I
I
I
CREATIVE
EVOLUTION
BY
HENRI BERGSON
MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTF.
fROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY
ARTHUR MITCHELL, PH.D.
MACMILLAN AND CO, LIMITED
ST. MARTIN S STREET, LONDON
1922
COPYRIGHT
First Petition March IQII
Reprinted November 1911, 1912, 1913
1914, 1919, 192) J 9 22
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
TRANSLATOR S NOTE
IN the writing of this English translation of Professor
Bergson s most important work, I was helped by the
friendly interest of Professor William James, to whom
I owe the illumination of much that was dark to me
as well as the happy rendering of certain words and
phrases for which an English equivalent was difficult
to find. His sympathetic appreciation of Professor
Bergson s thought is well known, and he has expressed
his admiration for it in one of the chapters of A Plural
istic Universe. It was his intention, had he lived to
see the completion of this translation, himself to intro
duce it to English readers in a prefatory note.
I wish to thank my friend, Dr. George Clarke Cox,
for many valuable suggestions.
I have endeavoured to follow the text as closely as
possible, and at the same time to preserve the living
union of diction and thought. Professor Bergson has
himself carefully revised the whole work. We both
of us wish to acknowledge the great assistance of Miss
Millicent Murby. She has kindly studied the trans
lation phrase by phrase, weighing each word, and her
revision has resulted in many improvements.
But above all we must express our acknowledgment
vi CREATIVE EVOLUTION
to Mr. H. Wildon Carr, the Honorary Secretary of
the Aristotelian Society of London, and the writer of
several studies of " Evolution Creatrice." l We asked
him to be kind enough to revise the proofs of our
work. He has done much more than revise them :
they have come from his hands with his personal
mark in many places. We cannot express all that
the present work owes to him.
ARTHUR MITCHELL.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
i Proceedings of t/ie. Aristotelian Society, vols. ix. and x., and Hibbcrt
Jour mil for July 1910.
CONTENTS
PAR*
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE MECHANISM AND TELEOLOGY
Of duration in general Unorganized bodies and abstract time
Organized bodies and real duration Individuality and the
process of growing old . . . . i
Of transformism and the different ways of interpreting it Radical
mechanism and real duration : the relation of biology to
physics and chemistry Radical finalism and real duration :
the relation of biology to philosophy . . . .24
The quest of a criterion Examination of the various theories with
regard to a particular example Darwin and insensible
variation De Vries and sudden variation Eimer and ortho
genesis Neo-Lamarckism and the hereditability of acquired
characters ..... 56
Result of the inquiry The vital impetus ... 89
CHAPTER II
THE DIVERGENT DIRECTIONS OF THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE
TORPOR, INTELLIGENCE, INSTINCT
General idea of the evolutionary process Growth Divergent
and complementary tendencies The meaning of progress and
of adaptation . . 103
The relation of the animal to the plant General tendency of
animal life The development of animal life . . . 1 1 1
The main directions of the evolution of life : torpor, intelligence,
instinct . .... 142
The nature of the intellect . . . . 160
The nature of instinct ... . . 174
Life and consciousness The apparent place of man in nature . 186
vii
viii CREATIVE EVOLUTION
CHAPTER III
ON THE MEANING OF LIFE THE ORDER OF NATURE
AND THE FORM OF INTELLIGENCE
PAG I
Relation of the problem of" life to the problem of knowledge The
method of philosophy Apparent vicious circle of the method
proposed Real vicious circle of the opposite method . . 196
Simultaneous genesis of matter and intelligence Geometry in
herent in matter Geometrical tendency of the intellect
Geometry and deduction Geometry and induction Physical
laws ..... .210
Sketch of a theory of knowledge based on the analysis of the idea
of Disorder Two opposed forms of order : the problem of
genera and the problem of laics The idea of " disorder " an
oscillation of the intellect between the two kinds of order . 232
Creation and evolution Ideal genesis of matter The origin and
function of life The essential and the accidental in the vital
process and in the evolutionary movement Mankind The
life of the body and the life of the spirit . . 249
CHAPTER IV
THE ClNEMATOGRAPHICAI, MECHANISM OF THOUGHT AND THE
MECHANISTIC ILLUSION A GLANCE AT THE HISTORY OF
SYSTEMS REAL BECOMING AND FALSE EVOLUTIONISM
Sketch of a criticism of philosophical t-vstems, based on the analysis
of the idea of Immutability and of the idea of " Nothing "-
Relation of metaphysical problems to the idea of "Nothing"
Real meaning of this idea . . . 287
Form and Becoming . .314
The philosophy of Forms and its conception of Becoming Plato
and Aristotle The natural trend of the intellect . . 331
Becoming in modern science : two views of Time . . . 347
The metaphysical interpretation of modern science : Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibniz . . . 365
The Criticism of Kant ...... 376
The evolutionism of Spencer . . . 384
INDEX 493
INTRODUCTION
THE history of the evolution of life, incomplete as it
yet is, already reveals to us how the intellect has been
formed, by an uninterrupted progress, along a line which
ascends through the vertebrate series up to man. It
shows us in the faculty of understanding an appendage
of the faculty of acting, a more and more precise, more
and more complex and supple adaptation of the con
sciousness of living beings to the conditions of exist
ence that are made for them. Hence should result
this consequence that our intellect, in the narrow
sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect
fitting of our body to its environment, to represent the
relations of external things among themselves in
short, to think matter. Such will indeed be one of
the conclusions of the present essay. We shall see
that the human intellect feels at home among inanimate
objects, more especially among solids, where our action
finds its fulcrum and our industry its tools ; that our
concepts have been formed on the model of solids ;
that our logic is, pre-eminently, the logic of solids ;
that, consequently, our intellect triumphs in geometry,
wherein is revealed the kinship of logical thought with
unorganized matter, and where the intellect has only
to follow its natural movement, after the lightest
possible contact with experience, in order to go from
x CREATIVE EVOLUTION
discovery to discovery, sure that experience is following
behind it and will justify it invariably.
But from this it must also follow that our thought,
in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting
the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolu
tionary movement. Created by life, in definite circum
stances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace
life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect ?
Deposited by the evolutionary movement in the course
of its way, how can it be applied to the evolutionary
movement itself? As well contend that the part is
equal to the whole, that the effect can reabsorb its
cause, or that the pebble left on the beach displays
the form of the wave that brought it there. In fact,
we do indeed feel that not one of the categories of
our thought unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality,
intelligent finality, etc. applies exactly to the things of
life : who can say where individuality begins and ends,
whether the living being is one or many, whether it
is the cells which associate themselves into the
organism or the organism which dissociates itself into
cells ? In vain we force the living into this or that one
O
of our moulds. All the moulds crack. They are
too narrow, above all too rigid, for what we try to put
into them. Our reasoning, so sure of itself among
things inert, feels ill at ease on this new ground. It
would be difficult to cite a biological discovery due
to pure reasoning. And most often, when experience
has finally shown us how life goes to work to obtain a
certain result, we find its way of working is just that
of which we should never have thought.
Yet evolutionist philosophy does not hesitate to
extend to the things of life the same methods of
explanation which have succeeded in the case of un-
INTRODUCTION xi
organized matter. It begins by showing us in the
intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame, perhaps
accidental, which lights up the coming and going of
living beings in the narrow passage open to their action ;
and lo ! forgetting what it has just told us, it makes of
this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun which can
illuminate the world. Boldly it proceeds, with the
powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal recon
struction of all things, even of life. True, it hurtles in
its course against such formidable difficulties, it sees
its logic end in such strange contradictions, that it very
speedily renounces its first ambition. " It is no longer
reality itself," it says, " that it will reconstruct, but only
an imitation of the real, or rather a symbolical image ;
the essence of things escapes us, and will escape us
always ; we move among relations ; the absolute is not
in our province ; we are brought to a stand before
the Unknowable." But for the human intellect, after
too much pride, this is really an excess of humility.
If the intellectual form of the living being has been
gradually modelled on the reciprocal actions and
reactions of certain bodies and their material environ
ment, how should it not reveal to us something of
the very essence of which these bodies are made ?
Action cannot move in the unreal. A mind born
to speculate or to dream, I admit, might remain
outside reality, might deform or transform the real,
perhaps even create it, as we create the figures of
men and animals that our imagination cuts out of
the passing cloud. But an intellect bent upon the act
to be performed and the reaction to follow, feeling its
object so as to get its mobile impression at every instant,
is an intellect that touches something of the absolute.
Would the idea ever have occurred to us to doubt
xii CREATIVE EVOLUTION
this absolute value of our knowledge if philosophy
had not shown us what contradictions our speculation
meets, what dead-locks it ends in ? But these diffi
culties and contradictions all arise from trying to apply
the usual forms of our thought to objects with which
our industry has nothing to do, and for which, therefore,
our moulds are not made. Intellectual knowledge, in
so far as it relates to a certain aspect of inert matter,
ought, on the contrary, to give us a faithful imprint of
it, having been stereotyped on this particular object.
It becomes relative only if it claims, such as it is, to
present to us life that is to say, the maker of the
stereotype-plate.
Must we then give up fathoming the depths of life ?
Must we keep to that mechanistic idea of it which the
understanding will always give us an idea necessarily
artificial and symbolical, since it makes the total
activity of life shrink to the form of a certain human
activity which is only a partial and local manifestation
of life, a result or by-product of the vital process ? We
should have to do so, indeed, if life had employed all
the psychical potentialities it possesses in producing pure
understandings that is to say, in making geometricians.
But the line of evolution that ends in man is not the
only one. On other paths, divergent from it, other
forms of consciousness have been developed, which
have not been able to free themselves from external
constraints or to regain control over themselves, as
the human intellect has done, but which, none the less,
also express something that is immanent and essential
in the evolutionary movement. Suppose these other
forms of consciousness brought together and amalga
mated with intellect : would not the result be a
INTRODUCTION xiii
consciousness as wide as life ? And such a conscious
ness, turning around suddenly against the push of life
which it feels behind, would have a vision of life
complete would it not? even though the vision
were fleeting.
It will be said that, even so, we do not transcend
our intellect, for it is still with our intellect, and
through our intellect, that we see the other forms of
consciousness. And this would be right if we were
pure intellects, if there did not remain, around our
conceptual and logical thought, a vague nebulosity,
made of the very substance out of which has been
formed the luminous nucleus that we call the intellect.
Therein reside certain powers that are complementary
to the understanding, powers of which we have only
an indistinct feeling when we remain shut up in our
selves, but which will become clear and distinct when
they perceive themselves at work, so to speak, in the
evolution of nature. They will thus learn what sort
of effort they must make to be intensified and expanded
in the very direction of life.
This amounts to saying that theory of knowledge
and theory of life seem to us inseparable. A theory
of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of know
ledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts
which the understanding puts at its disposal : it can
but enclose the facts, willing or not, in pre-existing
frames which it regards as ultimate. It thus obtains
a symbolism which is convenient, perhaps even
necessary to positive science, but not a direct vision of
its object. On the other hand, a theory of knowledge
which does not replace the intellect in the general
evolution of life will teach us neither how the frames
xiv CREATIVE EVOLUTION
of knowledge have been constructed nor how we
can enlarge or go beyond them. It is necessary that
these two inquiries, theory of knowledge and theory
of life, should join each other, and, by a circular
process, push each other on unceasingly.
Together, they may solve by a method more sure,
brought nearer to experience, the great problems that
philosophy poses. For, if they should succeed in
their common enterprise, they would show us the
formation of the intellect, and thereby the genesis of
that matter of which our intellect traces the general
configuration. They would dig to the very root of
nature and of mind. They would substitute for the
false evolutionism of Spencer which consists in cutting
up present reality, already evolved, into little bits
no less evolved, and then recomposing it with these
fragments., thus positing in advance everything that
is to be explained a true evolutionism, in which
reality would be followed in its generation and its
growth.
But a philosophy of this kind will not be made in a
day. Unlike the philosophical systems properly so
called, each of which was the individual work of a man
of genius and sprang up as a whole, to be taken or
left, it will only be built up by the collective and pro
gressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers
also, completing, correcting and improving one another.
So the present essay does not aim at resolving at once
the greatest problems. It simply desires to define the
method and to permit a glimpse, on some essential
points, of the possibility of its application.
Its plan is traced by the subject itself. In the
first chapter, we try on the evolutionary progress the
two ready-made garments that our understanding
CHAPTER I
THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE MECHANISM AND TELEOLOGY
THE existence of which we are most assured and which
we know best is unquestionably our own, for of
every other object we have notions which may be con
sidered external and superficial, whereas, of ourselves,
our perception is internal and profound. What, then,
do we find ? In this privileged case, what is the precise
meaning of the word " exist " ? Let us recall here
briefly the conclusions of an earlier work.
I find, first of all, that I pass from state to state. 1
am warm or cold, I am merry or sad, I work or I dc
nothing, I look at what is around me or I think of
something else. Sensations, feelings, volitions, ideas
such are the changes into which my existence is
divided and which colour it in turns. I change, then,
without ceasing. But this is not saying enough.
Change is far more radical than we are at first inclined
to suppose.
For I speak of each of my states as if it formed a
block and were a separate whole. I say indeed that I
change, but the change seems to me to reside in the
passage from one state to the next : of each state, taken
separately, I am apt to think that it remains the same
during all the time that it prevails. Nevertheless, a
slight effort of attention would reveal to me that there
* i B
2 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not under
going change every moment : if a mental state ceased
to vary, its duration would cease to flow. Let us take
the most stable of internal states, the visual perception
of a motionless external object. The object may remain
the same, I may look at it from the same side, at the
same angle, in the same light ; nevertheless the vision
I now have of it differs from that which I have just had,
even if only because the one is an instant older than
the other. My memory is there, which conveys some
thing of the past into the present. My mental state,
as it advances on the road of time, is continually
swelling with the duration which it accumulates : it
goes on increasing rolling upon itself, as a snowball
on the snow. Still more is this the case with states
more deeply internal, such as sensations, feelings,
desires, etc., which do not correspond, like a simple
visual perception, to an unvarying external object.
But it is expedient to disregard this uninterrupted
change, and to notice it only when it becomes sufficient
to impress a new attitude on the body, a new direction
on the attention. Then, and then only, we find that
our state has changed. The truth is that we change
without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing
but change.
This amounts to saying that there is no essential
difference between passing from one state to another
and persisting in the same state. If the state which
"remains the same" is more varied than we think, on
the other hand the passing from one state to another
resembles, more than we imagine, a single state being
prolonged ; the transition is continuous. But, just
because we close our eyes to the unceasing variation
of every psychical state, we are obliged, when the
, DURATION 3
change has become so considerable as to force itself
on our attention, to speak as if a new state were placed
alongside the previous one. Of this new state we
assume that it remains unvarying in its turn, and
so on endlessly. The apparent discontinuity of the
psychical life is then due to our attention being fixed
on it by a series of separate acts : actually there is
only a gentle slope ; but in following the broken
line of our acts of attention, we think we perceive
separate steps. True, our psychic life is full of the
unforeseen. A thousand incidents arise, which seem
to be cut off from those which precede them, and
to be disconnected from those which follow. Dis
continuous though they appear, however, in point of
fact they stand out against the continuity of a back
ground on which they are designed, and to which
indeed they owe the intervals that separate them ;
they are the beats of the drum which break forth here
and there in the symphony. Our attention fixes on
them because they interest it more, but each of them
is borne by the fluid mass of our whole psychical
existence. Each is only the best illuminated point of a
moving zone which comprises all that we feel or think
or will all, in short, that we are at any given moment.
It is this entire zone which in reality makes up our
state. Now, states thus defined cannot be regarded
as distinct elements. They continue each other in an
endless flow.
But, as our attention has distinguished and separated
them artificially, it is obliged next to reunite them by
an artificial bond. It imagines, therefore, a formless
egOy indifferent and unchangeable, on which it threads
the psychic states which it has set up as inde
pendent entities. Instead of a flux of fleeting shades
4 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP
merging into each other, it perceives distinct and,
so to speak, solid colours, set side by side like
the beads of a necklace ; it must perforce then
suppose a thread, also itself solid, to hold the beads
together. But if this colourless substratum is per
petually coloured by that which covers it, it is for
us, in its indeterminateness, as if it did not exist,
since we only perceive what is coloured, or, in other
words, psychic states. As a matter of fact, this sub
stratum has no reality ; it is merely a symbol intended
to recall unceasingly to our consciousness the artificial
character of the process by which the attention places
clean-cut states side by side, where actually there
is a continuity which unfolds. If our existence were
composed of separate states with an impassive ego
to unite them, for us there would be no duration.
For an ego which does not change does not endure^
and a psychic state which remains the same so long
as it is not replaced by the following state does not
endure either. Vain, therefore, is the attempt to range
such states beside each other on the ego supposed to
sustain them : never can these solids strung upon a solid
make up that duration which flows. What we actually
obtain in this way is an artificial imitation of the
internal life, a static equivalent which will lend itself
better to the requirements of logic and language, just
because we have eliminated from it the element of
real time. But, as regards the psychical life unfolding
beneath the symbols which conceal it, we readily per
ceive that time is just the stuff it is made of.
There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant nor
more substantial. For our duration is not merely one
instant replacing another ; if it were, there would never
be anything but the present no prolonging of the
i DURATION 5
past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration.
Duration is the continuous progress of the past which
gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.
And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is
no limit to its preservation. Memory, as we have tried
to prove, 1 is not a faculty of putting away recollections
in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There
is no register, no drawer ; there is not even, properly
speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently,
when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of
the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In
reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically.
In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant ;
all that we have felt, thought and willed from our
earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which
is about to join it, pressing against the portals of con
sciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral
mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the
unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit
beyond the threshold only that which can cast light
on the present situation or further the action now
being prepared in short, only that which can give
useful work. At the most, a few superfluous recollec
tions may succeed in smuggling themselves through
the half-open door. These memories, messengers
from the unconscious, remind us of what we are
dragging behind us unawares. But, even though we
may have no distinct idea of it, we feel vaguely that our
past remains present to us. What are we, in fact, what
is our character, if not the condensation of the history
that we have lived from our birth nay, even before
our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions ?
Doubtless we think with only a small part of our pastj
1 Mattire ft mSmoi*-e, Paris, 1896, chaps, ii. and iii.
6 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
but it is with our entire past, including the original
bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act. Our
past, then, as a whole, is made manifest to us in its
impulse ; it is felt in the form of tendency, although
a small part of it only is known in the form of idea.
From this survival of the past it follows that
consciousness cannot go through the same state twice.
