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Chapter 6

The Distinction Between Organic Life And Animal Life
Made By Some Physiologists

84. Naturalists must apply themselves, therefore, to determining which signs definitely indicate sensation and which do not. Only this criterion will allow us to classify experimentally as animal or non-animal the different beings produced by nature.

85. In the meantime it seems certain as a result of what we have noted that neither the force of contractility or irritability alone, nor elasticity, extensibility, swelling and similar forces in which some scientists think they have observed what resembles spontaneous movement, can be claimed as a definite sign of sensitivity. Thus, without more definite signs of feeling, a body should not be classified among animals simply because it indicates these forces.

86. Some may wish to apply the name `life' to these kinds of mobility, although we cannot presume that sensation accompanies it. But that is their business; I do not want to discuss words. It is sufficient if we understand that the kind of life we predicate of any organism whatsoever that is capable of moving itself according to certain laws or under certain stimuli, is far removed from, and of an entirely different nature to, the life present in feeling. This life is subjective, independent of any external observation and located totally in a principle that feels, manifesting itself solely in its external effects.

87. Moreover the ideas of physiologists concerning animality and life are extremely confused, for the reason, I believe, that they take little account of psychological studies.(44)

Bichat, at the beginning of his work on life and death, distinguishes two lives, organic and animal. He says: `One of these lives is common to vegetables and animals simultaneously, while the other is the special heritage of animals.'(45) It is clear that life common to vegetables can never consist in feeling, since vegetables as such do not have feeling. Because this author considers life solely in its phenomena and external effects, he considers it in organs and movements, without grasping its internal, subjective and essential characteristic. This characteristic is feeling, which cannot be observed under the microscope or cut with a knife. Consequently, he attributes sensitivity to both organic life (such as vegetables) and animal life. He combines true sensitivity with visible, palpable characteristics without being aware that sensitivity is neither seen nor touched, nor subject to external experience in the way that corporeal qualities are.

88. He says: `In organic life, sensitivity is the faculty of receiving an impression, but in animal life it is the faculty of receiving an impression and transmitting it to a common centre.'(46) In these definitions we see two sensitivities indicating impressions and movements. But impressions and movements are external things. The principal thing, the core, that is, feeling, which alone constitutes sensitivity, is missing. In fact, the most insensitive object, whether soft or hard, can receive an impression, which, depending on the thing's composition, will propagate itself to a material centre by vibrations or some means of movement. But if the thing has no sense-capacity, no feeling of any kind is aroused in it; neither the impression nor communication to a centre constitute sensitivity. Sensitivity is something essentially different from all such external phenomena.

89. Bichat adds: `The stomach is sensitive to the presence of food and the heart to blood. - The amount of sensibility in the excretory channels is analogous to that of the fluids flowing through them but disproportionate to that of other fluids to which it does not allow entry.'(47)

These words clearly indicate what led him and many other physiologists into error. They noticed that the stomach, heart and excretory orifices perform their functions in the presence respectively of food, blood and certain fluids, but not in the presence of other fluids. They concluded that all these parts have their own sensitivity. But this is a misuse of words, and I cannot really think that these scientists mean true sensations; they must mean movements similar to those seen in beings that have feeling. These beings flee what causes them pain or distress, seeking out what gives pleasant sensations.(48) The word sensitivity is grossly misused if such effects and organic sensitivity are interpreted by these scientists simply as a kind of affinity or attraction which enables the parts to unite with certain bodies but not with others. If, however, they mean a real sensitivity, we can only repeat that this is inadmissible if there are no clear indications of the presence of feeling.

Although the effects noted are not sufficient proof of feeling, movement away from what is unpleasant to what is pleasant can manifest some capacity, as it were, to choose and discern, because movement could be referred to a cause entirely lacking in sense, for example, to a particular kind of molecular attraction, or to animal magnetism, or any other unknown cause which up to the present these physiologists understand as material. It may be claimed that the orifices of the milk channels, for example, have real feeling solely because we observe that the open orifices in the intestines attract the chyle alone and reject all other fluids mixed with it. It is not my intention to discuss the value of this hypothesis (which would require us to explain all phenomena of chemical affinity by means of feeling in the smallest particles). The question is: why should this kind of sensitivity be called organic, not animal like every other feeling? If real feeling can exist without real animality, we need to know how this is possible.

