11. There is a distinction between inorganic and organic which may fitly be called radical: it lies at the root of the phenomena, and must be accepted as an ultimate fact, although the synthesis on which it depends is analytically reducible to a complication of more primitive conditions. It has been already indicated in § 5. All organisms above the very simplest are syntheses Of three terms: Structure, Aliment, and Instrument. Crystals, like all other anorganisms have structure, and in a certain sense they may be said to grow (_Mineralia crescunt_), though the growth is by _increase_ and not by _modification_:[2] the motherlye, which is the food of the crystal, is never brought to the crystal, nor prepared for it, by any instrumental agency of the crystal. Organisms are exclusively instrumental; the organ is an instrument. The structural integrity of an organism is thus preserved through an alimentation which is effected through special instruments. Nothing like this is visible in anorganisms. The increase of a crystal is further distinguishable from the growth of an organism, in the fact Of its being simple accretion without development; and the structure of the crystal is distinguishable from that of an organism in the fact that its integrity is preserved by the _exclusion_ of all molecular change, and not by the simultaneous changes of molecular decomposition and recomposition. Inorganic substances are sometimes as unstable as organic, sometimes even more unstable; but their instability is the source of their structural destruction--they change into other species; whereas the instability of _organized_ substances (_not_ of organic) is the source of their structural integrity: the tissue is renovated, and its renovation is a consequence of its waste. 12. But while the distinction is thus radical, when we view the organism from the _real_--that is, from the synthetic point of view--we must also urge the validity of the analytical point of view, which seizes on the conditions here complicated in a special group, and declares these conditions to be severally recognizable equally in anorganisms and in organisms. All the fundamental properties of Matter are recognizable in organized Matter. The elementary substances and forces familiar to physicists and chemists are the materials of the biologist; nor has there been found a single organic substance, however special, that is not reducible to inorganic elements. We see, then, that organized Matter is only a special combination of that which in _other_ combinations presents chemical and physical phenomena; and we are prepared to find Chemistry and Physics indispensable aids in our analysis of organic phenomena. Aids, but only aids; indispensable, but insufficient.