The circumstances may still be the same, but they will
act no longer on the same person, since they find him
at a new moment of his history. Our personality,
which is being built up each instant with its accumulated
experience, changes without ceasing. By changing, it
prevents any state, although superficially identical with
another, from ever repeating it in its very depth. That
is why our duration is irreversible. We could not live
over again a single moment, for we should have to
begin by effacing the memory of all that had followed.
Even could we erase this memory from our intellect,
we could not from our will.
Thus our personality shoots, grows and ripens with
out ceasing. Each of its moments is something new
added to what was before. We may go further : it is
riot only something new, but something unforeseeable.
Doubtless, my present state is explained by what was
in me and by what was acting on me a moment ago.
In analysing it I should find no other elements. But
even a superhuman intelligence would not have been
able to foresee the simple indivisible form which gives
to these purely abstract elements their concrete organiza
tion. For to foresee consists of projecting into the
future what has been perceived in the past, or of
imagining for a later time a new grouping, in a new
order, of elements already perceived. But that which
has never been perceived, and which is at the same
. DURATION 7
time simple, is necessarily unforeseeable. Now such
is the case with each of our states, regarded as a
moment in a history that is gradually unfolding : it is
simple, and it cannot have been already perceived, since
it concentrates in its indivisibility all that has been
perceived and what the present is adding to it besides.
It is an original moment of a no less original history.
The finished portrait is explained by the features of
the model, by the nature of the artist, by the colours
spread out on the palette ; but, even with the know
ledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist,
could have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be,
for to predict it would have been to produce it before
it was produced an absurd hypothesis which is its
own refutation. Even so with regard to the moments
of our life, of which we are the artisans. Each of
them is a kind of creation. And just as the talent of
the painter is formed or deformed in any case, is
modified under the very influence of the works he
produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its
issue, modifies our personality, being indeed the new
form that we are just assuming. It is then right
to say that what we do depends on what we are ;
but it is necessary to add also that we are, to a certain
extent, what we do, and that we are creating our
selves continually. This creation of self by self is
the more complete, the more one reasons on what
one does. For reason does not proceed in such
matters as in geometry, where impersonal premisses
are given once for all, and an impersonal conclusion
must perforce be drawn. Here, on the contrary, the
same reasons may dictate to different persons, or to
the same person at different moments, acts profoundly
different, although equally reasonable. The truth is
8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
that they are not quite the same reasons, since they are
not those of the same person, nor of the same moment.
That is why we cannot deal with them in the abstract,
from outside, as in geometry, nor solve for another
the problems by which he is faced in life. Each
must solve them from within, on his own account.
But we need not go more deeply into this. We are
seeking only the precise meaning that our conscious
ness gives to this word " exist," and we find that, for
a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is
to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself
endlessly. Should the same be said of existence in
general ?
A material object, of whatever kind, presents-
opposite characters to those which we have just been
describing. Either it remains as it is, or else, if it
changes under the influence of an external force, our
idea of this change is that of a displacement of parts
which themselves do not change. If these parts took
to changing, we should split them up in their turn.
We should thus descend to the molecules of which the
fragments are made, to the atoms that make up the
molecules, to the corpuscles that generate the atoms,
to the " imponderable " within which the corpuscle
is perhaps a mere vortex. In short, we should push
the division or analysis as far as necessary. But we
should stop only before the unchangeable.
Now, we say that a composite object changes by
the displacement of its parts. But when a part has
left its position, there is nothing to prevent its return
to it. A group of elements which has gone through
a state can therefore always find its way back to that
state, if not by itself, at least by means of an external
i UNORGANIZED BODIES 9
cause able to restore everything to its place. This
amounts to saying that any state of the group may be
repeated as often as desired, and consequently that the
group does not grow old. It has no history.
Thus nothing is created therein, neither form nor
O
matter. What the group will be is already present in
what it is, provided u what it is " includes all the points
of the universe with which it is related. A superhuman
intellect could calculate, for any moment of time, the
position of any point of the system in space. And as
there is nothing more in the form of the whole than
the arrangement of its parts, the future forms of the
system are theoretically visible in its present con
figuration.
All our belief in objects, all our operations on the
systems that science isolates, rest in fact on the idea
that time does not bite into them. We have touched
on this question in an earlier work, and shall return to
it in the course of the present study. For the moment,
we will confine ourselves to pointing out that the
abstract time / attributed by science to a material
object or to an isolated system consists only in a certain
number of simultaneities or more generally of corre
spondences, and that this number remains the same,
whatever be the nature of the intervals between the
correspondences. With these intervals we are never
concerned when dealing with inert matter ; or, if they
are considered, it is in order to count therein fresh
correspondences, between which again we shall not care
what happens. Common sense, which is occupied
with detached objects, and also science, which considers
isolated systems, are concerned only with the ends of the
intervals and not with the intervals themselves. There
fore the flow of time might assume an infinite rapidity,
ro CREATIVE EVOLUTION
the entire past, present, and future of material objects
or of isolated systems might be spread out all at once
in space, without there being anything to change either
in the formulae of the scientist or even in the language
of common sense. The number /would always stand for
the same thing ; it would still count the same number
of correspondences between the states of the objects or
systems and the points of the line, ready drawn, which
would be then the "course of time."
Yet succession is an undeniable fact, even in the
material world. Though our reasoning on isolated
systems may imply that their history, past, present, and
future, might be instantaneously unfurled like a fan,
this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually,
as if it occupied a duration like our own. If I want to
mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy-nilly,
wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with
meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not that
mathematical time which would apply equally well to the
entire history of the material world, even if that history
were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides
with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion
of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract
as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is some
thing lived. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.
What else can this mean than that the glass of water,
the sugar, and the process of the sugar s melting in the
water are abstractions, and that the Whole within which
they have been cut out by my senses and understanding
progresses, it may be in the manner of a consciousness ?
Certainly, the operation by which science isolates
and closes a system is not altogether artificial. If it
had no objective foundation, we could not explain
why it is clearly indicated in some cases and im-
i UNORGANIZED BODIES n
possible in others. We shall see that matter has a
tendency to constitute isolable systems, that can be
treated geometrically. In fact, we shall define matter
by just this tendency. But it is only a tendency.
Matter does not go to the end, and the isolation
is never complete. If science does go to the
end and isolate completely, it is for convenience of
study ; it is understood that the so-called isolated
system remains subject to certain external influences.
Science merely leaves these alone, either because it
finds them slight enough to be negligible, or because
it intends to take them into account later on. It is
none the less true that these influences are so many
threads which bind up the system to another more
extensive, and this to a third which includes both, and
so on to the system most objectively isolated and most
independent of all, the solar system complete. But,
even here, the isolation is not absolute. Our sun
radiates heat and light beyond the farthest planet.
And, on the other hand, it moves in a certain fixed
direction, drawing with it the planets and their satellites.
The thread attaching it to the rest of the universe
is doubtless very tenuous. Nevertheless it is along
this thread that is transmitted down to the smallest
particle of the world in which we live the duration
immanent to the whole of the universe.
The universe endures. The more we study the
nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that
duration means invention, the creation of forms, the
continual elaboration of the absolutely new. The
systems marked off by science endure only because they
are bound up inseparably with the rest of the universe.
It is true that in the universe itself two opposite
movements are to be distinguished, as we shall see
12 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP
later on, "descent" and "ascent." The first only
unwinds a roll ready prepared. In principle, it might
be accomplished almost instantaneously, like releasing
a spring. But the ascending movement, which corre
sponds to an inner work of ripening or creating, endures
essentially, and imposes its rhythm on the first, which
is inseparable from it.
There is no reason, therefore, why a duration, and
so a form of existence like our own, should not be attri
buted to the systems that science isolates, provided such
systems are reintegrated into the Whole. But they
must be so reintegrated. The same is even more
obviously true of the objects cut out by our perception.
The distinct outlines which we see in an object, and
which give it its individuality, are only the design of a
certain kind of influence that we might exert on a
certain point of space : it is the plan of our eventual
actions that is sent back to our eyes, as though by a
mirror, when we see the surfaces and edges of things.
Suppress this action, and with it consequently those
main directions which by perception are traced out for
it in the entanglement of the real, and the individuality
of the body is re-absorbed in the universal interaction
which, without doubt, is reality itself.
Now, we have considered material objects generally.
Are there not some objects privileged ? The bodies we
perceive are, so to speak, cut out of the stuff of nature
by our perception^ and the scissors follow, in some way,
the marking of lines along which action might be taken.
But the body which is to perform this action, the body
which marks out upon matter the design of its eventual
actions even before they are actual, the body that has
only to point its sensory organs on the flow of the rea)
i ORGANIZED BODIES 13
in order to make that flow crystallize into definite forms
and thus to create all the other bodies in short, the
living body is^this a_body as others are ?
Doubtless it, also, consists in a portion of extension
bound up with the rest of extension, an intimate part of
the Whole, subject to the same physical and chemical
laws that govern any and every portion of matter. But,
while the subdivision of matter into separate bodies is
relative to our perception, while the building up of
closed-off systems of material points is relative to our
science, the living body has been separated and closed
off by Nature herself. It is composed of unlike parts
that complete each other. It performs diverse functions
that involve each other. It is an individual, and of no
other object, not even of the crystal, can this be said,
for a crystal has neither difference of parts nor diversity
of functions. No doubt, it is hard to decide, even in
the organized world, what is individual and what is not.
The difficulty is great, even in the animal kingdom ;
with plants it is almost insurmountable. This difficulty
is, moreover, due to profound causes, on which we shall
dwell later. We shall see that individuality admits of
any number of degrees, and that it is not fully realized
anywhere, even in man. But that is no reason for
thinking it is not a characteristic property of life. The
biologist who proceeds as a geometrician is too ready to
take advantage here of our inability to give a precise and
general definition of individuality. A perfect definition
applies only to a completed reality ; now, vital properties
are never entirely realized, though always on the way
to become so ; they are not so much states as tendencies.
And a tendency achieves all that it aims at only if it is not
thwarted by another tendency. How, then, could this
occur in the domain of life, where, as we shall show, the
i 4 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
interaction of antagonistic tendencies is always implied ?
In particular, it may be said of individuality that, while
the tendency to individuate is everywhere present in
the organized world, it is everywhere opposed by the
tendency towards reproduction. For the individuality
to be perfect, it would be necessary that no detached
part of the organism could live separately. But then
reproduction would be impossible. For what is repro
duction, but the building up of a new organism with a
detached fragment of the old ? Individuality therefore
harbours its enemy at home. Its very need of per
petuating itself in time condemns it never to be complete
in space. The biologist must take due account of both
tendencies in every instance, and it is therefore useless
to ask him for a definition of individuality that shall fit
all cases and work automatically.
But too often one reasons about the things of life
in the same way as about the conditions of crude
matter. Nowhere is the confusion so evident as in
discussions about individuality. We are shown the
stumps of a Lumbriculus, each regenerating its head
and living thenceforward as an independent individual ;
a hydra whose pieces become so many fresh hydras ;
a sea-urchin s egg whose fragments develop com
plete embryos : where then, we are asked, was the
individuality of the egg, the hydra, the worm ? But,
because there are several individuals now, it does not
follow that there was not a single individual just
before. No doubt, when I have seen several drawers
fall from a chest, I have no longer the right to say
that the article was all of one piece. But the fact is
that there can be nothing more in the present of the
chest of drawers than there was in its past, and if it is
made up of several different pieces now, it was so from
i ORGANIZED BODIES 15
the date of its manufacture. Generally speaking, un
organized bodies, which are what we have need of in
order that we may act, and on which we have modelled
our fashion of thinking, are regulated by this simple
law : the present contains nothing more than the past, and
what is found in the effect was already in the cause. But
suppose that the distinctive feature of the organized body
is that it grows and changes without ceasing, as indeed
the most superficial observation testifies, there would be
nothing astonishing in the fact that it was one in the first
instance, and afterwards many. The reproduction of uni
cellular organisms consists in just this the living being
divides into two halves, of which each is a complete
individual. True, in the more complex animals, nature
localises in the almost independent sexual cells the
power of producing the whole anew. But something
of this power may remain diffused in the rest of the
organism, as the facts of regeneration prove, and it is
conceivable that in certain privileged cases the faculty
may persist integrally in a latent condition and manifest
itself on the first opportunity. In truth, that I may
have the right to speak of individuality, it is not
necessary that the organism should be without the
power to divide into fragments that are able to live.
It is sufficient that it should have presented a certain
systematisation of parts before the division, and that
the same systematisation tend to be reproduced in each
separate portion afterwards. Now, that is precisely
what we observe in the organic world. We may con
clude, then, that individuality is never perfect, and that
it is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell what is
an individual and what is not, but that life nevertheless
manifests a search for individuality, as if it strove to
constitute systems naturally isolated, naturally closed,
1 6 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
CHAF.
By this is a living being distinguished from all that
our perception or our science isolates or closes artifici
ally. It would therefore be wrong to compare it to an
object. Should we wish to find a term of comparison in
the inorganic world, it is not to a determinate material
object, but much rather to the totality of the material
universe that we ought to compare the living organism.
It is true that the comparison would not be worth
much, for a living being is observable, whilst the whole
of the universe is constructed or reconstructed by
thought. But at least our attention would thus have
been called to the essential character of organization.
Like the universe as a whole, like each conscious being
taken separately, the organism which lives is a thing
that endures. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged into
its present, and abides there, actual and acting. How
otherwise could we understand that it passes through
distinct and well-marked phases, that it changes its age
in short, that it has a history r If I consider my
body in particular, I find that, like my consciousness,
it matures little by little from infancy to old age ; like
myself, it grows old. Indeed, maturity and old age
are, properly speaking, attributes only of my body ; it
is only metaphorically that I apply the same names to
the corresponding changes of my conscious self. Now,
if I pass from the top to the bottom of the scale of
living beings, from one of the most to one of the least
differentiated, from the multicellular organism of man to
the unicellular organism of the Infusorian, I find, even
in this simple cell, the same process of growing old. The
Infusorian is exhausted at the end of a certain number
of divisions, and though it may be possible, by modify
ing the environment, to put off the moment when a
rejuvenation by conjugation becomes necessary, this
, INDIVIDUALITY AND AGE 17
cannot be indefinitely postponed. 1 It is true that
between these two extreme cases, in which the organism
is completely individualised, there might be found a
multitude of others in which the individuality is less
well marked, and in which, although there is doubtless
an ageing somewhere, one cannot say exactly what it is
that grows old. Once more, there is no universal bio
logical law which applies precisely and automatically to
every living thing. There are only directions in which
life throws out species in general. Each particular
species, in the very act by which it is constituted,
affirms its independence, follows its caprice, deviates
more or less from the straight line, sometimes even
remounts the slope and seems to turn its back on its
original direction. It is easy enough to argue that a
tree never grows old, since the tips of its branches
are always equally young, always equally capable of
engendering new trees by budding. But in such an
organism which is, after all, a society rather than an
individual something ages, if only the leaves and the
interior of the trunk. And each cell, considered separ
ately, evolves in a specific way. Wherever anything
lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time
is being inscribed.
This, it will be said, is only a metaphor. It is of
the very essence of mechanism, in fact, to consider as
metaphorical every expression which attributes to time
an effective action and a reality of its own. In vain
does immediate experience show us that the very basis
of our conscious existence is memory, that is to say, the
prolongation of the past into the present, or, in a word,
duration, acting and irreversible. In vain does reason
1 Calkins, " Studies on the Life History of Protozoa " (Archiv f,
Ent<wicklungsmechanik y vol. xv., 1903, pp. 139-186).
C
1 8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
prove to us that the more we get away from the objects
cut out and the systems isolated by common sense
and by science and the deeper we dig beneath them,
the more we have to do with a reality which changes as
a whole in its inmost states, as if an accumulative
memory of the past made it impossible to go back
again. The mechanistic instinct of the mind is stronger
than reason, stronger than immediate experience. The
metaphysician that we each carry unconsciously within
us, and the presence of which is explained, as we shall
see later on, by the very place that man occupies
amongst the living beings, has its fixed requirements,
its ready-made explanations, its irreducible propositions :
all unite in denying concrete duration. Change must be
reducible to an arrangement or rearrangement of parts ;
the irreversibility of time must be an appearance relative
to our ignorance ; the impossibility of turning back
must be only the inability of man to put things in place
again. So growing old can be nothing more than the
gradual gain or loss of certain substances, perhaps both
together. Time is assumed to have just as much
reality for a living being as for an hour-glass, in which
the top part empties while the lower fills, and all goes
where it was before when you turn the glass upside
down.
True, biologists are not agreed on what is gained
and what is lost between the day of birth and the day
of death. There are those who hold to the continual
growth in the volume of protoplasm from the birth of
the cell right on to its death. 1 More probable and more
profound is the theory according to which the diminution
1 Sedgwick Minot, " On Certain Phenomena of Growing Old " (Proc.
Amer. Assoc. for the Advancement of Science, 39th Meeting, Salem, 1891,
pp. 271-288).
t INDIVIDUALITY AND AGE 19
bears on the quantity of nutritive substance contained
in that " inner environment " in which the organism is
being renewed, and the increase in the quantity of un-
excreted residual substances which, accumulating in the
body, finally "crust it over." 1 Must we, however with
an eminent bacteriologist declare any explanation of
growing old insufficient that does not take account of
phagocytosis ? 2 We do not feel qualified to settle the
question. But the fact that the two theories agree in
affirming the constant accumulation or loss of a certain
kind of matter, even though they have little in common
as to what is gained and lost, shows pretty well that
the frame of the explanation has been furnished a -priori.
We shall see this more and more as we proceed with
our study : it is not easy, in thinking of time, to escape
the image of the hour-glass.
The cause of growing old must lie deeper. We
hold that there is unbroken continuity between the
evolution of the embryo and that of the complete
organism. The impetus which causes a living being
to grow larger, to develop and to age, is the same
that has caused it to pass through the phases of
the embryonic life. The development of the embryo
is a perpetual change of form. Any one who attempts
to note all its successive aspects becomes lost in an
infinity, as is inevitable in dealing with a continuum.
Life does but prolong this prenatal evolution. The
proof of this is that it is often impossible for us to say
whether we are dealing with an organism growing old
or with an embryo continuing to evolve ; such is the
1 Le Dantec, L Individuality et Verreur individualiste, Paris, 1905,
pp. 84 .
2 Metchnikoff, "La Deg&nerescence senile" (Annte biologique, iii., 1897,
pp. 249 ff.). Cf. by the same author, La Nature humaine, Paris, 3903,
pp. 312 ff.
2c CREATIVE EVOLUTION
case, for example, with the larvae of insects and Crustacea.