90. In other places, the author under discussion (and nearly all modern writers on physiology) seems to deny any feeling to organic sensitivity, positing feeling as the distinguishing characteristic of animals: `All the phenomena of digestion, circulation, secretion, respiration, absorption, nutrition, etc. belong to this organic sensitivity . . . It is common to plants and animals: zoophytes have it equally with the most perfectly organised quadrupeds. Sensations' (we should note this) `and perception derive from it, as do the pain and pleasure which modify it . . . Furthermore, this sensitivity cannot be considered as an attribute of vegetables, to which it does not belong.'(49)

Accordingly every sensation and perception, pleasure and pain pertains to animal sensitivity, while organic sensitivity is simply sensitivity that feels nothing, like the sensitivity of a vegetable!
After our author (and a large number of physiologists with him) has thus described these supposed animal and organic sensitivities, he compares them and finds no essential difference between them. The only difference, he claims, is one of degree: animal sensitivity is merely a greater quantity of organic sensitivity! This statement may appear unbelievable to a thinking person, but it is found in the authors we are discussing. Bichat says:

The sensitivity proper to vegetables, therefore, which according to Bichat have neither sensations nor pleasure nor pain, is the sensitivity proper to animals, varying only in quantity. Such an absurdity is the inevitable conclusion of considering in sensitivity only the external impression and the movements sensitivity produces. Feeling, which alone appertains to sensitivity, is lost to view. The impression, the movements it causes, the systems of these movements (called functions), all fall equally under external observation, and therefore belong to the same species; their visible differences are simply accidental, variations of quantity and degree, but not of essence. I repeat, however, that sensitivity is not present in external things visible to the eye; sensitivity is something completely hidden, invisible, and situated solely in the feeling subject, not in any piece of matter.

91. The inaccuracy of the physiologists' language will become clearer if we consider the proofs Bichat uses to establish that organic and animal sensitivity differ only in degree. All of his proofs are drawn from the observation that certain parts of the body which seem without sensitivity exhibit a feeling of pain when subject to determined stimuli. He concludes: `It is evident that the difference established earlier in the sense-faculty concerns the various modifications of which the nature is susceptible, not the nature itself, which is the same throughout. This faculty is common to all the organs penetrated by it, because none of them can be said to lack feeling'; consequently, `the sensitivity, distributed in a certain quantity in one organ, is animal, but in a lesser quantity is organic.'(51)

First, we must differentiate between a question of physiology and a question of logic and psychology, because only the latter concerns us in this study. Physiology asks `which parts of the human body have feeling, and under what conditions do they give us a sensation to which we do not advert'. This question of fact is not our concern here; we are happy to let the physiolo-gists dispute whether the nerves alone or other parts have feeling [App., no. 3].

Bichat says that the `organic sensitivity' he is discussing is in fact animal sensitivity, but in a lesser quantity. We want to know if this lesser quantity or, if preferred, least quantity, of animal sensitivity has any feeling at all. It would seem it has, because he says: `The sensitivity is changing all the time from animal to organic and vice versa according to the increase or diminution of its intension.' But if this is true, how can he say that animal sensitivity is suddenly extinguished at the moment of violent death, while organic sensitivity persists for an unspecified time? His proof is: `The lymphatics continue to absorb, the muscles still feel the point of a pin, nails and hair grow and feel the fluids they draw from the skin, etc.'(52) But when animal sensitivity has been annihilated by death, are we dealing with real feeling or with the function of organs entirely devoid of feeling? If even the least quantity of feeling is present, should we not say that the animal is still alive, or at least that living animality remains? And if feeling is no longer present but only contractility, tonicity, elasticity, affinity and other forces that are considered entirely devoid of feeling and continue their functions for a period of time, how can we say that this organic force, whatever it is, differs only in degree and quantity from the animal sensitivity now said to be annihilated? In other words, although there are degrees of lesser or greater movement in one direction or another, the difference between feeling and not feeling is in no way a matter of degree. Granted that for some time after death we can find functions in vegetables and animal bodies that resemble the functions of an animate body, the difference between life and death, between vegetable and animal, is not a matter of degree.

Notes

(44) It is a fact that materialism, although rejected today by all sciences, is still entrenched in medicine. Psychological and philosophical studies should be part of medical science.

(45) P. 1, art. 1, §1.

(46) P. 1, art. 7, §3.

(47) P. 1, art. 7, §3 and 4.

(48) Bichat tries to distinguish his organic sensitivity from contractility, but this puts him in the embarrassing position of having to explain organic sensitivity by some hidden, entirely hypothetical cause which contracts the organ by means of an impression. He says: `All the authors maintain that irritability indicates simultaneously a sensation aroused in an organ on contact with a body, and the contraction of the organ as it reacts on the body itself' (P. 1, art. 7, §5).

(49) P. 1, art. 7, §3.

(50) Ibid.

(51) Ibid.

(52) Ibid.