Hence, you can experiment on a living being as well as on an inanimate one; it is only a question of putting yourself in the desired conditions.

Follow the "All Files: HTTP" link in the "View the book" box to the left to find XML files that contain more metadata about the original images and the derived formats (OCR results, PDF etc.). For the physiologist, the exterior and interior conditions are purely chemical and physical, and this aids him in finding the laws which govern them easily. Nevertheless, if in practice Claude Bernard thrusts aside philosophical system, he recognizes the necessity of philosophy.

All sciences have necessarily commenced by being conjectural; there are still to-day in every science conjectural parts. In short, everything is summed up in this great fact: the experimental method in letters, as in the sciences, is in the way to explain the natural phenomena, both individual and social, of which metaphysics, until now, has given only irrational and supernatural explanations. Let us compare, for one instant, the work of the idealistic novelists to ours; and here this word idealistic refers to writers who cast aside observation and experiment, and base their works on the supernatural and the irrational, who admit, in a word, the power of mysterious forces outside of the determinism of the phenomena. If it is necessary to state the facts precisely on any one subject, it is on that of the impersonal character of the method.

Only the idea of a literature governed by science is doubtless … I am deaf to the voices of those doctors who demand that the causes of scarlatina and measles shall be experimentally shown to them, and who think by that to draw forth an argument against the use of the experimental method in medicine. Moreover, Claude Bernard himself has indicated the evolutions of the human mind: “The human mind,” he says, “at various periods of its progress has passed successively through feeling, reason, and experiment. Besides, in the slow conquest which we can make over this unknown which surrounds us, we humbly confess the ignorant condition in which we are. And it is no longer the ephemeral influence of a personal system of any kind, it is the result of the scientific evolution, of the study of man himself. “In the phenomenal relations,” he says, “such as nature offers them to us, there always reigns a complexity more or less great. 9782808005180 82 EBook Plurilingua Publishing The French novelist Émile Zola was one of the most celebrated writers of the 19th century and remains one of the most widely read, translated and studied authors in the world.

Go back once more to the example of All my literary life has been controlled by this conviction.

Zola went on to produce these 20 novels—most of which are of substantial length—at the rate of nearly one per year, completing the series in 1893.

This is why we have been led to apply to our work the experimental method as soon as this method had become the most powerful tool of investigation. Claude Bernard always assigns the rôle of pioneers to the philosophers. Indeed our great study is just there, in the reciprocal effect of society on the individual and the individual on society. Zola advocated a novel that resembled a scientific investigation into reality.

After having explained the experimental considerations common to living beings and to inanimate, Claude Bernard passes to the experimental considerations which belong specially to living beings. Paul Cézanne: Oil on canvas, 130 cm × 160 cm.

The experimental direction which the novel is taking to-day is a definite one. The day in which we gain control of the mechanism of this passion we can treat it and reduce it, or at least make it as inoffensive as possible.

The social circulus is identical with the vital circulus; in society, as in human beings, a solidarity exists which unites the different members and the different organisms in such a way that if one organ becomes rotten many others are tainted and a very complicated disease results. Not only is a writer’s genius to be found in the feeling and in the idea He is a man who realizes in a work of art an idea or a sentiment which is personal to him.” I absolutely reject this definition.

It is the characteristic of the experimental method to depend only on itself, as it carries within itself its criterion, which is experiment.

He who writes the best will not be the one who gallops madly among hypotheses, but the one who walks straight ahead in the midst of truths.

The observer in him gives the facts as he has observed them, suggests the point of departure, displays the solid earth on which his characters are to tread and the phenomena to develop. The end of all experimental method, the boundary of all scientific research, is then identical for living and for inanimate bodies; it consists in finding the relations which unite a phenomenon of any kind to its nearest cause, or, in other words, in determining the conditions necessary for the manifestation of this phenomenon. We have not exhausted our matter when we have depicted anger, avarice, and love; all nature and all of man belong to us, not only in their phenomena, but in the causes of these phenomena. In fact, the end the experimental method proposes is the same everywhere; it consists in connecting, by experiment, the natural phenomena to their conditions of existence or to their nearest causes.” This nearest cause, as it is called, is nothing more than the physical and material condition of the existence or manifestation of the phenomena.

Claude Bernard explains the defiance which we should assume toward theories thus: “You must have a strong faith and yet not believe; I will explain myself by saying that it is necessary in science to believe firmly in the principles and to doubt the formulas; in fact, on one side we are sure that determinism exists, but we are never certain of possessing it.

Though I have frequently written the same words and given the same advice, I will repeat them here: “The experimental method alone can bring the novel out of the atmosphere of lies and errors in which it is plunged. Man is not alone; he lives in society, in a social condition; and consequently, for us novelists, this social condition unceasingly modifies the phenomena.