On the other hand, in an organism such as our own,
crises like puberty or the menopause, in which the in
dividual is completely transformed, are quite comparable
to changes in the course of larval or embryonic life yet
they are part and parcel of the process of our ageing.
Although they occur at a definite age and within a
time that may be quite short, no one would maintain
that they appear then ex abrupto, from without, simply
because a certain age is reached, just as a legal right
is granted to us on our one-and-twentieth birthday. It
is evident that a change like that of puberty is in
course of preparation at every instant from birth, and
even before birth, and that the ageing up to that crisis
consists, in part at least, of this gradual preparation.
In short, what is properly vital in growing old is the
insensible, infinitely graduated, continuance of the
change of form. Now, this change is undoubtedly
accompanied by phenomena of organic destruction : to
these, and to these alone, will a mechanistic explanation
of ageing be confined. It will note the facts of sclerosis,
the gradual accumulation of residual substances, the
growing hypertrophy of the protoplasm of the cell.
But under these visible effects an inner cause lies
hidden. The evolution of the living being, like that
of the embryo, implies a continual recording of dura
tion, a persistence of the past in the present, and so an
appearance, at least, of organic memory.
The present state of an unorganized body depends ex
clusively on what happened at the previous instant ; and
likewise the position of the material points of a system
defined and isolated by science is determined by the
position of these same points at the moment immedi
ately before. In other words, the laws that govern
i INDIVIDUALITY AND AGE 21
unorganized matter are expressible, in principle, by
differential equations in which time (in the sense in
which the mathematician takes this word) would play
the r61e of independent variable. Is it so with the
laws of life ? Does the state of a living body find its
complete explanation in the state immediately before ?
Yes, if it is agreed a priori to liken the living body to
other bodies, and to identify it, for the sake of the
argument, with the artificial systems on which the
chemist, physicist, and astronomer operate. But in
astronomy, physics, and chemistry the proposition has
a perfectly definite meaning : it signifies that certain
aspects of the present, important for science, are
calculable as functions of the immediate past. Nothing
of the sort in the domain of life. Here calculation
touches, at most, certain phenomena of organic
destruction. Organic creation^ on the contrary, the
evolutionary phenomena which properly constitute life,
we cannot in any way subject to a mathematical treat
ment. It will be said that this impotence is due only
to our ignorance. But it may equally well express
the fact that the present moment of a living body does
not find its explanation in the moment immediately
before, that all the past of the organism must be
added to that moment, its heredity in fact, the whole
of a very long history. In the second of these two
hypotheses, not in the first, is really expressed the
present state of the biological sciences, as well as their
direction. As for the idea that the living body might
be treated by some superhuman calculator in the
same mathematical way as our solar system, this has
gradually arisen from a metaphysic which has taken a
more precise form since the physical discoveries of
Galileo, but which, as we shall show, was always the
22 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
natural metaphysic of the human mind. Its apparent
clearness, our impatient desire to find it true, the
enthusiasm with which so many excellent minds accept
it without proof all the seductions, in short, that it
exercises on our thought, should put us on our guard
against it. The attraction it has for us proves well
enough that it gives satisfaction to an innate inclination.
But, as will be seen further on, the intellectual tendencies
innate to-day, which life must have created in the course
of its evolution, are not at all meant to supply us with
an explanation of life : they have something else to do.
Any attempt to distinguish between an artificial
and a natural system, between the dead and the living,
runs counter to this tendency at once. Thus it happens
that we find it equally difficult to imagine that the
organized has duration and that the unorganized has
not. When we say that the state of an artificial system
depends exclusively on its state at the moment before,
does it not seem as if we were bringing time in, as if
the system had something to do with real duration r
And, on the other hand, though the whole of the past
goes into the making of the living being s present
moment, does not organic memory press it into the
moment immediately before the present, so that the
moment immediately before becomes the sole cause of
the present one ? To speak thus is to ignore the
cardinal difference between concrete time, along which
a real system develops, and that abstract time which
enters into our speculations on artificial systems.
What does it mean, to say that the state of an artificial
system depends on what it was at the moment immedi
ately before ? There is no instant immediately before
another instant ; there could not be, any more than
there could be one mathematical point touching another.
i INDIVIDUALITY AND AGE 23
The instant " immediately before " is, in reality, that
which is connected with the present instant by the
interval dt. All that you mean to say, therefore, is
that the present state of the system is defined by
equations into which differential coefficients enter,
such as dsjdt, dv/dt^ that is to say, at bottom, present
velocities and present accelerations. You are therefore
really speaking only of the present a present, it is true,
considered along with its tendency. The systems science
works with are, in fact, in an instantaneous present that
is always being renewed ; such systems are never in that
real, concrete duration in which the past remains bound
up with the present. When the mathematician calculates
the future state of a system at the end of a time /, there
is nothing to prevent him from supposing that the uni
verse vanishes from this moment till that, and suddenly
reappears. It is the /-th moment only that counts
and that will be a mere instant. What will flow on in
the interval that is to say, real time does not count,
and cannot enter into the calculation. If the mathe
matician says that he puts himself inside this interval,
he means that he is placing himself at a certain point,
at a particular moment, therefore at the extremity
again of a certain time / ; with the interval up to T
he is not concerned. If he divides the interval into
infinitely small parts by considering the differential dt y
he thereby expresses merely the fact that he will
consider accelerations and velocities that is to say,
numbers which denote tendencies and enable him to
calculate the state of the system at a given moment.
But he is always speaking of a given moment a static
moment, that is and not of Bowing time. In short,
the world the mathematician deals with is a world that
dies and is reborn at every instant, the world which
24 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
Descartes was thinking of when he spoke of continued creation.
But, in time thus conceived, how could evolution,
which is the very essence of life, ever take place ?
Evolution implies a real persistence of the past in the
present, a duration which is, as it were, a hyphen, a
connecting link. In other words, to know a living
being or natural system is to get at the very interval
of duration, while the knowledge of an artificial or
mathematical system applies only to the extremity.
Continuity of change, preservation of the past in
the present, real duration the living being seems,
then, to share these attributes with consciousness.
Can we go further and say that life, like conscious
activity, is invention, is unceasing creation ?
It does not enter into our plan to set down here
the proofs of transformism. We wish only to
explain in a word or two why we shall accept it, in
the present work, as a sufficiently exact and precise
expression of the facts actually known. The idea of
transformism is already in germ in the natural classi
fication of organized beings. The naturalist, in fact,
brings together the organisms that are like each other,
then divides the group into sub-groups within which
the likeness is still greater, and so on : all through the
operation, the characters of the group appear as general
themes on which each of the sub-groups performs its
particular variation. Now, such is just the relation
we find, in the animal and in the vegetable world,
between the generator and the generated : on the
canvas which the ancestor passes on, and which his
descendants possess in common, each puts his own
original embroidery. True, the differences between
the descendant and the ancestor are slight, and it may
t TRANSFORMISM 25
be asked whether the same living matter presents
enough plasticity to take in turn such different forms
as those of a fish, a reptile and a bird. But, to this
question, observation gives a peremptory answer. It
shows that up to a certain period in its development the
embryo of the bird is hardly distinguishable from that of
the reptile, and that the individual develops, throughout
the embryonic life in general, a series of transforma
tions comparable to those through which, according
to the theory of evolution, one species passes into
another. A single cell, the result of the combination
O
of two cells, male and female, accomplishes this work
by dividing. Every day, before our eyes, the highest
forms of life are springing from a very elementary form.
Experience, then, shows that the most complex has been
able to issue from the most simple by way of evolu
tion. Now, has it arisen so, as a matter of fact ? Pale
ontology, in spite of the insufficiency of its evidence,
invites us to believe it has ; for, where it makes out the
order of succession of species with any precision, this
order is just what considerations drawn from embryo-
geny and comparative anatomy would lead any one
to suppose, and each new paleontological discovery
brings transformism a new confirmation. Thus, the
proof drawn from mere observation is ever being
strengthened, while, on the other hand, experiment
is removing the objections one by one. The recent
experiments of H. de Vries, for instance, by showing
that important variations can be produced suddenly
and transmitted regularly, have overthrown some of
the greatest difficulties raised by the theory. They
have enabled us greatly to shorten the time biological
evolution seems to demand. They also render us
less exacting toward paleontology. So that, all things
26 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
considered, the transformist hypothesis looks more and
more like a close approximation to the truth. It is
not rigorously demonstrable ; but, failing the certainty
of theoretical or experimental demonstration, there is a
probability which is continually growing, due to evidence
which, while coming short of direct proof, seems to
point persistently in its direction : such is the kind of
probability that the theory of transformism offers.
Let us admit, however, that transformism may be
wrong. Let us suppose that species are proved, by
inference or by experiment, to have arisen by a dis
continuous process, of which to-day we have no idea.
Would the doctrine be affected in so far as it has a
special interest or importance for us ? Classification
would probably remain, in its broad lines. The actual
data of embryology would also remain. The correspond
ence between comparative embryogeny and comparative
anatomy would remain too. Therefore biology could
and would continue to establish between living forms
the same relations and the same kinship as transformism
supposes to-day. It would be, it is true, an ideal
kinship, and no longer a material affiliation. But, as
the actual data of paleontology would also remain, we
should still have to admit that it is successively, not
simultaneously, that the forms between which we find
an ideal kinship have appeared. Now, the evolutionist
theory, so far as it has any importance for philosophy,
requires no more. It consists above all in establishing
relations of ideal kinship, and in maintaining that wher
ever there is this relation of, so to speak, logical affiliation
between forms, there is also a relation of chronological
succession between the species in which these forms
are materialized. Both arguments would hold in any
case. And hence, an evolution somewhere would still
i TRANSFORMISM 27
have to be supposed, whether in a creative Thought in
which the ideas of the different species are generated
by each other exactly as transformism holds that
species themselves are generated on the earth ; or in a
plan of vital organization immanent in nature, which
gradually works itself out, in which the relations of
logical and chronological affiliation between pure
forms are just those which transformism presents as
relations of real affiliation between living individuals ;
or, finally, in some unknown cause of life, which
develops its effects as if they generated one another.
Evolution would then simply have been transposed,
made to pass from the visible to the invisible.
Almost all that transformism tells us to-day would
be preserved, open to interpretation in another way.
Will it not, therefore, be better to stick to the letter of
transformism as almost all scientists profess it ? Apart
from the question to what extent the theory of evolution
describes the facts and to what extent it symbolizes
them, there is nothing in it that is irreconcilable with
the doctrines it has claimed to replace, even with that
of special creations, to which it is usually opposed.
For this reason we think the language of transformism
forces itself now upon all philosophy, as the dogmatic
affirmation of transformism forces itself upon science.
But then, we must no longer speak of life in general
as an abstraction, or as a mere heading under which all
living beings are inscribed. At a certain moment, in
certain points of space, a visible current has taken rise ;
this current of life, traversing the bodies it has organized
one after another, passing from generation to generation,
has become divided amongst species and distributed
amongst individuals without losing anything of its
force, rather intensifying in proportion to its advance.
28 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
It is well known that, on the theory of the " continuity
of the germ -plasm," maintained by Weismann, the
sexual elements of the generating organism pass on
their properties directly to the sexual elements of the
organism engendered. In this extreme form, the
theory has seemed debatable, for it is only in exceptional
cases that there are any signs of sexual glands at the
time of segmentation of the fertilized egg. But,
though the cells that engender the sexual elements do
not generally appear at the beginning of the embryonic
life, it is none the less true that they are always formed
out of those tissues of the embryo which have not
undergone any particular functional differentiation, and
whose cells are made of unmodified protoplasm. 1 In
other words, the genetic power of the fertilized ovum
weakens, the more it is spread over the growing mass
of the tissues of the embryo ; but, while it is being
thus diluted, it is concentrating anew something of
itself on a certain special point, to wit, the cells from
which the ova or spermatozoa will develop. It might
therefore be said that, though the germ-plasm is not
continuous, there is at least continuity of genetic
energy, this energy being expended only at certain
instants, for just enough time to give the requisite
impulsion to the embryonic life, and being recouped as
soon as possible in new sexual elements, in which,
again, it bides its time. Regarded from this point of
view, life is like a current passing from germ to germ
through the medium of a developed organism. It is as if
the organism itself were only an excrescence, a bud
caused to sprout by the former germ endeavouring to
continue itself in a new germ. The essential thing is
the continuous progress indefinitely pursued, an invisible
1 Roule, V Embryologie generally Paris, 1893, p. 319.
i BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 29
progress, on which each visible organism rides during
the short interval of time given it to live.
Now, the more we fix our attention on this con
tinuity of life, the more we see that organic evolution
resembles the evolution of a consciousness, in which
the past presses against the present and causes the
f* upspringing of a new form of consciousness, incom-
( mensurable with its antecedents. That the appearance
|of a vegetable or animal species is due to specific causes,
nobody will gainsay. But this can only mean that if,
after the fact, we could know these causes in detail, we
could explain by them the form that has been pro
duced ; foreseeing the form is out of the question. 1 It
may perhaps be said that the form could be foreseen if
we could know, in all their details, the conditions under
which it will be produced. But these conditions are
built up into it and are part and parcel of its being ;
they are peculiar to that phase of its history in which
life finds itself at the moment of producing the form :
how could we know beforehand a situation that is
unique of its kind, that has never yet occurred and
will never occur again ? Of the future, only that is
foreseen which is like the past or can be made up
again with elements like those of the past. Such is
the case with astronomical, physical and chemical facts,
with all facts which form part of a system in which
elements supposed to be unchanging are merely put
together, in which the only changes are changes of
position, in which there is no theoretical absurdity
in imagining that things are restored to their place ;
in which, consequently, the same total phenomenon,
1 The irreversibility of the series of living beings has been well set forth
by Baldwin (Development and Evolution, New York, 1902 ; in particular
p. 327).
30 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
or at least the same elementary phenomena, can be
repeated. But an original situation, which imparts
something of its own originality to its elements, that is
to say, to the partial views that are taken of it, how
can such a situation be pictured as given before it is
actually produced ? l All that can be said is that, once
produced, it will be explained by the elements that
analysis will then carve out of it. Now, what is true of
the production of a new species is also true of the pro
duction of a new individual, and, more generally, of any
moment of any living form. For, though the variation
must reach a certain importance and a certain generality
in order to give rise to a new species, it is being produced
every moment, continuously and insensibly, in every
living being. And it is evident that even the sudden
" mutations " which we now hear of are possible only if
a process of incubation, or rather of maturing, is going
on throughout a series of generations that do not seem
to change. In this sense it might be said of life, as
of consciousness, that at every moment it is creating
something. 2
But against this idea of the absolute originality and un-
foreseeability of forms our whole intellect rises in revolt.
1 We have dwelt on this point and tried to make it clear in the Essai
sur les donntes immediate; de la conscience, pp. 140-151.
2 In his fine work on Genius in Art (Le Gtnie dam I art}, M. Seailles
develops this twofold thesis, that art is a continuation of nature and that
life is creation. We should willingly accept the second formula ; but by
creation must we understand, as the author does, a synthesis of elements ?
Where the elements pre-exist, the synthesis that will be made is virtually
given, being only one of the possible arrangements. This arrangement a
superhuman intellect could have perceived in advance among all the
possible ones that surround it. We hold, on the contrary, that in the
domain of life the elements have no real and separate existence. They are
manifold mental views of an indivisible process. And for that reason there
is radical contingency in progress, incommensurability between what goes
before and what follows in short, duration.
i BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 31
The essential function of our intellect, as the evolution
of life has fashioned it, is to be a light for our conduct,
to make ready for our action on things, to foresee, for
a given situation, the events, favourable or unfavourable,
which may follow thereupon. Intellect therefore in
stinctively selects in a given situation whatever is like
something already known ; it seeks this out, in order
that it may apply its principle that like produces like."
In just this does the prevision of the future by
common sense consist. Science carries this faculty to
the highest possible degree of exactitude and preci
sion, but does not alter its essential character. Like
ordinary knowledge, in dealing with things science is
concerned only with the aspect of repetition. Though
the whole be original, science will always manage to
analyse it into elements or aspects which are approxi
mately a reproduction of the past. Science can work
only on what is supposed to repeat itself that is to say,
on what is withdrawn, by hypothesis, from the action
of real time. Anything that is irreducible and irrever
sible in the successive moments of a history eludes
science. To get a notion of this irreducibility and
irreversibility, we must break with scientific habits
which are adapted to the fundamental requirements of
thought, we must do violence to the mind, go counter
to the natural bent of the intellect. But that is just
the function of philosophy.
In vain, therefore, does life evolve before our eyes
as a continuous creation of unforeseeable form : the
idea always persists that form, unforeseeability and con
tinuity are mere appearance, the outward reflection of
our own ignorance. What is presented to the senses as
a continuous history would break up, we are told, into
a series of successive states. " What gives you the
32 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
impression of an original state resolves, upon analysis,
into elementary facts, each of which is the repetition
of a fact already known. What you call an unfore
seeable form is only a new arrangement of old ele
ments. The elementary causes, which in their totality
have determined this arrangement, are themselves old
causes repeated in a new order. Knowledge of the
elements and of the elementary causes would have
made it possible to foretell the living form which is
their sum and their resultant. When we have
resolved the biological aspect of phenomena into
physico-chemical factors, we will leap, if necessary, over
physics and chemistry themselves ; we will go from
masses to molecules, from molecules to atoms, from
atoms to corpuscles : we must indeed at last come to
something that can be treated as a kind of solar
system, astronomically. If you deny it, you oppose
the very principle of scientific mechanism, and you
arbitrarily affirm that living matter is not made of the
same elements as other matter."- We reply that we
do not question the fundamental identity of inert
matter and organized matter. The only question is
whether the natural systems which we call living
beings must be assimilated to the artificial systems that
science cuts out within inert matter, or whether they
must not rather be compared to that natural system
which is the whole of the universe. That life is a kind
of mechanism I cordially agree. But is it the mechanism
of parts artificially isolated within the whole of the
universe, or is it the mechanism of the real whole ?
The real whole might well be, we conceive, an in
divisible continuity. The systems we cut out within it
would, properly speaking, not then be parts at all ;
they would be partial views of the whole. And, with
i BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 33
these partial views put end to end, you will not make
even a beginning of the reconstruction of the whole,
any more than, by multiplying photographs of an object
in a thousand different aspects, you will reproduce the
object itself. So of life and of the physico-chemical
phenomena to which you endeavour to reduce it.
Analysis will undoubtedly resolve the process of organic
creation into an ever-growing number of physico-
chemical phenomena, and chemists and physicists will
have to do, of course, with nothing but these. But
it does not follow that chemistry and physics will ever
give us the key to life.
