes transparentes ; et c’était, au-dessus de la ville, jusqu’au fond des ténèbres, toute une végétation, toute une floraison, monstrueux épanouissement de métal, dont les tiges qui montaient en fusée, les branches qui se tordaient et se nouaient, couvraient un monde avec les légèretés de feuillage d’une futaie séculaire. Elsewhere Claude Bernard confesses how difficult it is to apply the experimental method to living beings. “The experimental method is the scientific method which proclaims the liberty of thought. From this we shall see that we can act upon the social conditions, in acting upon the phenomena of which we have made ourselves master in man.
Sous cette radieuse matinée, la ville, jaune de soleil, semblait un champ d’épis mûrs ; et l’immense tableau avait une simplicité, deux tons seulement, le bleu pâle de l’air et le reflet doré des toits. If it were necessary for me to give a comparison which would explain my sentiments on the science of life, I should say that it is a superb salon, flooded with light, which you can only reach by passing through a long and nauseating kitchen.”
Let us see first what Claude Bernard says about medicine: “Certain doctors contend that medicine can only be conjectural, and they conclude that a doctor is an artist, who ought to make up for the indeterminism in particular cases by his genius and his personal tact. I insist upon the word which I have employed, that of experimental novelists as applied to naturalistic novelists. It shows clearly the rôle that the personality of the novelist should play, apart from the style.
Some day the physiologist will explain to us the mechanism of the thoughts and the passions; we shall know how the individual machinery of each man works; how he thinks, how he loves, how he goes from reason to passion and folly; but these phenomena, resulting as they do from the mechanism of the organs, acting under the influence of an interior condition, are not produced in isolation or in the bare void. We must be immovable on the principles of experimental science (determinism), and yet not believe in the theories absolutely.” I will quote the following passage, in which he announces the end of systems: “Experimental medicine is not a new system of medicine, but, on the contrary, the negation of all systems. I, 621 ; 20)Et Florent regardait les grandes Halles sortir de l’ombre, sortir du rêve, où il les avait vues, allongeant à l’infini leurs palais à jour. Then the experimentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for. In fact, the coming of experimental medicine will result in dispersing from science all individual views, to replace them by impersonal and general theories, which will be, as in other sciences, but a regular co-ordination deduced from the facts furnished by experiment.” An experiment, even the most simple, is always based on an idea, itself born of an observation. All things hang together; it is necessary to start from the determinism of inanimate bodies in order to arrive at the determinism of living beings; and since savants like Claude Bernard demonstrate now that fixed laws govern the human body, we can easily proclaim, without fear of being mistaken, the hour in which the laws of thought and passion will be formulated in their turn. Among his early books was It is a little complicated, it is true, and Claude Bernard is led on to say: “When all this passes into the brain of a savant who has given himself up to the study of a science as complicated as medicine still is, then there is such an entanglement between the result of observation and what belongs to experiment that it will be impossible and, besides, useless to try to analyze, in their inextricable One page of “L’Introduction” struck me as being very forcible, that in which the author speaks of the vital “circulus.” “The muscular and nervous organs preserve the activity of the organs which make the blood; but the blood, in its turn, nourishes the organs which produce it.
These discouraging objections and denials generally come from systematic or lazy minds, those who prefer to rest on their systems or to sleep in darkness instead of making an effort to become enlightened. IV, 235 ; 230)Questioned by Sandoz, Claude himself discovers the obscure fundament of his research:... il ne voulait pas avouer la vraie raison, une idée à lui, si peu claire, qu’il n’aurait pu la dire avec netteté, le tourment d’un symbolisme secret, ce vieux regain du romantisme qui lui faisait incarner dans cette nudité la chair même de Paris, la ville nue et passionnée, resplendissante d’une beauté de femme. To be more clear, I think it would be better to give a brief To be the master of good and evil, to regulate life, to regulate society, to solve in time all the problems of socialism, above all, to give justice a solid foundation by solving through experiment the questions of criminality––is not this being the most useful and the most moral workers in the human workshop? was approached by a narrow path. Claude Bernard in each page of “L’Introduction” comes back to this idea. When it has been proved that the body of man is a machine, whose machinery can be taken apart and put together again at the will of the experimenter, then we can pass to the passionate and intellectual acts of man. Il était à la pointe Saint-Eustache.Florent levait les yeux, regardait la haute voûte, dont les boiseries intérieures luisaient, entre les dentelles noires des charpentes de fonte.