“_It is easy_ (says M. GORTER) _to diminish the vital forces, but we have hardly any thing capable to repair them_[103].” This may easily be conceived, on reflecting, that aliments and remedies are nothing but the instruments of which Nature makes use to support itself, to repair her losses, and to remedy the disorders which happen to the body. And what is Nature? _The aggregate of the forces of the body harmoniously distributed._ It is the vital force respectively distributed into the different parts. When those forces are exhausted, Nature it is that consequently fails; she is the working architect that no longer executes her functions; furnish her with materials, as long as you please, she is in no condition to employ them. You may bury an architect, with all his building, under stone, wood, and mortar, without an inch of a wall being thereby repaired. Just so it is with diseases dependent on the destruction of the vital forces: the aliments repair nothing, the remedies operate nothing. I have seen stomachs so weakened, that aliments received from it no more preparation than in a vessel of wood: sometimes they take place in it according to the laws of their specific gravities, and when, at length, a new ingestion has, by its weight, irritated the stomach, they have been known, on a slight effort, to come away, successively, clearly separate one from another. At other times, through a long stay in the stomach, they corrupt in it, and are vomited up just as if they had been suffered to putrify in a vessel of silver or porcelain. What good can be hoped from aliments of this sort? The exhaustion of strength is not, indeed, so considerable in all: there are some in whom the vital forces are only weakened without being totally destroyed; for these there remains some resource in aliments, and even in remedies. What remains unperished of Nature draws some benefit from aliments: as to the remedies, they are to be sought for among those which have been observed to be fittest for re-animating that principle of the vital action which is verging to extinction: these are the adventitious aids, with which the architect is to be enabled to work at his task at the least expence possible of the strength that is left him: sometimes, too, they serve, as a spur to a weak horse, that may oblige him to make an effort to get out of a plunge in a slough; but what expertness, what prudence are not required, to be able at one cast of the eye, to judge comparatively the depth of the slough, and the strength of the animal? If the attempt is beyond his strength, that spur will, it is true, oblige him to make an effort; but if that effort is not sufficient to disengage him, and bring him into the good road again, it will only serve to totally exhaust him.