A very small element of a curve is very near being
a straight line. And the smaller it is, the nearer. In
the limit, it may be termed a part of the curve or a
part of the straight line, as you please, for in each
of its points a curve coincides with its tangent. So
likewise " vitality " is tangent, at any and every point,
to physical and chemical forces ; but such points are,
as a fact, only views taken by a mind which imagines
stops at various moments of the movement that
generates the curve. In reality, life is no more made
of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed
of straight lines.
In a general way, the most radical progress a science
can achieve is the working of the completed results into
a new scheme of the whole, by relation to which they
become instantaneous and motionless views taken at in
tervals along the continuity of a movement. Such, for
example, is the relation of modern to ancient geometry.
The latter, purely static, worked with figures drawn
once for all ; the former studies the varying of a
function that is, the continuous movement by which
the figure is described. No doubt, for greater strict-
D
34 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
ness, all considerations of motion may be eliminated
from mathematical processes ; but the introduction of
motion into the genesis of figures is nevertheless the
origin of modern mathematics. We believe that if
biology could ever get as close to its object as mathe
matics does to its own, it would become, to the physics
and chemistry of organized bodies, what the mathematics
of the moderns has proved to be in relation to ancient
geometry. The wholly superficial displacements of
masses and molecules studied in physics and chemistry
would become, by relation to that inner vital move
ment (which is transformation and not translation) what
the position of a moving object is to the movement
of that object in space. And, so far as we can see, the
procedure by which we should then pass from the
definition of a certain vital action to the system of
physico-chemical facts which it implies would be like
passing from the function to its derivative, from the
equation of the curve (i.e. the law of the continuous
movement by which the curve is generated) to the
equation of the tangent giving its instantaneous
direction. Such a science would be a mechanics of
transformation, of which our mechanics of translation
would become a particular case, a simplification, a pro
jection on the plane of pure quantity. And just as an
infinity of functions have the same differential, these
functions differing from each other by a constant, so
perhaps the integration of the physico-chemical elements
of properly vital action might determine that action only
i n p ar t a part would be left to indetermination. But
such an integration can be no more than dreamed of;
we do not pretend that the dream will ever be realised.
We are only trying, by carrying a certain comparison as
far as possible, to show up to what point our theory
r BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 35
goes along with pure mechanism, and where they part
company.
Imitation of the living by the unorganized may,
however, go a good way. Not only does chemistry
make organic syntheses, but we have succeeded in
reproducing artificially the external appearance of certain
facts of organization, such as indirect cell-division and
protoplasmic circulation. It is well known that the
protoplasm of the cell effects various movements within
its envelope ; on the other hand, indirect cell-division
is the outcome of very complex operations, some in
volving the nucleus and others the cytoplasm. These
latter commence by the doubling of the centrosome, a
small spherical body alongside the nucleus. The two
centrosomes thus obtained draw apart, attract the broken
and doubled ends of the filament of which the original
nucleus mainly consisted, and join them to form two
fresh nuclei about which the two new cells are con
structed which will succeed the first. Now, in their
broad lines and in their external appearance, some at least
of these operations have been successfully imitated. If
some sugar or table salt is pulverized and some very old
oil is added, and a drop of the mixture is observed under
the microscope, a froth of alveolar structure is seen
whose configuration is like that of protoplasm, according
to certain theories, and in which movements take
place which are decidedly like those of protoplasmic
circulation. 1 If, in a froth of the same kind, the air is
extracted from an alveolus, a cone of attraction is seen
to form, like those about the centrosomes which result
in the division of the nucleus. 2 Even the external
1 Biitschli, Untersuchungen uber mikroskopische Schfiume und das Proto
plasma, Leipzig, 1892, First Part.
2 Rhumbler, "Versuch einer mechanischen Erklarung der indirekten
Zell- und Kernteilung" (Roux s Archi<v, 1896).
36 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
motions of a unicellular organism of an amoeba, at any
rate are sometimes explained mechanically. The dis
placements of an amoeba in a drop of water would be
comparable to the motion to and fro of a grain of dust
in a draughty room. Its mass is all the time absorbing
certain soluble matters contained in the surrounding
water, and giving back to it certain others ; these
continual exchanges, like those between two vessels
separated by a porous partition, would create an ever-
changing vortex around the little organism. As for
the temporary prolongations or pseudopodia which the
amoeba seems to make, they would be not so much
given out by it as attracted from it by a kind of
inhalation or suction of the surrounding medium. 1
In the same way we may perhaps come to explain the
more complex movements which the Infusorian makes
with its vibratory cilia, which, moreover, are probably
only fixed pseudopodia.
But scientists are far from agreed on the value of
explanations and schemas of this sort. Chemists have
pointed out that even in the organic not to go
so far as the organized science has reconstructed
hitherto nothing but waste products of vital activity;
the peculiarly active plastic substances obstinately defy
synthesis. One of the most notable naturalists of our
time has insisted on the opposition of two orders of
phenomena observed in living tissues, anagenesis and
katagenesis. The role of the anagenetic energies is to
raise the inferior energies to their own level by
assimilating inorganic substances. They construct the
tissues. On the other hand, the actual functioning of
1 Berthold, W/V iiber Protoplasmamechanik, Leipzig, 1886, p. 102. Cf.
the explanation proposed by Le Dantec, Thc orie nou=velle de la <vie, Paris,
1896, p. 60.
i BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 37
life (excepting, of course, assimilation, growth, and
reproduction) is of the katagenetic order, exhibiting
the fall, not the rise, of energy. It is only with these
facts of katagenetic order that physico-chemistry deals
that is, in short, with the dead and not with the living. 1
The other kind of facts certainly seem to defy
physico-chemical analysis, even if they are not anagenetic
in the proper sense of the word. As for the artificial
imitation of the outward appearance of protoplasm,
should a real theoretic importance be attached to this
when the question of the physical framework of
protoplasm is not yet settled ? We are still further
from compounding protoplasm chemically. Finally, a
physico-chemical explanation of the motions of the
amoeba, and a fortiori of the behaviour of the In
fusoria, seems impossible to many of those whc
have closely observed these rudimentary organisms.
Even in these humblest manifestations of life they
discover traces of an effective psychological activity. 2
But instructive above all is the fact that the tendency
to explain everything by physics and chemistry is
discouraged rather than strengthened by deep study of
histological phenomena. Such is the conclusion of the
truly admirable book which the histologist E. B.
Wilson has devoted to the development of the cell :
"The study of the cell has, on the whole, seemed to
1 Cope, The Primary Factors of Organic Evolution, Chicago, 1896, pp.
4.75-484.
2 Maupas, " Etude des infusoires cilies " (Arch, de zoologie exptrimentale,
1883, pp. 47, 491, 518, 549, in particular). P. Vignon, Recherches de
cytologie g/ne rale sur les epitheliums, Paris, 1902, p. 655. A profound study
of the motions of the Infusoria and a very penetrating criticism of the
idea of tropism have been made recently by Jennings (Contributions to the
Study of the Behaviour of Lower Organisms, Washington, 1904). The
" type of behaviour " of these lower organisms, as Jennings defines it
(pp. 237-252), is unquestionably of the psychological order.
38 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
widen rather than to narrow the enormous gap that
separates even the lowest forms of life from the
inorganic world."
To sum up, those who are concerned only with the
functional activity of the living being are inclined to
believe that physics and chemistry will give us the key
to biological processes. 2 They have chiefly to do, as a
fact, with phenomena that are repeated continually in
the living being, as in a chemical retort. This explains,
in some measure, the mechanistic tendencies of phy
siology. On the contrary, those whose attention is
concentrated on the minute structure of living tissues,
on their genesis and evolution, histologists and em-
bryogenists on the one hand, naturalists on the other,
are interested in the retort itself, not merely in its
contents. They find that this retort creates its own
form through a unique series of acts that really con
stitute a history. Thus, histologists, embryogenists,
and naturalists believe far less readily than physiologists
in the physico-chemical character of vital actions.
The fact is, neither one nor the other of these two
theories, neither that which affirms nor that which
denies the possibility of chemically producing an
elementary organism, can claim the authority of experi
ment. They are both unverifiable, the former because
science has not yet advanced a step toward the chemical
synthesis of a living substance, the second because
there is no conceivable way of proving experimentally
the impossibility of a fact. But we have set forth the
theoretical reasons which prevent us from likening the
living being, a system closed off by nature, to the
1 E. B. Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, New York,
1897, p. 330.
8 Dastre, La Vie et la mort, p. 43.
i RADICAL MECHANISM 39
systems which our science isolates. These reasons
have less force, we acknowledge, in the case of a
rudimentary organism like the amoeba, which hardly
evolves at all. But they acquire more when we
consider a complex organism which goes through a
regular cycle of transformations. The more duration
marks the living being with its imprint, the more
obviously the organism differs from a mere mechanism,
over which duration glides without penetrating. And
the demonstration has most force when it applies to
the evolution of life as a whole, from its humblest
origins to its highest forms, inasmuch as this evolution
constitutes, through the unity and continuity of the
animated matter which supports it, a single indivisible
history. Thus viewed, the evolutionist hypothesis
does not seem so closely akin to the mechanistic
conception of life as it is generally supposed to be.
Of this mechanistic conception we do not claim, of
course, to furnish a mathematical and final refutation.
But the refutation which we draw from the consideration
of real time, and which is, in our opinion, the only
refutation possible, becomes the more rigorous and |
cogent the more frankly the evolutionist hypothesis is
assumed. We must dwell a good deal more on this
point. But let us first show more clearly the notion of
life to which we are leading up.
The mechanistic explanations, we said, hold good
for the systems that our thought artificially detaches
from the whole. But of the whole itself and of the
systems which, within this whole, seem to take
after it, we cannot admit a priori that they are
mechanically explicable, for then time would be use
less, and even unreal. The essence of mechanical
explanation, in fact, is to regarcPthe future and the
40 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
past as calculable functions of thj_present x andjhus to
claim that all is given. On this hypothesis, past,
present and future would be open at a glance to a
superhuman intellect capable of making the calculation.
Indeed, the scientists who have believed in the
universality and perfect objectivity of mechanical
explanations have, consciously or unconsciously, acted
on a hypothesis of this kind. Laplace formulated it
with the greatest precision : "An intellect which at a
given instant knew all the forces with which nature is
animated, and the respective situations of the beings
that compose nature supposing the said intellect were
vast enough to subject these data to analysis would
embrace in the same formula the motions of the
greatest bodies in the universe and those of the
slightest atom : nothing would be uncertain for it, and
the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes." 1
And Du Bois-Reymond : " We can imagine the
knowledge of nature arrived at a point where the
universal process of the world might be represented by
a single mathematical formula, by one immense system
of simultaneous differential equations, from which
could be deduced, for each moment, the position,
direction, and velocity of every atom of the world." 2
Huxley has expressed the same idea in a more con
crete form : " If the fundamental proposition of
evolution is true, that the entire world, living and not
living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according
to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules
of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was
composed, it is no less certain that the existing world
1 Laplace, "Introduction & la theorie analytique des probabilities"
((Euvres completes, vol. vii., Paris, 1886, p. vi.).
2 Du Bois-Reymond, Uber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens t Leipzig,
1892
i RADICAL FINALISM 41
lay, potentially, in the cosmic vapour, and that a
sufficient intellect could, from a knowledge of the
properties of the molecules of that vapour, have
predicted, say the state of the Fauna of Great Britain
in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what
will happen to the vapour of the breath on a cold
winter s day." In such a doctrine, time is still spoken
of : one pronounces the word, but one does not think
of the thing. For time is here deprived of efficacy, and
if it does nothing, it is nothing. Radical mechanism^
implies a metaphysj^ mjvdikJ^
is postulated complete in eternity, and in which the
apparent duration of things expresses merely the
infirmity of a mind that cannot know everything at
once. But duration is something very different from
this for our consciousness, that is to say, for that which
is most indisputable in our experience. We perceive
duration as a stream against which we cannot go. It
is the foundation of our being, and, as we feel, the
very substance of the world in which we live. It is of
no use to hold up before our eyes the dazzling pros
pect of a universal mathematic ; we cannot sacrifice
experience to the requirements of a system. That is
why we reject radical mechanism.
But radical finalism is quite as unacceptable, and for
the same reason. The doctrine of teleology, in its
extreme form, as we find it in Leibniz for example, im
plies that things and beings merely realize a programme
previously arranged. But if there is nothing unfore
seen, no invention or creation in the universe, time is
useless again. As in the mechanistic hypothesis, here
again it is supposed that all is given. Finalism thus
understood is only inverted mechanism. It springs
42 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
from the same postulate, with this sole difference, that
in the movement of our finite intellects along succes
sive things, whose successiveness is reduced to a mere
appearance, it holds in front of us the light with which
it claims to guide us, instead of putting it behind.
It substitutes the attraction of the future for the
impulsion of the past. But succession remains none
the less a mere appearance, as indeed does movement
itself. In the doctrine of Leibniz, time is reduced to
a confused perception, relative to the human stand
point, a perception which would vanish, like a rising
mist, for a mind seated at the centre of things.
Yet finalism is not, like mechanism, a doctrine with
fixed rigid outlines. It admits of as many inflections
as we like. The mechanistic philosophy is to be
taken or left : it must be left if the least grain of dust,
by straying from the path foreseen by mechanics, should
show the slightest trace of spontaneity. The doctrine
of final causes, on the contrary, will never be defini
tively refuted. If one form of it be put aside, it will
take another. Its principle, which is essentially psy
chological, is very flexible. It is so extensible, and
thereby so comprehensive, that one accepts something
of it as soon as one rejects pure mechanism. The
v theory we shall put forward in this book will therefore
^necessarily partake of finalism to a certain extent. For
that reason it is important to intimate exactly what
we are going to take of it, and what we mean to leave.
Let us say at once that to thin out the Leibnizian
finalism by breaking it into an infinite number of
pieces seems to us a step in the wrong direction.
This is, however, the tendency of the doctrine of
finality. It fully realizes that if the universe as a whole
is the carrying out of a plan, this cannot be demon-
i RADICAL FINALISM 43
strated empirically, and that even of the organized
world alone it is hardly easier to prove all harmonious :
facts would equally well testify to the contrary. Nature
sets living beings at discord with one another. She
everywhere presents disorder alongside of order, retro
gression alongside of progress. But, though finality
cannot be affirmed either of the whole of matter or
of the whole of life, might it not yet be true, says the
finalist, of each organism taken separately ? Is there
not a wonderful division of labour, a marvellous soli
darity among the parts of an organism, perfect order in
infinite complexity ? Does not each living being thus
realize a plan immanent in its substance ? This theory
consists, at bottom, in breaking up the original notion
of finality into bits. It does not accept, indeed it
ridicules, the idea of an external finality, according to
which living beings are ordered with regard to each
other : to suppose the grass made for the cow, the lamb
for the wolf that is all acknowledged to be absurd.
o
But there is, we are told, an internal finality : each
being is made for itself, all its parts conspire for
the greatest good of the whole and are intelligently
organized in view of that end. Such is the notion
of finality which has long been classic. Finalism has
shrunk to the point of never embracing more than one
living being at a time. By making itself smaller, it
probably thought it would offer less surface for blows.
The truth is, it lay open to them a great deal more.
Radical as our own theory may appear, finality is
external or it is nothing at all.
Consider the most complex and the most harmonious
organism. All the elements, we are told, conspire for
the greatest good of the whole. Very well, but let
us not forget that each of these elements may itself be
44 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
an organism in certain cases, and that in subordinating
the existence of this small organism to the life of the
great one we accept the principle of an external finality.
The idea of a finality that is always internal is therefore
a self-destructive notion. An organism is composed of
tissues, each of which lives for itself. The cells of which
the tissues are made have also a certain independence.
Strictly speaking, if the subordination of all the elements
of the individual to the individual itself were complete,
we might contend that they are not organisms, reserve
the name organism for the individual, and recognise
only internal finality. But every one knows that
these elements may possess a true autonomy. To say
nothing of phagocytes, which push independence to
the point of attacking the organism that nourishes
them, or of germinal cells, which have their own life
alongside the somatic cells, the facts of regeneration
are enough : here an element or a group of elements
suddenly reveals that, however limited its normal space
and function, it can transcend them occasionally ; it
may even, in certain cases, be regarded as the equivalent
of the whole.
There lies the stumbling-block of the vitalistic
theories. We shall not reproach them, as is ordinarily
done, with replying to the question by the question
itself: the " vital principle " may indeed not explain
much, but it is at least a sort of label affixed to our
ignorance, so as to remind us of this occasionally, 1 while
1 There are really two lines to follow in contemporary neo-vitalism : on
the one hand, the assertion that pure mechanism is insufficient, which assumes
great authority when made by such scientists as Driesch or Reinke, for
example ; and, on the other hand, the hypotheses which this vitalism super
poses on mechanism (the " entelechies " of Driesch, and the " dominants " of
Reinke, etc.). Of these two parts, the former is perhaps the more interesting
See the admirable studies of Driesch Die Localisation morphogenetischer
i RADICAL FINALISM 45
mechanism invites us to ignore that ignorance. But the
position of vitalism is rendered very difficult by the
fact that, in nature, there is neither purely internal
finality nor absolutely distinct individuality. The
organized elements composing the individual have
themselves a certain individuality, and each will claim
its vital principle if the individual pretends to have
its own. But, on the other hand, the individual itself
is not sufficiently independent, not sufficiently cut off
from other things, for us to allow it a " vital principle "
of its own. An organism such as a higher vertebrate
is the most individuated of all organisms ; yet, if we
take into account that it is only the development of an
ovum forming part of the body of its mother and of
a spermatozoon belonging to the body of its father,
that the egg (i.e. the ovum fertilized) is a connecting
link between the two progenitors since it is common
to their two substances, we shall realize that every
individual organism, even that of a man, is merely a
bud that has sprouted on the combined body of both
its parents. Where, then, does the vital principle of
the individual begin or end ? Gradually we shall be
carried further and further back, up to the individual s
remotest ancestors : we shall find him solidary with
each of them, solidary with that little mass of proto
plasmic jelly which is probably at the root of the
genealogical tree of life. Being, to a certain extent,
one with this primitive ancestor, he is also solidary
with all that descends from the ancestor in divergent
directions. In this sense each individual may be
forgange, Leipzig, 1899 ; Die organischen Regulationen, Leipzig, 1901 ;
Natitrbegriffe und Natururteile, Leipzig, 1904 ; Der Vitaltsmus ah Geschichte
und ah Lehre, Leipzig, 1905 ; and of Reinke Die Welt ah Tat, Berlin,
1899 ; Einleitung in die theoretische Biologie, Berlin, 1901 ; Philosophie dtr
Botanik, Leipzig, 1905.
46 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
said to remain united with the totality of living
beings by invisible bonds. So it is of no use to try
to restrict finality to the individuality of the living
being. If there is finality in the world of life, it
includes the whole of life in a single indivisible
embrace. This life common to all the living un
doubtedly presents many gaps and incoherences, and
again it is not so mathematically one that it cannot
allow each being to become individualized to a cer
tain degree. But it forms a single whole, none the
less ; and we have to choose between the out-and-
out negation of finality and the hypothesis which co
ordinates not only the parts of an organism with the
organism itself, but also each living being with the
collective whole of all others.
Finality will not go down any easier for being
taken as a powder. Either the hypothesis of a finality
immanent in life should be rejected as a whole, or
it must undergo a treatment very different from
pulverization.
The error of radical finalism, as also that of radical
mechanism, is to extend too far the application of
certain concepts that are natural to our intellect.
Originally, we think only in order to act. Our
intellect has been cast in the mould of action.
Speculation is a luxury, while action is a necessity.
Now, in order to act, we begin by proposing an end ;
we make a plan, then we go on to the detail of the
mechanism which will bring it to pass. This latter
operation is possible only if we know what we can
reckon on. We must therefore have managed to
extract resemblances from nature, which enable us to
anticipate the future. Thus we must, consciously or
i BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 47
unconsciously, have made use of the law of causality.
Moreover, the more sharply the idea of efficient
causality is defined in our mind, the more it takes
the form of a mechanical causality. And this scheme,
in its turn, is the more mathematical according as it
expresses a more rigorous necessity. That is why we
have only to follow the bent of our mind to become
mathematicians. But, on the other hand, this natural
mathematics is only the rigid unconscious skeleton
beneath our conscious supple habit of linking the
same causes to the same effects ; and the usual object
of this habit is to guide actions inspired by intentions,
or, what comes to the same, to direct movements com
bined with a view to reproducing a pattern. We are
born artisans as we are born geometricians, and indeed
we are geometricians only because we are artisans.
Thus the human intellect, inasmuch as it is fashioned
for the needs of human action, is an intellect which
proceeds at the same time by intention and by calcula
tion, by adapting means to ends and by thinking out
mechanisms of more and more geometrical form.
Whether nature be conceived as an immense machine
regulated by mathematical laws, or as the realization
of a plan, these two ways of regarding it are only the
consummation of two tendencies of mind which are
complementary to each other, and which have their
origin in the same vital necessities.
For that reason, radical finalism is very near radical
mechanism on many points. Both doctrines are reluct
ant to see in the course of things generally, or even
simply in the development of life, an unforeseeable
creation of form. In considering reality, mechanism
regards only the aspect of similarity or repetition. It
is therefore dominated by this law, that in nature there
48 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
is only like reproducing like. The more the geometry
in mechanism is emphasized, the less can mechanism
admit that anything is ever created, even pure form.
In so far as we are geometricians, then, we reject the
unforeseeable. We might accept it, assuredly, in so
far as we are artists, for art lives on creation and
implies a latent belief in the spontaneity of nature.
But disinterested art is a luxury, like pure specula
tion. Long before being artists, we are artisans ; and
all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness
and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves
as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which
it sets out to reproduce ; and even w r hen it invents,
it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new
arrangement of elements already known. Its principle
is that "we must have like to produce like." In
short, the strict application of the principle of finality,
like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads
to the conclusion that " all is given." Both principles
say the same thing in their respective languages, because
they respond to the same need.
That is why again they agree in doing away with time.
Real duration is that duration which gnaws on things,
and leaves on them the mark of its tooth. If every
thing is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the
same concrete reality never recurs. Repetition is there
fore possible only in the abstract : what is repeated is
some aspect that our senses, and especially our intellect,
have singled out from reality, just because our action,
upon which all the effort of our intellect is directed,
can move only among repetitions. Thus, concentrated
on that which repeats, solely preoccupied in welding
the same to the same, intellect turns away from the
vision of time. It dislikes what is fluid, and solidifies
BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 49
everything it toudjL^&r We "do nor~Mnk^jce^\ time.
But we live it, beau$e_life transcends intellect. The
feeling we have of our evoTuTi^rr and^o^flte evolution
of all things in pure duration is there, forming around
the intellectual concept properly so-called an indistinct
fringe that fades off into darkness. Mechanism and
o
finalism agree in taking account only of the bright
nucleus shining in the centre. They forget that this
nucleus has been formed out of the rest by con
densation, and that the whole must be used, the fluid
as well as and more than the condensed, in order to
grasp the inner movement of life.
Indeed, if the fringe exists, however delicate and
indistinct, it should have more importance for philo
sophy than the bright nucleus it surrounds. For it is
its presence that enables us to affirm that the nucleus
is a nucleus, that pure intellect is a contraction, by con
densation, of a more extensive power. And, just
because this vague intuition is of no help in directing
our action on things, which action takes place ex
clusively on the surface of reality, we may presume
that it is to be exercised not merely on the surface,
but below.
As soon as we go out of the encasings in which
radical mechanism and radical finalism confine our
thought, reality appears as a ceaseless upspringing of
something new, which has no sooner arisen to make
the present than it has already fallen back into the
past ; at this exact moment it falls under the glance
of the intellect, whose eyes are ever turned to the rear.
This is already the case with our inner life. For each
of our acts we shall easily find antecedents of which it
may in some sort be said to be the mechanical resultant.
And it may equally well be said that each action is the
5 o CREATIVE EVOLUTION
realization of an intention. In this sense mechanism
is everywhere, and finality everywhere, in the evolu
tion of our conduct. But if our action be one that
involves the whole of our person and is truly ours,
it could not have been foreseen, even though its ante
cedents explain it when once it has been accomplished.
And though it be the realizing of an intention, it
differs, as a present and new reality, from the intention,
which can never aim at anything but recommencing or
rearranging the past. Mechanism and finalism are
therefore, here, only external views of our conduct.
They extract its intellectuality. But our conduct slips
between them and extends much further. Once again,
this does not mean that free action is capricious, un
reasonable action. To behave according to caprice is
to oscillate mechanically between two or more ready-
made alternatives and at length to settle on one of
them ; it is no real maturing of an internal state, no
real evolution ; it is merely however paradoxical the
assertion may seem bending the will to imitate the
mechanism of the intellect. A conduct that is truly
our own, on the contrary, is that of a will which does
not try to counterfeit intellect, and which, remaining
itself that is to say, evolving ripens gradually into
acts which the intellect will be able to resolve in
definitely into intelligible elements without ever reach
ing its goal. The free act is incommensurable with
the idea, and its " rationality " must be defined by this
very incommensurability, which admits the discovery
of as much intelligibility within it as we will. Such is
the character of our own evolution ; and such also,
without doubt, that of the evolution of life.
Our reason, incorrigibly presumptuous, imagines
itself possessed, by right of birth or by right of con-
, BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 51
quest, innate or acquired, of all the essential elements
of the knowledge of truth. Even where it confesses
that it does not know the object presented to it, it
believes that its ignorance consists only in not knowing
which one of its time-honoured categories suits the
new object. In what drawer, ready to open, shall we
put it ? In what garment, already cut out, shall we
clothe it ? Is it this, or that, or the other thing ? And
"this," and "that," and "the other thing" are always
something already conceived, already known. The
idea that for a new object we might have to create a
new concept, perhaps a new method of thinking, is
I deeply repugnant to us. The history of philosophy is
\there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of
(systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the
/real into the ready-made garments of our ready-made
) concepts, the necessity of making to measure. But,
j rather than go to this extremity, our reason prefers to
announce once for all, with a proud modesty, that it has
\ to do only with the relative, and that the absolute is not
in its province. This preliminary declaration enables
it to apply its habitual method of thought without
any scruple, and thus, under pretence that it does
not touch the absolute, to make absolute judgments
upon everything. Plato was the first to set up the
theory that to know the real consists in finding its Idea,
that is to say, in forcing it into a pre-existing frame
already at our disposal as if we implicitly possessed
universal knowledge. But this belief is natural to the
human intellect, always engaged as it is in determining
under what former heading it shall catalogue any new
object ; and it may be said that, in a certain sense, we
are all born Platonists.
Nowhere is the inadequacy of this method so obvious
5 2 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
as in theories of life. If, in evolving in the direction
of the vertebrates in general, of man and intellect in par
ticular, life has had to abandon by the way many elements
incompatible with this particular mode of organization
and consign them, as we shall show, to other lines of
development, it is the totality of these elements that we
must find again and rejoin to the intellect proper, in
order to grasp the true nature of vital activity. And
we shall probably be aided in this by the fringe of vague
intuition that surrounds our distinct that is, intellectual
representation. For what can this useless fringe be,
if not that part of the evolving principle which has not
shrunk to the peculiar form of our organization, but has
settled around it unasked for, unwanted ? It is there,
accordingly, that we must look for hints to expand the
intellectual form of our thought ; from there shall we
derive the impetus necessary to lift us above ourselves.
To form an idea of the whole of life cannot consist in
combining simple ideas that have been left behind in us
by life itself in the course of its evolution. How could
the part be equivalent to the whole, the content to
the container, a by-product of the vital operation to
the operation itself? Such, however, is our illusion
when we define the evolution of life as a " passage from
the homogeneous to the heterogeneous," or by any
other concept obtained by putting fragments of intellect
side by side. We place ourselves in one of the points
where evolution comes to a head the principal one,
no doubt, but not the only one ; and there we do
not even take all we find, for of the intellect we keep
only one or two of the concepts by which it expresses
itself; and it is this part of a part that we declare
representative of the whole, of something indeed which
goes beyond the concrete whole, I mean of the evolution
i BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 53
movement of which this "whole " is only the present
stage ! The truth is, that to represent this the entire
intellect would not be too much nay, it would not be
enough. It would be necessary to add to it what
we find in every other terminal point of evolution.
And these diverse and divergent elements must be
considered as so many extracts which are, or at least
which were, in their humblest form, mutually com
plementary. Only then might we have an inkling of
the real nature of the evolution movement ; and even
then we should fail to grasp it completely, for we
should still be dealing only with the evolved, which
is a result, and not with evolution itself, which is the
act by which the result is obtained.
Such is the philosophy of life to which we are
leading up. It claims to transcend both mechanism
and finalism ; but, as we announced at the beginning, "
it is nearer the second doctrine than the first. It will / r
not be amiss to dwell on this point, and show more {
precisely how far this philosophy of life resembles f
finalism and wherein it is different.
Like radical finalism, although in a vaguer form,
our philosophy represents the organized world as a
harmonious whole. But this harmony is far from
being as perfect as it has been claimed to be. It admits
of much discord, because each species, each individual
even, retains only a certain impetus from the universal
vital impulsion and tends to use this energy in its own
interest. In this consists adaptation. The species and
the individual thus think only of themselves whence
arises a possible conflict with other forms of life.
Harmony, therefore, does not exist in fact ; it exists
rather in principle ; I mean that the original impetus
is a common impetus, and the higher we ascend the
54 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
stream of life the more do diverse tendencies appear
complementary to each other. Thus the wind at a
street corner divides into diverging currents which are
all one and the same gust. Harmony, or rather
" complementarity," is revealed only in the mass, in
tendencies rather than in states. Especially (and this
is the point on which finalism has been most seriously
mistaken) harmony is rather behind us than before. It
is due to an identity of impulsion and not to a common
aspiration. It would be futile to try to assign to life
an end, in the human sense of the word. To speak of
an end is to think of a pre-existing model which has
only to be realized. It is to suppose, therefore, that
all is given, and that the future can be read in the
present. It is to believe that life, in its movement and
in its entirety, goes to work like our intellect, which
is only a motionless and fragmentary view of life, and
which naturally takes its stand outside of time. Life,
on the contrary, progresses and endures in time. Of
course, when once the road has been travelled, we
can glance over it, mark its direction, note this in
psychological terms and speak as if there had been
pursuit of an end. Thus shall we speak ourselves.
But, of the road which was going to be travelled, the
human mind could have nothing to say, for the road
has been created pan passu with the act of travelling
over it, being nothing but the direction of this act itself.
At every instant, then, evolution must admit of a
psychological interpretation which is, from our point
of view, the best interpretation ; but this explanation
has neither value nor even significance except retrospec
tively. Never could the finalistic interpretation, such as
we shall propose it, be taken for an anticipation of the
future. It is a particular mode of viewing the past in
i BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 55
the light of the present. In short, the classic conception
of finality postulates at once too much and too little :
it is both too wide and too narrow. In explaining life
by intellect, it limits too much the meaning of life :
intellect, such at least as we find it in ourselves, has
been fashioned by evolution during the course of
progress ; it is cut out of something larger, or, rather,
it is only the projection, necessarily on a plane, of a
reality that possesses both relief and depth. It is this
more comprehensive reality that true finalism ought to
reconstruct, or, rather, if possible, embrace in one view.
But, on the other hand, just because it goes beyond
intellect- the faculty of connecting the same with the
same, of perceiving and also of producing repetitions
this reality is undoubtedly creative, i.e. productive of
effects in which it expands and transcends its own being.
These effects were therefore not given in it in advance,
and so it could not take them for ends, although, when
once produced, they admit of a rational interpretation,
like that of the manufactured article that has reproduced
a model. In short, the theory of final causes does not
go far enough when it confines itself to ascribing some
intelligence to nature, and it goes too far when it
supposes a pre-existence of the future in the present in
the form of idea. And the second theory, which sins
by excess, is the outcome of the first, which sins by
defect. In place of intellect proper must be substituted
the more comprehensive reality of which intellect is
only the contraction. The future then appears as
expanding the present : it was not, therefore, con
tained in the present in the form of a represented
end. And yet, once realized, it will explain the present
as much as the present explains it, and even more ;
it must be viewed as an end as much as, and more
5 6 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
than, a result. Our intellect has a right to consider
the future abstractly from its habitual point of view,
being itself an abstract view of the cause of its own
being.
It is true that the cause may then seem beyond our
grasp. Already the finalist theory of life eludes all
precise verification. What if we go beyond it in one of
its directions ? Here, in fact, after a necessary digres
sion, we are back at the question which we regard as
essential : can the insufficiency of mechanism be proved
by facts ? We said that if this demonstration is
possible, it is on condition of frankly accepting the
evolutionist hypothesis. We must now show that if
mechanism is insufficient to account for evolution, the
way of proving this insufficiency is not to stop at the
classic conception of finality, still less to contract or
attenuate it, but, on the contrary, to go further.
Let us indicate at once the principle of our demon
stration. We said of life that, from its origin, it is
the continuation of one and the same impetus,
divided into divergent lines of evolution. Something
has grown, something has developed by a series of
additions which have been so many creations. This
very development has brought about a dissociation of
tendencies which were unable to grow beyond a certain
point without becoming mutually incompatible. Strictly
speaking, there is nothing to prevent our imagining
that the evolution of life might have taken place in one
single individual by means of a series of transformations
spread over thousands of ages. Or, instead of a single
individual, any number might be supposed, succeeding
each other in a unilinear series. In both cases evolu
tion would have had, so to speak, one dimension only.
But evolution has actually taken place through millions
i THE QUEST OF A CRITERION 57
of individuals, on divergent lines, each ending at a
crossing from which new paths radiate, and so on
indefinitely. If our hypothesis is justified, if the
essential causes working along these diverse roads are
of psychological nature, they must keep something in
common in spite of the divergence of their effects, as
school-fellows long separated keep the same memories
of boyhood. Roads may fork or by-ways be opened
along which dissociated elements may evolve in an inde
pendent manner, but nevertheless it is in virtue of the
primitive impetus of the whole that the movement of
the parts continues. Something of the whole, therefore,
must abide in the parts ; and this common element
will be evident to us in some way, perhaps by the
presence of identical organs in very different organisms.
Suppose, for an instant, that the mechanistic explana
tion is the true one : evolution must then have occurred
through a series of accidents added to one another,
each new accident being preserved by selection if it
is advantageous to that sum of former advantageous
accidents which the present form of the living being
represents. What likelihood is there that, by two
entirely different series of accidents being added to
gether, two entirely different evolutions will arrive at
similar results ? The more two lines of evolution
diverge, the less probability is there that accidental outer
influences or accidental inner variations bring about the
construction of the same apparatus upon them, especially
if there was no trace of this apparatus at the moment
of divergence. But such similarity of the two products
would be natural, on the contrary, on a hypothesis like
ours : even in the latest channel there would be some
thing of the impulsion received at the source. Pure
mechanism, then, would be refutable, and finality , in
5 8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
the special sense in which we understand it, would be
demonstrable in a certain aspect ^ if it could be -proved that
life may manufacture the like apparatus, by unlike means,
on divergent lines of evolution; and the strength of the proof
would be proportional both to the divergency between the
lines of evolution thus chosen and to the complexity of the
similar structures found in them.
It will be said that resemblance of structure is due
to sameness of the general conditions in which life has
evolved, and that these permanent outer conditions may
have imposed the same direction on the forces con
structing this or that apparatus, in spite of the diversity
of transient outer influences and accidental inner changes.
We are not, of course, blind to the role which the
concept of adaptation plays in the science of to-day.
Biologists certainly do not all make the same use of it.
Some think the outer conditions capable of causing
change in organisms in a direct manner, in a definite
direction, through physico-chemical alterations induced
by them in the living substance ; such is the hypothesis
of Eimer, for example. Others, more faithful to the
spirit of Darwinism, believe the influence of conditions
works indirectly only, through favouring, in the struggle
for life, those representatives of a species which the
chance of birth has best adapted to the environment.
In other words, some attribute a positive influence to
outer conditions, and say that they actually give rise to
variations, while the others say these conditions have
only a negative influence and merely eliminate variations.
But, in both cases, the outer conditions are supposed
to bring about a precise adjustment of the organism to
its circumstances. Both parties, then, will attempt to
explain mechanically, by adaptation to similar condi
tions, the similarities of structure which we think are
THE QUEST OF A CRITERION 59
the strongest argument against mechanism. So we
must at once indicate in a general way, before passing
to the detail, why explanations from "adaptation " seem
to us insufficient.
Let us first remark that, of the two hypotheses
just described, the latter is the only one which is not
equivocal. The Darwinian idea of adaptation by auto
matic elimination of the unadapted is a simple and clear
idea. But, just because it attributes to the outer cause
which controls evolution a merely negative influence,
it has great difficulty in accounting for the progressive
and, so to say, rectilinear development of complex
apparatus such as we are about to examine. How
much greater will this difficulty be in the case of the
similar structure of two extremely complex organs
on two entirely different lines of evolution ! An
accidental variation, however minute, implies the
working of a great number of small physical and
chemical causes. An accumulation of accidental varia
tions, such as would be necessary to produce a com
plex structure, requires therefore the concurrence
of an almost infinite number of infinitesimal causes.
Why should these causes, entirely accidental, recur the
same, and in the same order, at different points of space
and time ? No one will hold that this is the case,
and the Darwinian himself will probably merely main
tain that identical effects may arise from different causes,
that more than one road leads to the same spot. But
let us not be fooled by a metaphor. The place reached
does not give the form of the road that leads there ;
while an organic structure is just the accumulation of
those small differences which evolution has had to go
through in order to achieve it. The struggle for life
and natural selection can be of no use to us in solving
60 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
this part of the problem, for we are not concerned here
with what has perished, we have to do only with what
has survived. Now, we see that identical structures
have been formed on independent lines of evolution by
a gradual accumulation of effects. How can accidental
causes, occurring in an accidental order, be supposed
to have repeatedly come to the same result, the causes
being infinitely numerous and the effect infinitely
complicated ?
The principle of mechanism is that " the same causes
produce the same effects." This principle, of course,
does not always imply that the same effects must have
the same causes ; but it does involve this consequence
in the particular case in which the causes remain visible
in the effect that they produce and are indeed its
constitutive elements. That two walkers starting from
different points and wandering at random should finally
meet, is no great wonder. But that, throughout their
walk, they should describe two identical curves exactly
superposable on each other, is altogether unlikely. The
improbability will be the greater, the more complicated
the routes ; and it will become impossibility, if the
zigzags are infinitely complicated. Now, what is this
complexity of zigzags as compared with that of an
organ in which thousands of different cells, each being
itself a kind of organism, are arranged in a definite
order ?
Let us turn, then, to the other hypothesis, and see
how it would solve the problem. Adaptation, it says,
is not merely elimination of the unadapted ; it is due
to the positive influence of outer conditions that have
moulded the organism on their own form. This time,
similarity of effects will be explained by similarity of
cause. We shall remain, apparently, in pure mechanism.
, THE QUEST OF A CRITERION 61
But if we look closely, we shall see that the explanation
is merely verbal, that we are again the dupes of words,
and that the trick of the solution consists in taking the
term " adaptation " in two entirely different senses at
the same time.
If I pour into the same glass, by turns, water and
wine, the two liquids will take the same form, and the
sameness in form will be due to the sameness in
adaptation of content to container. Adaptation, here,
really means mechanical adjustment. The reason ie
that the form to which the matter has adapted itself
was there, ready-made, and has forced its own shape
on the matter. But, in the adaptation of an organism
to the circumstances it has to live in, where is the pre
existing form awaiting its matter ? The circumstances
are not a mould into which life is inserted and whose
form life adopts : this is indeed to be fooled by a
metaphor. There is no form yet, and life must create
a form for itself, suited to the circumstances which are
made for it. It will have to make the best of these
circumstances, neutralize their inconveniences and
utilize their advantages in short, respond to outer
actions by building up a machine which has no re
semblance to them. Such adapting is not repeating, but
replying, an entirely different thing. If there is still
adaptation, it will be in the sense in which one may say
of the solution of a problem of geometry, for example,
that it is adapted to the conditions. I grant indeed
that adaptation so understood explains why different
evolutionary processes result in similar forms : the same
problem, of course, calls for the same solution. But
it is necessary then to introduce, as for the solution of a
problem of geometry, an intelligent activity, or at least
a cause which behaves in the same way. This is to bring
62 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
in finality again, and a finality this time more than ever
charged with anthropomorphic elements. In a word, if
the adaptation is passive, if it is mere repetition in the
relief of what the conditions give in the mould, it will
build up nothing that one tries to make it build ; and
if it is active, capable of responding by a calculated solu
tion to the problem which is set out in the conditions,
that is going further than we do too far, indeed, in
our opinion in the direction we indicated in the
beginning. But the truth is that there is a surreptitious
passing from one of these two meanings to the other,
a flight for refuge to the first whenever one is about to
be caught in flagrante delicto of final ism by employing
the second. It is really the second which serves the
usual practice of science, but it is the first that generally
provides its philosophy. In any particular case one
talks as if the process of adaptation were an effort of
the organism to build up a machine capable of turning
external circumstances to the best possible account :
then one speaks of adaptation /;/ general as if it were
the very impress of circumstances, passively received
by an indifferent matter.
But let us come to the examples. It would be
interesting first to institute here a general comparison
between plants and animals. One cannot fail to be
struck with the parallel progress which has been accom
plished, on both sides, in the direction of sexuality.
Not only is fecundation itself the same in higher plants
and in animals, since it consists, in both, in the
union of two nuclei that differ in their properties and
structure before their union and immediately after
become equivalent to each other ; but the preparation
of sexual elements goes on in both under like con
ditions : it consists essentially in the reduction of the
i THE CHOICE OF AN EXAMPLE 63
number of chromosomes and the rejection of a certain
quantity of chromatic substance. 1 Yet vegetables and
animals have evolved on independent lines, favoured
by unlike circumstances, opposed by unlike obstacles.
Here are two great series which have gone on
diverging. On either line, thousands and thousands
of causes have combined to determine the morpho
logical and functional evolution. Yet these infinitely
complicated causes have been consummated, in each
series, in the same effect. And this effect could
hardly be called a phenomenon of " adaptation " :
where is the adaptation, where is the pressure of
external circumstances ? There is no striking utility
in sexual generation ; it has been interpreted in the
most diverse ways ; and some very acute enquirers
even regard the sexuality of the plant, at least, as a
luxury which nature might have dispensed with. 2 But
we do not wish to dwell on facts so disputed. The
ambiguity of the term " adaptation," and the necessity
of transcending both the point of view of mechanical
causality and that of anthropomorphic finality, will
stand out more clearly with simpler examples. At all
times the doctrine of finality has laid much stress on
the marvellous structure of the sense-organs, in order
to liken the work of nature to that of an intelligent
o
workman. Now, since these organs are found, in a
rudimentary state, in the lower animals, and since
nature offers us many intermediaries between the
pigment-spot of the simplest organisms and the in-
1 P. Guerin, Les Connaissances actuelles sur la fecondation chez les pha-
nfrogames, Paris, 1904, pp. 144-148. Cf. Delage, UHe r&tite, 2nd edition,
1903, pp. 140 ff.
2 Mobius, Eeitrdge zur Lehre <von der Fortpflanzung der Genvacfise, Jena,
1897, pp. 203-206 in particular. Cf. Hartog, "Sur les phenomenes de re
production" (Annte biologique, 1895, pp. 707-709).
64 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
finitely complex eye of the vertebrates, it may just as
well be alleged that the result has been brought about
by natural selection perfecting the organ automatically.
In short, if there is a case in which it seems justifiable
to invoke adaptation, it is this particular one. For
there may be discussion about the function and mean
ing of such a thing as sexual generation, in so far as
it is related to the conditions in which it occurs ; but
the relation of the eye to light is obvious, and when
we call this relation an adaptation, we must know what
we mean. If, then, we can show, in this privileged
case, the insufficiency of the principles invoked on both
sides, our demonstration will at once have reached a
high degree of generality.
Let us consider the example on which the advocates
of finality have always insisted : the structure of such
an organ as the human eye. They have had no diffi
culty in showing that in this extremely complicated
apparatus all the elements are marvellously co
ordinated. In order that vision shall operate, says the
author of a well-known book on Final Causes, " the
sclerotic membrane must become transparent in one
point of its surface, so as to enable luminous rays to
pierce it . . . ; the cornea must correspond exactly
with the opening of the socket . . . ; behind this
transparent opening there must be refracting media
. . . ; there must be a retina 1 at the extremity of the
dark chamber . . . ; perpendicular to the retina there
must be an innumerable quantity of transparent cones
permitting only the light directed in the line of their
axes to reach the nervous membrane," 2 etc. etc. In
reply, the advocate of final causes has been invited to
1 Paul Janet, Les Causes finales, Paris, 1876, p. 83.
2 Ibid. p. 80.
i THE CHOICE OF AN EXAMPLE 65
assume the evolutionist hypothesis. Everything is
marvellous, indeed, if one consider an eye like ours, in
which thousands of elements are coordinated in a
single function. But take the function at its origin, in
the Infusorian, where it is reduced to the mere impres
sionability (almost purely chemical) of a pigment-spot
to light : this function, possibly only an accidental
fact in the beginning, may have brought about a slight
complication of the organ, which again induced an
improvement of the function. It may have done this
either directly, through some unknown mechanism, or
indirectly, merely through the effect of the advantages it
brought to the living being and the hold it thus offered
to natural selection. Thus the progressive formation
of an eye as well contrived as ours would be explained
by an almost infinite number of actions and reactions
between the function and the organ, without the inter
vention of other than mechanical causes.
The question is hard to decide, indeed, when
put directly between the function and the organ, as
is done in the doctrine of finality, as also mechanism
itself does. For organ and function are terms of
different nature, and each conditions the other so
closely that it is impossible to say a priori whether in
expressing their relation we should begin with the first,
as does mechanism, or with the second, as finalism
requires. But the discussion would take an entirely
different turn, we think, if we began by comparing
together two terms of the same nature, an organ with
an organ, instead of an organ with its function. In
this case, it would be possible to proceed little by little
to a solution more and more plausible, and there would
be the more chance of a successful issue the more
resolutely we assumed the evolutionist hypothesis.
66 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
Let us place side by side the eye of a vertebrate
and that of a mollusc such as the common Pecten.
We find the same essential parts in each, composed of
analogous elements. The eye of the Pecten presents
a retina, a cornea, a lens of cellular structure like
our own. There is even that peculiar inversion of
retinal elements which is not met with, in general,
in the retina of the invertebrates. Now, the origin
of molluscs may be a debated question, but, what
ever opinion we hold, all are agreed that molluscs
and vertebrates separated from their common parent-
stem long before the appearance of an eye so complex
as that of the Pecten. Whence, then, the structural
analogy ?
Let us question on this point the two opposed
systems of evolutionist explanation in turn the hypo
thesis of purely accidental variations, and that of a
variation directed in a definite way under the influence
of external conditions.
The first, as is well known, is presented to-day in
two quite different forms. Darwin spoke of very
slight variations being accumulated by natural selection.
He was not ignorant of the facts of sudden variation ;
but he thought these " sports," as he called them, were
only monstrosities incapable of perpetuating them
selves ; and he accounted for the genesis of species by
an accumulation of insensible variations. 1 Such is still
the opinion of many naturalists. It is tending, how
ever, to give way to the opposite idea that a new
species comes into being all at once by the simultaneous
appearance of several new characters, all somewhat
different from the previous ones. This latter hypo
thesis, already proposed by various authors, notably
1 Darwin, Origin of Species, chap. ii.
i INSENSIBLE VARIATION 67
by Bateson in a remarkable book, 1 has become deeply
significant and acquired great force since the striking
experiments of Hugo de Vries. This botanist, work
ing on the Oenothera Lamarckiana, obtained at the
end of a few generations a certain number of new
species. The theory he deduces from his experiments
is of the highest interest. Species pass through
alternate periods of stability and transformation.
When the period of "mutability" occurs, unexpected
forms spring forth in a great number of different
directions. 2 We will not attempt to take sides between
this hypothesis and that of insensible variations.
Indeed, perhaps both are partly true. We wish
merely to point out that if the variations invoked are
accidental, they do not, whether small or great, account
for a similarity of structure such as we have cited.
Let us assume, to begin with, the Darwinian theory
of insensible variations, and suppose the occurrence of
small differences due to chance, and continually accumu
lating. It must not be forgotten that all the parts
of an organism are necessarily coordinated. Whether
the function be the effect of the organ or its cause, it
matters little ; one point is certain the organ will be
of no use and will not give selection a hold unless it
functions. However the minute structure of the
retina may develop, and however complicated it may
become, such progress, instead of favouring vision,
will probably hinder it if the visual centres do not
develop at the same time, as well as several parts of
the visual organ itself. If the variations are accidental,
1 Bateson, Materials for the Study of Variation, London, 1894, especially
pp. 567 ff. Cf. Scott, "Variations and Mutations" (American Journal of
Science, Nov. 1894).
2 De Vries, Die Mutationstheorie, Leipzig, 1901-1903. Cf., by the same
author, Species and Varieties, Chicago, 1905.
68 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
how can they ever agree to arise in every part of the
organ at the same time, in such way that the organ
will continue to perform its function ? Darwin quite
understood this ; it is one of the reasons why he
regarded variation as insensible. 1 For a difference
which arises accidentally at one point of the visual
apparatus, if it be very slight, will not hinder the
functioning of the organ ; and hence this first
accidental variation can, in a sense, wait for comple
mentary variations to accumulate and raise vision to a
higher degree of perfection. Granted ; but while the
insensible variation does not hinder the functioning
of the eye, neither does it help it, so long as the varia
tions that are complementary do not occur. How,
in that case, can the variation be retained by natural
selection? Unwittingly one will reason as if the slight
variation were a toothing stone set up by the organism
and reserved for a later construction. This hypothesis.
so little conformable to the Darwinian principle, is
difficult enough to avoid even in the case of an organ
which has been developed along one single main line of
evolution, e.g. the vertebrate eye. But it is absolutely
forced upon us when we observe the likeness of
structure of the vertebrate eye and that of the molluscs.
How could the same small variations, incalculable in
number, have ever occurred in the same order on two
independent lines of evolution, if they were purely
accidental ? And how could they have been preserved
by selection and accumulated in both cases, the same
in the same order, when each of them, taken separately,
was of no use ?
Let us turn, then, to the hypothesis of sudden
variations, and see whether it will solve the problem.
1 Darwin, Origin of Species, chap. vi.
i SUDDEN VARIATION 69
It certainly lessens the difficulty on one point, but it
makes it much worse on another. If the eye of the
mollusc and that of the vertebrate have both been
raised to their present form by a relatively small number
of sudden leaps, I have less difficulty in understand
ing the resemblance of the two organs than if this
resemblance were due to an incalculable number of
infinitesimal resemblances acquired successively : in
both cases it is chance that operates, but in the second
case chance is not required to work the miracle it
would have to perform in the first. Not only is
the number of resemblances to be added somewhat
reduced, but I can also understand better how each
could be preserved and added to the others ; for the
elementary variation is now considerable enough to be
an advantage to the living being, and so to lend itself
to the play of selection. But here there arises another
problem, no less formidable, viz., how do all the parts
of the visual apparatus, suddenly changed, remain so
well coordinated that the eye continues to exercise
its function ? For the change of one part alone will
make vision impossible, unless this change is absolutely
infinitesimal. The parts must then all change at once,
each consulting the others. I agree that a great
number of uncoordinated variations may indeed have
arisen in less fortunate individuals, that natural selec
tion may have eliminated these, and that only the
combination fit to endure, capable of preserving and
improving vision, has survived. Still, this combina
tion had to be produced. And, supposing chance to
have granted this favour once, can we admit that it
repeats the self-same favour in the course of the history
of a species, so as to give rise, every time, all at once, to
new complications marvellously regulated with reference
70 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP
to each other, and so related to former complications
as to go further on in the same direction ? How,
especially, can we suppose that by a series of mere
" accidents " these sudden variations occur, the same,
in the same order, involving in each case a perfect
harmony of elements more and more numerous and
complex, along two independent lines of evolution ?
The law of correlation will be invoked, of course ;
Darwin himself appealed to it. 1 It will be alleged
that a change is not localized in a single point of the
organism, but has its necessary recoil on other points.
The examples cited by Darwin remain classic : white
cats with blue eyes are generally deaf ; hairless dogs
have imperfect dentition, etc. Granted ; but let us not
play now on the word "correlation." A collective
whole of solidary changes is one thing, a system of
complementary changes changes so coordinated as
to keep up and even improve the functioning of an
organ under more complicated conditions is another.
That an anomaly of the pilous system should be
accompanied by an anomaly of dentition is quite
conceivable without our having to call for a special
principle of explanation ; for hair and teeth are
similar formations, 2 and the same chemical change of
the germ that hinders the formation of hair would
probably obstruct that of teeth : it may be for the
same sort of reason that white cats with blue eyes
are deaf. In these different examples the " cor
relative " changes are only solidary changes (not to
mention the fact that they are really lesions, namely,
diminutions or suppressions, and not additions, which
1 Darwin, Origin of Species, chap. i.
2 On this homology of hair and teeth, see Brandt, "tiber . . . eine
mutmassliche Homologie der Haare und Zahne " (BioL Centralblatt, vol
xviii., 1898, especially pp. 262 ff.).
, SUDDEN VARIATION 71
makes a great difference). But when we speak of
" correlative " changes occurring suddenly in the
different parts of the eye, we use the word in an
entirely new sense : this time there is a whole set
of changes not only simultaneous, not only bound
together by community of origin, but so coordinated
that the organ keeps on performing the same simple
function, and even performs it better. That a change
in the germ, which influences the formation of the
retina, may affect at the same time also the formation
of the cornea, the iris, the lens, the visual centres, etc.,
I admit, if necessary, although they are formations that
differ much more from one another in their original
nature than do probably hair and teeth. But that all
these simultaneous changes should occur in such a way
as to improve or even merely maintain vision, this is
what, in the hypothesis of sudden variation, I cannot
admit, unless a mysterious principle is to come in,
whose duty it is to watch over the interest of the
function. But this would be to give up the idea of
" accidental " variation. In reality, these two senses of
the word " correlation " are often interchanged in the
mind of the biologist, just like the two senses of the
word "adaptation." And the confusion is almost
legitimate in botany, that science in which the theory
of the formation of species by sudden variation rests
on the firmest experimental basis. In vegetables,
function is far less narrowly bound to form than
in animals. Even profound morphological differences,
such as a change in the form of leaves, have no appreci
able influence on the exercise of function, and so do not
require a whole system of complementary changes for
the plant to remain fit to survive. But it is not so in
the animal, especially in the case of an organ like the eye,
72 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
of very complex structure and very delicate function.
Here it is impossible to identify changes that are simply
solidary with changes which are also complementary.
The two senses of the word "correlation" must be
carefully distinguished ; it would be a downright
paralogism to adopt one of them in the premisses of
the reasoning, and the other in the conclusion. And
this is just what is done when the principle of correlation
is invoked in explanations of detail in order to account
for complementary variations, and then correlation
in general is spoken of as if it were any group of
variations provoked by any variation of the germ.
Thus, the notion of correlation is first used in current
science as it might be used by an advocate of finality ;
it is understood that this is only a convenient way of
expressing oneself, that one will correct it and fall back
on pure mechanism when explaining the nature of the
principles and turning from science to philosophy.
And one does then come back to pure mechanism,
but only by giving a new meaning to the word
" correlation," a meaning which would now make
correlation inapplicable to the detail it is called upon
to explain.
To sum up, if the accidental variations that bring
about evolution are insensible variations, some good
genius must be appealed to the genius of the
future species in order to preserve and accumulate
these variations, for selection will not look after this.
If, on the other hand, the accidental variations are
sudden, then, for the previous function to go on or
for a new function to take its place, all the changes
that have happened together must be complementary.
So we have to fall back on the good genius again,
this time to obtain the convergence of simultaneous
t ORTHOGENESIS 73
changes, as before to be assured of the continuity of
direction of successive variations. But in neither case can
parallel development of the same complex structures
on independent lines of evolution be due to a mere
accumulation of accidental variations. So we come
to the second of the two great hypotheses we have
to examine. Suppose the variations are due, not to
accidental and inner causes, but to the direct influence
of outer circumstances. Let us see what line we
should have to take, on this hypothesis, to account
for the resemblance of eye-structure in two series that
are independent of each other from the phylogenetic
point of view.
Though molluscs and vertebrates have evolved
separately, both have remained exposed to the influence
of light. And light is a physical cause bringing forth
certain definite effects. Acting in a continuous way,
it has been able to produce a continuous variation
in a constant direction. Of course it is unlikely
that the eye of the vertebrate and that of the mollusc
have been built up by a series of variations due to
simple chance. Admitting even that light enters into
the case as an instrument of selection, in order to
allow only useful variations to persist, there is no
possibility that the play of chance, even thus supervised
from without, should bring about in both cases the
same juxtaposition of elements coordinated in the same
way. But it would be different supposing that light
acted directly on the organized matter so as to change
its structure and somehow adapt this structure to its
own form. The resemblance of the two effects would
then be explained by the identity of the cause. The
more and more complex eye would be something like
the deeper and deeper imprint of light on a matter
74 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP
which, being organized, possesses a special aptitude for
receiving it.
But can an organic structure be likened to an
imprint ? We have already called attention to the
ambiguity of the term "adaptation." The gradual
complication of a form which is being better and better
adapted to the mould of outward circumstances is one
thing, the increasingly complex structure of an instru
ment which derives more and more advantage from
these circumstances is another. In the former case, the
matter merely receives an imprint ; in the second, it
reacts positively, it solves a problem. Obviously it is
this second sense of the word " adapt " that is used
when one says that the eye has become better and better
adapted to the influence of light. But one passes more
or less unconsciously from this sense to the other, and
a purely mechanistic biology will strive to make the
passive adaptation of an inert matter, which submits
to the influence of its environment, mean the same as
the active adaptation of an organism which derives from
this influence an advantage it can appropriate. It must
be owned, indeed, that Nature herself appears to invite
our mind to confuse these two kinds of adaptation, for
she usually begins by a passive adaptation where, later
on, she will build up a mechanism for active response.
Thus, in the case before us, it is unquestionable that
the first rudiment of the eye is found in the pigment-
spot of the lower organisms ; this spot may indeed
have been produced physically, by the mere action of
light, and there are a great number of intermediaries
between the simple spot of pigment and a complicated
eye like that of the vertebrates. But, from the fact
that we pass from one thing to another by degrees, it
does not follow that the two things are of the same
i ORTHOGENESIS 75
nature. From the fact that an orator falls in, at first,
with the passions of his audience in order to make
himself master of them, it will not be concluded that to
follow is the same as to lead. Now, living matter
seems to have no other means of turning circumstances
to good account than by adapting itself to them
passively at the outset. Where it has to direct a
movement, it begins by adopting it. Life proceeds
by insinuation. The intermediate degrees between a
pigment-spot and an eye are nothing to the point :
however numerous the degrees, there will still be
the same interval between the pigment-spot and the
eye as between a photograph and a photographic
apparatus. Certainly the photograph has been gradu
ally turned into a photographic apparatus ; but could
light alone, a physical force, ever have provoked this
change, and converted an impression left by it into a
machine capable of using it ?
It may be claimed that considerations of utility are
out of place here ; that the eye is not made to see, but
that we see because we have eyes ; that the organ is
what it is, and " utility " is a word by which we
designate the functional effects of the structure. But
when I say that the eye " makes use of" light, I do not
merely mean that the eye is capable of seeing ; I allude
to the very precise relations that exist between this
organ and the apparatus of locomotion. The retina of
vertebrates is prolonged in an optic nerve, which, again,
is continued by cerebral centres connected with motor
mechanisms. Our eye makes use of light in that it
enables us to utilize, by movements of reaction, the
objects that we see to be advantageous, and to avoid
those which we see to be injurious. Now, of course,
as light may have produced a pigment-spot by physical
76 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP
means, so it can physically determine the movements
of certain organisms ; ciliated Infusoria, for instance,
react to light. But no one would hold that the in-
O
fluence of light has physically caused the formation of
a nervous system, of a muscular system, of an osseous
system, all things which are continuous with the
apparatus of vision in vertebrate animals. The truth
is, when one speaks of the gradual formation of the eye,
and, still more, when one takes into account all that
is inseparably connected with it, one brings in some
thing entirely different from the direct action of light.
One implicitly attributes to organized matter a certain
capacity sui generis, the mysterious power of building
up very complicated machines to utilize the simple
excitation that it undergoes.
But this is just what is claimed to be unnecessary.
Physics and chemistry are said to give us the key to
everything. Eimer s great work is instructive in this
respect. It is well known what persevering effort this
biologist has devoted to demonstrating that transforma
tion is brought about by the influence of the external on
the internal, continuously exerted in the same direction,
and not, as Darwin held, by accidental variations. His
theory rests on observations of the highest interest, of
which the starting-point was the study of the course
followed by the colour variation of the skin in certain
lizards. Before this, the already old experiments of
Dorfmeister had shown that the same chrysalis, accord
ing as it was submitted to cold or heat, gave rise
to very different butterflies, which had long been
regarded as independent species, Vanessa levana and
Vanessa prorsa : an intermediate temperature produces
an intermediate form. We might class with these
facts the important transformations observed in a little
ORTHOGENESIS
77
crustacean, Artemia salina, when the salt of the water it
lives in is increased or diminished. 1 In these various
experiments the external agent seems to act as a cause
of transformation. But what does the word " cause "
mean here? Without undertaking an exhaustive
analysis of the idea of causality, we will merely remark
that three very different meanings of this term are
commonly confused. A cause may act by impelling^
releasing, or unwinding. The billiard-ball, that strikes
another, determines its movement by impelling. The
spark that explodes the powder acts by releasing. The
gradual relaxing of the spring that makes the phono
graph turn, unwinds the melody inscribed on the
cylinder : if the melody which is played be the effect,
and the relaxing of the spring the cause, we must
say that the cause acts by unwinding. What distin
guishes these three cases from each other is the
greater or less solidarity between the cause and the
effect. In the first, the quantity and quality of the
effect vary with the quantity and quality of the cause.
In the second, neither quality nor quantity of the
effect varies with quality and quantity of the cause :
the effect is invariable. In the third, the quantity
of the effect depends on the quantity of the cause,
but the cause does not influence the quality of the
effect : the longer the cylinder turns by the action of
the spring, the more of the melody I shall hear, but the
nature of the melody, or of the part heard, does not
depend on the action of the spring. Only in the first
case, really, does cause explain effect ; in the others
the effect is more or less given in advance, and the
1 It seems, from later observations, that the transformation of Artemia is
a more complex phenomenon than was first supposed. See on this subject
Samter and Heymons, " Die Variation bei Artemia salina " (Anhang zu den
Ahhandlungen der k. preussischen Akad. der Wissemchaften, 1902).
7 8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
antecedent invoked is in different degrees, of course
its occasion rather than its cause. Now, in saying
that the saltness of the water is the cause of the trans
formations of Artemia, or that the degree of tempera
ture determines the colour and marks of the wings
which a certain chrysalis will assume on becoming a
butterfly, is the word " cause " used in the first sense ?
Obviously not : causality has here an intermediary
sense between those of unwinding and releasing.
Such, indeed, seems to be Eimer s own meaning when
he speaks of the " kaleidoscopic " character of the
variation, 1 or when he says that the variation of
organized matter works in a definite way, just as
inorganic matter crystallizes in definite directions. 2
And it may be granted, perhaps, that the process is
a merely physical and chemical one in the case of
the colour-changes of the skin. But if this sort of
explanation is extended to the case of the gradual
formation of the eye of the vertebrate, for instance, it
must be supposed that the physico-chemistry of living
bodies is such that the influence of light has caused the
organism to construct a progressive series of visual
apparatus, all extremely complex, yet all capable of
seeing, and of seeing better and better. 3 What more
could the most confirmed finalist say, in order to mark
out so exceptional a physico-chemistry ? And will not
the position of a mechanistic philosophy become still
more difficult, when it is pointed out to it that the
egg of a mollusc cannot have the same chemical com
position as that of a vertebrate, that the organic sub
stance which evolved toward the first of these two
1 Eimer, Orthogenesis der Schmetterlinge, Leipzig, 1897, p. 24. Cf. Die
Entstehung der Art en, p. 53.
2 Eimer, Die Entstehung der Arten, Jena, 1888, p. 25.
3 Ibid. pp. 165 ff.
5 ORTHOGENESIS 79
forms could not have been chemically identical with
that of the substance which went in the other direction,
and that, nevertheless, under the influence of light, the
same organ has been constructed in the one case as in
o
the other ?
The more we reflect upon it, the more we shall
see that this production of the same effect by two
different accumulations of an enormous number of
small causes is contrary to the principles of mechan
istic philosophy. We have concentrated the full force
of our discussion upon an example drawn from phylo
genesis. But ontogenesis would have furnished us
with facts no less cogent. Every moment, right before
our eyes, nature arrives at identical results, in some
times neighbouring species, by entirely different em-
bryogenic processes. Observations of " heteroblastia "
have multiplied in late years, 1 and it has been necessary
to reject the almost classical theory of the specificity
of embryonic gills. Still keeping to our comparison
between the eye of vertebrates and that of molluscs,
we may point out that the retina of the vertebrate is
produced by an expansion in the rudimentary brain of
the young embryo. It is a regular nervous centre which
has moved toward the periphery. In the mollusc, on the
contrary, the retina is derived from the ectoderm directly,
and not indirectly by means of the embryonic encephalon.
Quite different, therefore, are the evolutionary processes
which lead, in man and in the Pecten, to the develop
ment of a like retina. But, without going so far as to
compare two organisms so distant from each other, we
1 Salensky, "Heteroblastie" (Proc. of the Fourth International Congress of
Zoology, London, 1899, pp. m-ii8). Salensky has coined this word to
designate the cases in which organs that are equivalent, but of different
embryological origin, are formed at the same points in animals related to
each other.
8o CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
might reach the same conclusion simply by looking at
certain very curious facts of regeneration in one and
the same organism. If the crystalline lens of a Triton
be removed, it is regenerated by the iris. 1 Now, the
original lens was built out of the ectoderm, while the
iris is of mesodermic origin. What is more, in the
Salamandra maculata^ if the lens be removed and the
iris left, the regeneration of the lens takes place at
the upper part of the iris ; but if this upper part
of the iris itself be taken away, the regeneration takes
place in the inner or retinal layer of the remaining
region. 2 Thus, parts differently situated, differently
constituted, meant normally for different functions, are
capable of performing the same duties and even of
manufacturing, when necessary, the same pieces of the
machine. Here we have, indeed, the same effect
obtained by different combinations of causes.
Whether we will or no, we must appeal to some inner
directing principle in order to account for this convergence
of effects. Such convergence does not appear possible in
the Darwinian, and especially the neo-Darwinian, theory
of insensible accidental variations, nor in the hypothesis
of sudden accidental variations, nor even in the theory
that assigns definite directions to the evolution of the
various organs by a kind of mechanical composition of
the external with the internal forces. So we come to
the only one of the present forms of evolution which
remains for us to mention, viz., neo-Lamarckism.
It is well known that Lamarck attributed to the
living being the power of varying by use or disuse of
1 Wolff, "Die Regeneration der Urodelenlinse " (Arch.f.Entwickelungs-
mechanik, i., 1895, pp. 380 ff.).
2 Fischel, "tiber die Regeneration der Linse" (Anat. Anzeiger, xiv., 1898,
pp. 373-3 8 o).
i VARIATION AND HEREDITY 81
its organs, and also of passing on the variation so
acquired to its descendants. A certain number of
biologists hold a doctrine of this kind to-day. The
variation that results in a new species is not, they
believe, merely an accidental variation inherent in the
germ itself, nor is it governed by a determinism sui
generis which develops definite characters in a definite
direction, apart from every consideration of utility. It
springs from the very effort of the living being to adapt
itself to the circumstances of its existence. The effort
may indeed be only the mechanical exercise of certain
organs, mechanically elicited by the pressure of external
circumstances. But it may also imply consciousness
and will, and it is in this sense that it appears to be
understood by one of the most eminent representatives
of the doctrine, the American naturalist Cope. 1 Neo-
Lamarckism is therefore, of all the later forms of
evolutionism, the only one capable of admitting an
internal and psychological principle of development,
although it is not bound to do so. And it is also
the only evolutionism that seems to us to account for
the building up of identical complex organs on in
dependent lines of development. For it is quite
conceivable that the same effort to turn the same
circumstances to good account might have the same
result, especially if the problem put by the circum
stances is such as to admit of only one solution. But
the question remains, whether the term a effort " must
not then be taken in a deeper sense, a sense even more
psychological than any neo-Lamarckian supposes.
For a mere variation of size is one thing, and a
change of form is another. That an organ can be
1 Cope, The Origin of the Fittest, 1887 ; The Primary Factors of Organic
Evolution, 1896
G
82 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
strengthened and grow by exercise, nobody will deny.
But it is a long way from that to the progressive de
velopment of an eye like that of the molluscs and of
the vertebrates. If this development be ascribed to
the influence of light, long continued but passively
received, we fall back on the theory we have just
criticized. If, on the other hand, an internal activity is
appealed to, then it must be something quite different
from what we usually call an effort, for never has an
effort been known to produce the slightest complication
of an organ, and yet an enormous number of complica
tions, all admirably coordinated, have been necessary
to pass from the pigment-spot of the Infusorian to the
eye of the vertebrate. But, even if we accept this
notion of the evolutionary process in the case of
animals, how can we apply it to plants ? Here,
variations of form do not seem to imply, nor always
to lead to, functional changes ; and even if the cause
of the variation is of a psychological nature, we can
hardly call it an effort, unless we give a very unusual
extension to the meaning of the word. The truth is,
it is necessary to dig beneath the effort itself and look
for a deeper cause.
This is especially necessary, we believe, if we wish to
get at a cause of regular hereditary variations. We are
not going to enter here into the controversies over the
transmissibility of acquired characters ; still less do we
wish to take too definite a side on this question, which is
not within our province. But we cannot remain com
pletely indifferent to it. Nowhere is it clearer that
philosophers cannot to-day content themselves with
vague generalities, but must follow the scientists in
experimental detail and discuss the results with them.
If Spencer had begun by putting to himself the question
VARIATION AND HEREDITY 83
of the hereditability of acquired characters, his evolu
tionism would no doubt have taken an altogether
different form. If (as seems probable to us) a habit
contracted by the individual were transmitted to its
descendants only in very exceptional cases, all the
Spencerian psychology would need re-making, and a
large part of Spencer s philosophy would fall to pieces.
Let us say, then, how the problem seems to us to
present itself, and in what direction an attempt might
be made to solve it.
After having been affirmed as a dogma, the trans-
missibility of acquired characters has been no less
dogmatically denied, for reasons drawn a "priori from the
supposed nature of germinal cells. It is well known
how Weismann was led, by his hypothesis of the
continuity of the germ-plasm, to regard the germinal
cells ova and spermatozoa as almost independent
of the somatic cells. Starting from this, it has been
claimed, and is still claimed by many, that the heredi
tary transmission of an acquired character is incon
ceivable. But if, perchance, experiment should show
that acquired characters are transmissible, it would
prove thereby that the germ-plasm is not so inde
pendent of the somatic envelope as has been contended,
and the transmissibility of acquired characters would
become ipso facto conceivable ; which amounts to
saying that conceivability and inconceivability have
nothing to do with the case, and that experience alone
must settle the matter. But it is just here that the
difficulty begins. The acquired characters we are speak
ing of are generally habits or the effects of habit, and at
the root of most habits there is a natural disposition.
So that one can always ask whether it is really the habit
acquired by the soma of the individual that is trans-
84 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
mitted, or whether it is not rather a natural aptitude,
which existed prior to the habit. This aptitude would
have remained inherent in the germ-plasm which the
individual bears within him, as it was in the individual
himself and consequently in the germ whence he
sprang. Thus, for instance, there is no proof that
the mole has become blind because it has formed the
habit of living underground ; it is perhaps because
its eyes were becoming atrophied that it condemned
itself to a life underground. 1 If this is the case,
the tendency to lose the power of vision has been
transmitted from germ to germ without anything
being acquired or lost by the soma of the mole itself.
From the fact that the son of a fencing-master has
become a good fencer much more quickly than his
father, we cannot infer that the habit of the parent has
been transmitted to the child ; for certain natural dis
positions in course of growth may have passed from the
plasma engendering the father to the plasma engender
ing the son, may have grown on the way by the effect
of the primitive impetus, and thus assured to the son a
greater suppleness than the father had, without troubling,
so to speak, about what the father did. So of many
examples drawn from the progressive domestication of
animals : it is hard to say whether it is the acquired habit
that is transmitted or only a certain natural tendency
that, indeed, which has caused such and such a particular
species or certain of its representatives to be specially
chosen for domestication. The truth is, when every
doubtful case, every fact open to more than one inter
pretation, has been eliminated, there remains hardly a
1 Cudnot, "La Nouvelle Theorie transfonniste" (Revue gSn/rale dei
sciences, 1894). Cf. Morgan, Evolution and Adaptation, London, 1903,
P- 357-
i VARIATION AND HEREDITY 85
single unquestionable example of acquired and trans
mitted peculiarities, beyond the famous experiments
of Brown-Sequard, repeated and confirmed by other
physiologists. 1 By cutting the spinal cord or the
sciatic nerve of guinea-pigs, Brown-Sequard brought
about an epileptic state which was transmitted to the
descendants. Lesions of the same sciatic nerve, of the
restiform body, etc., provoked various troubles in the
guinea-pig which its progeny inherited sometimes in a
quite different form : exophthalmia, loss of toes, etc.
But it is not demonstrated that in these different cases of
hereditary transmission there had been a real influence of
the soma of the animal on its germ-plasm. Weismann
at once objected that the operations of Brown-Sequard
might have introduced certain special microbes into the
body of the guinea-pig, which had found their means
of nutrition in the nervous tissues and transmitted
the malady by penetrating into the sexual elements. 2
This objection has been answered by Brown-Sequard
himself; 3 but a more plausible one might be raised.
Some experiments of Voisin and Peron have shown
that fits of epilepsy are followed by the elimination
of a toxic body which, when injected into animals, 4 is
capable of producing convulsive symptoms. Perhaps
the trophic disorders following the nerve lesions
made by Brown-Sequard correspond to the formation
1 Brown-S&juard, " Nouvelles Recherches sur 1 epilepsie due a certaines
lesions de la moelle epiniere et des nerfs rachidiens " (Arch, de physiologie, vol.
ii., 1866, pp. 211, 422, and 497).
2 Weismann, Aufsatze iiber Vererbung, Jena, 1892, pp. 376-378, and also
Vortrage iiber Descendenzt/ieorie, Jena, 1902, vol. ii. p. 76.
3 Brown-Squard, "Here"dite" d une affection due a une cause acci-
dentelle" (Arch, de p/iysiologie, 1892, pp. 686 ff.).
4 Voisin and Peron, " Recherches sur la toxicite urinaire chez les
e pileptiques " (Arch, de neurologic, vol. xxiv., 1892, and xxv., 1893.
Cf. the work of Voisin, L pilt:psie, Paris, 1897, pp. 125-133).
86 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP,
of precisely this convulsion-causing poison. If so, the
toxin passed from the guinea-pig to its spermatozoon
or ovum, and caused in the development of the
embryo a general disturbance, which, however, had
no visible effects except at one point or another of
the organism when developed. In that case, what
occurred would have been somewhat the same as in
the experiments of Charrin, Delamare, and Moussu,
where guinea-pigs in gestation, whose liver or kidney
was injured, transmitted the lesion to their progeny,
simply because the injury to the mother s organ had
given rise to specific " cytotoxins " which acted on the
corresponding organ of the foetus. 1 It is true that, in
these experiments, as in a former observation of the
same physiologists, 2 it was the already formed foetus
that was influenced by the toxins. But other researches
of Charrin have resulted in showing that the same
effect may be produced, by an analogous process, on
the spermatozoa and the ova. 8 To conclude, then :
the inheritance of an acquired peculiarity in the ex
periments of Brown-Sequard can be explained by the
effect of a toxin on the germ. The lesion, however
well localised it seems, is transmitted by the same
process as, for instance, the taint of alcoholism. But
may it not be the same in the case of every acquired
peculiarity that has become hereditary ?
There is, indeed, one point on which both those
who affirm and those who deny the transmissibility of
1 Charrin, Delamare and Moussu, "Transmission expdrimentale aux
descendants de Idsions developpees chez les ascendants " (C.R. de I Acad. des
Sciences, vol. cxxxv., 1902, p. 191). Cf. Morgan, Evolution and Adaptation,
p. 257, and Delage, L HfrSJitS, and edition, p. 388.
2 Charrin and Delamare, " He"redite cellulaire " (C.R. de I Acad. del
Sciences, vol. cxxxiii., 1901, pp. 69-71).
3 Charrin, " L Heredit6 pathologique " (Revue gfatrale des sciences, 15
Janvier 1896).
i VARIATION AND HEREDITY 87
acquired characters are agreed, namely, that certain in
fluences, such as that of alcohol, can affect at the same
time both the living being and the germ-plasm it con
tains. In such case, there is inheritance of a defect,
and the result is as if the soma of the parent had acted
on the germ-plasm, although in reality soma and plasma
have simply both suffered the action of the same cause.
Now, suppose that the soma can influence the germ-
plasm, as those believe who hold that acquired characters
are transmissible. Is not the most natural hypothesis
to suppose that things happen in this second case as in
the first, and that the direct effect of the influence of
the soma is a general alteration of the germ-plasm ?
If this is the case, it is by exception, and in some sort
by accident, that the modification of the descendant
is the same as that of the parent. It is like the
hereditability of the alcoholic taint : it passes from
father to children, but it may take a different form
in each child, and in none of them be like what
it was in the father. Let the letter C represent
the change in the plasm, C being either positive
or negative, that is to say, showing either the gain
or loss of certain substances. The effect will not
be an exact reproduction of the cause, nor will the
change in the germ-plasm, provoked by a certain
modification of a certain part of the soma, determine
a similar modification of the corresponding part of the
new organism in process of formation, unless all the
other nascent parts of this organism enjoy a kind of
immunity as regards C : the same part will then
undergo alteration in the new organism, because it
happens that the development of this part is alone
subject to the new influence. And, even then, the
part might be altered in an entirely different way
88 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
from that in which the corresponding part was altered
in the generating organism.
We should propose, then, to introduce a distinction
between the hereditability of deviation and that of char
acter. An individual which acquires a new character
thereby deviates from the form it previously had, which
form the germs, or oftener the half-germs, it contains
would have reproduced in their development. If this
modification does not involve the production of sub
stances capable of changing the germ -plasm, or does not
so affect nutrition as to deprive the germ-plasm of certain
of its elements, it will have no effect on the offspring
of the individual. This is probably the case as a rule.
If, on the contrary, it has some effect, this is likely to
be due to a chemical change which it has induced in
the germ-plasm. This chemical change might, by ex
ception, bring about the original modification again in the
organism which the germ is about to develop, but there
are as many and more chances that it will do something
else. In this latter case, the generated organism will
perhaps deviate from the normal type as much as the
generating organism, but it will do so differently. It
will have inherited deviation and not character. In
general, therefore, the habits formed by an individual
have probably no echo in its offspring ; and when
they have, the modification in the descendants may have
no visible likeness to the original one. Such, at least,
is the hypothesis which seems to us most likely. In
any case, in default of proof to the contrary, and so
long as the decisive experiments called for by an
eminent biologist 1 have not been made, we must keep
to the actual results of observation. Now, even if we
take the most favourable view of the theory of the trans-
1 Giard, Contravenes transformistes, Paris, 1904, p. 147
, RESULT OF THE DISCUSSION 89
missibility of acquired characters, and assume that the
ostensible acquired character is not, in most cases, the
more or less tardy development of an innate character,
facts show us that hereditary transmission is the excep
tion and not the rule. How, then, shall we expect
it to develop an organ such as the eye ? When we
think of the enormous number of variations, all in
the same direction, that we must suppose to be
accumulated before the passage from the pigment-
spot of the Infusorian to the eye of the mollusc and of
the vertebrate is possible, we do not see how heredity,
as we observe it, could ever have determined this
piling-up of differences, even supposing that individual
efforts could have produced each of them singly.
That is to say that neo-Lamarckism is no more able
than any other form of evolutionism to solve the
problem.
In thus submitting the various present forms of
evolutionism to a common test, in showing that they
all strike against the same insurmountable difficulty,
we have in no wise the intention of rejecting them
altogether. On the contrary, each of them, being
supported by a considerable number of facts, must be
true in its way. Each of them must correspond to
a certain aspect of the process of evolution. Perhaps
even it is necessary that a theory should restrict it
self exclusively to a particular point of view, in order
to remain scientific, i.e. to give a precise direction
to researches into detail. But the reality of which
each of these theories takes a partial view must trans
cend them all. And this reality is the special object
of philosophy, which is not constrained to scientific pre
cision because it contemplates no practical application.
90 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
Let us therefore indicate in a word or two the posi
tive contribution that each of the three present forms
of evolutionism seems to us to make toward the
solution of the problem, what each of them leaves out,
and on what point this threefold effort should, in our
opinion, converge in order to obtain a more compre
hensive, although thereby of necessity a less definite,
idea of the evolutionary process.
The neo-Darwinians are probably right, we believe,
when they teach that the essential causes of variation
are the differences inherent in the germ borne by the
individual, and not the experiences or behaviour of
the individual in the course of his career. Where we
fail to follow these biologists, is in regarding the
differences inherent in the germ as purely accidental
and individual. We cannot help believing that these
differences are the development of an impulsion which
passes from germ to germ across the individuals, that
they are therefore not pure accidents, and that they
might well appear at the same time, in the same form,
in all the representatives of the same species, or at least
in a certain number of them. Already, in fact, the
theory of mutations is modifying Darwinism profoundly
on this point. It asserts that at a given moment, after
a long period, the entire species is beset with a tendency
to change. The tendency to change, therefore, is not
accidental. True, the change itself would be accidental,
since the mutation works, according to De Vries, in
different directions in the different representatives of
the species. But, first we must see if the theory is
confirmed by many other vegetable species (De Vries
has verified it only by the Oenothera Lamarckiand)?
1 Some analogous facts, however, have been noted, all in the vegetable
world. See Blaringhem, " La Notion d espece et la th^orie de la mutation "
i RESULT OF THE DISCUSSION 91
and then there is the possibility, as we shall explain
further on, that the part played by chance is much
greater in the variation of plants than in that of
animals, because, in the vegetable world, function
does not depend so strictly on form. Be that as it
may, the neo-Darwinians are inclined to admit that the
periods of mutation are determinate. The direction
of the mutation may therefore be so as well, at least in
animals, and to the extent we shall have to indicate.
We thus arrive at a hypothesis like Eimer s,
according to which the variations of different characters
continue from generation to generation in definite
directions. This hypothesis seems plausible to us,
within the limits in which Eimer himself retains it.
Of course, the evolution of the organic world cannot
be predetermined as a whole. We claim, on the
contrary, that the spontaneity of life is manifested by
a continual creation of new forms succeeding others.
But this indetermination cannot be complete ; it must
leave a certain part to determination. An organ like
the eye, for example, must have been formed by
just a continual changing in a definite direction.
Indeed, we do not see how otherwise to explain the
likeness of structure of the eye in species that have
not the same history. Where we differ from Eimer
is in his claim that combinations of physical and
chemical causes are enough to secure the result. We
have tried to prove, on the contrary, by the example of
the eye, that if there is " orthogenesis " here, a psycho
logical cause intervenes.
Certain neo-Lamarckians do indeed resort to a
cause of a psychological nature. There, to our think-
(Anne"e psychologique, vol. xii., 1906, pp. 95 ff.), and De Vries, Species and
Varieties, p. 655.
92 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
ing, is one of the most solid positions of neo-Lamarck-
ism. But if this cause is nothing but the conscious
effort of the individual, it cannot operate in more than
a restricted number of cases at most in the animal
world, and not at all in the vegetable kingdom.
Even in animals, it will act only on points which are
under the direct or indirect control of the will. And
even where it does act, it is not clear how it could
compass a change so profound as an increase of com
plexity : at most this would be conceivable if the
acquired characters were regularly transmitted so as
to be added together ; but this transmission seems to
be the exception rather than the rule. A hereditary
change in a definite direction, which continues to
accumulate and add to itself so as to build up a
more and more complex machine, must certainly be
related to some sort of effort, but to an effort of far
greater depth than the individual effort, far more
independent of circumstances, an effort common to
most representatives of the same species, inherent in
the germs they bear rather than in their substance
alone, an effort thereby assured of being passed on to
their descendants.
So we come back, by a somewhat roundabout way,
to the idea we started from, that of an original impetus
of life, passing from one generation of germs to the
following generation of germs through the developed
organisms which bridge the interval between the genera
tions. This impetus, sustained right along the lines
of evolution among which it gets divided, is the
fundamental cause of variations, at least of those that
are regularly passed on, that accumulate and create
new species. In general, when species have begun to
THE VITAL IMPETUS
93
diverge from a common stock, they accentuate their
divergence as they progress in their evolution. Yet, in
certain definite points, they may evolve identically ; in
fact, they must do so if the hypothesis of a common
impetus be accepted. This is just what we shall have
to show now in a more precise way, by the same
example we have chosen, the formation of the eye in
molluscs and vertebrates. The idea of an " original
impetus," moreover, will thus be made clearer.
Two points are equally striking in an organ like the
eye : the complexity of its structure and the simplicity
of its function. The eye is composed of distinct parts,
such as the sclerotic, the cornea, the retina, the crystalline
lens, etc. In each of these parts the detail is infinite.
The retina alone comprises three layers of nervous
elements multipolar cells, bipolar cells, visual cells
each of which has its individuality and is undoubtedly
a very complicated organism : so complicated, indeed,
is the retinal membrane in its intimate structure, that
no simple description can give an adequate idea of it.
The mechanism of the eye is, in short, composed of
an infinity of mechanisms, all of extreme complexity.
Yet vision is one simple fact. As soon as the eye
opens, the visual act is effected. Just because the act is
simple, the slightest negligence on the part of nature in
the building of the infinitely complex machine would
have made vision impossible. This contrast between
the complexity of the organ and the unity of the
function is what gives us pause.
A mechanistic theory is one which means to show
us the gradual building-up of the machine under the
influence of external circumstances intervening either
directly by action on the tissues or indirectly by the
selection of better-adapted ones. But, whatever form
94 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
this theory may take, supposing it avails at all to
explain the detail of the parts, it throws no light on
their correlation.
Then comes the doctrine of finality, which says that
the parts have been brought together on a preconceived
plan with a view to a certain end. In this it likens the
labour of nature to that of the workman, who also
proceeds by the assemblage of parts with a view to the
realization of an idea or the imitation of a model.
Mechanism, here, reproaches finalism with its anthropo
morphic character, and rightly. But it fails to see that
itself proceeds according to this method somewhat
mutilated ! True, it has got rid of the end pursued
or the ideal model. But it also holds that nature has
worked like a human being by bringing parts together,
while a mere glance at the development of an embryo
shows that life goes to work in a very different way.
Life does not proceed by the association and addition of
elements^ but by dissociation and division.
We must get beyond both points of view, both
mechanism and finalism being, at bottom, only stand
points to which the human mind has been led by
considering the work of man. But in what direction
can we go beyond them ? We have said that in
analysing the structure of an organ, we can go on
decomposing for ever, although the function of the
whole is a simple thing. This contrast between the
infinite complexity of the organ and the extreme
simplicity of the function is what should open our eyes.
In general, when the same object appears in one
aspect as simple and in another as infinitely complex,
the two aspects have by no means the same importance,
or rather the same degree of reality. In such cases, the
simplicity belongs to the object itself, and the infinite
x THE VITAL IMPETUS 95
complexity to the views we take in turning around it,
to the symbols by which our senses or intellect repre
sent it to us, or, more generally, to elements of a
different order^ with which we try to imitate it arti
ficially, but with which it remains incommensurable,
being of a different nature. An artist of genius has
painted a figure on his canvas. We can imitate his
picture with many-coloured squares of mosaic. And
we shall reproduce the curves and shades of the model
so much the better as our squares are smaller, more
numerous and more varied in tone. But an infinity of
elements infinitely small, presenting an infinity of shades,
would be necessary to obtain the exact equivalent of the
figure that the artist has conceived as a simple thing,
which he has wished to transport as a whole to the
canvas, and which is the more complete the more it
strikes us as the projection of an indivisible intuition.
Now, suppose our eyes so made that they cannot help
seeing in the work of the master a mosaic effect. Or
suppose our intellect so made that it cannot explain the
appearance of the figure on the canvas except as a work
of mosaic. We should then be able to speak simply
of a collection of little squares, and we should be
under the mechanistic hypothesis. We might add
that, beside the materiality of the collection, there must
be a plan on which the artist worked ; and then we
should be expressing ourselves as finalists. But in
neither case should we have got at the real process,
for there are no squares brought together. It is the
picture, i.e. the simple act, projected on the canvas,
which, by the mere fact of entering into our per
ception, is decomposed before our eyes into thousands
and thousands of little squares which present, as
^composed, a wonderful arrangement. So the eye,
9 6 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
with its marvellous complexity of structure, may be
only the simple act of vision, divided for us into a
mosaic of cells, whose order seems marvellous to us
because we have conceived the whole as an assemblage.
If I raise my hand from A to B, this movement
appears to me under two aspects at once. Felt from
within, it is a simple, indivisible act. Perceived from
without, it is the course of a certain curve, AB. In
this curve I can distinguish as many positions as I
please, and the line itself might be defined as a certain
mutual coordination of these positions. But the posi
tions, infinite in number, and the order in which they
are connected, have sprung automatically from the
indivisible act by which my hand has gone from A to
B. Mechanism, here, would consist in seeing only the
positions. Finalism would take their order into account.
But both mechanism and finalism would leave on one
side the movement, which is reality itself. In one
sense, the movement is more than the positions and
than their order ; for it is sufficient to make it in its
indivisible simplicity to secure that the infinity of the
successive positions as also their order be given at once
with something else which is neither order nor
position but which is essential, the mobility. But,
in another sense, the movement is less than the series
of positions and their connecting order ; for, to arrange
points in a certain order, it is necessary first to conceive
the order and then to realize it with points, there must
be the work of assemblage and there must be intelligence,
whereas the simple movement of the hand contains
nothing of either. It is not intelligent, in the human
sense of the word, and it is not an assemblage, for it is
not made up of elements. Just so with the relation of
the eye to vision. There is in vision more than the
i THE VITAL IMPETUS 97
component cells of the eye and their mutual co-
Ordination : in this sense, neither mechanism nor
fmalism go far enough. But, in another sense,
mechanism and finalism both go too far, for they
attribute to Nature the most formidable of the labours of
Hercules in holding that she has exalted to the simple
act of vision an infinity of infinitely complex elements,
whereas Nature has had no more trouble in making an
eye than I have in lifting my hand. Nature s simple
act has divided itself automatically into an infinity of
elements which are then found to be coordinated to
one idea, just as the movement of my hand has dropped
an infinity of points which are then found to satisfy
one equation.
We find it very hard to see things in that light,
because we cannot help conceiving organization as
manufacturing. But it is one thing to manufacture,
and quite another to organize. Manufacturing is
peculiar to man. It consists in assembling parts of
matter which we have cut out in such manner that we
can fit them together and obtain from them a common
action. The parts are arranged, so to speak, around
the action as an ideal centre. To manufacture, there
fore, is to work from the periphery to the centre, or,
as the philosophers say, from the many to the one.
Organization, on the contrary, works from the centre
to the periphery. It begins in a point that is almost
a mathematical point, and spreads around this point by
concentric waves which go on enlarging. The work of
manufacturing is the more effective, the greater the
quantity of matter dealt with. It proceeds by concen
tration and compression. The organizing act, on the
contrary, has something explosive about it : it needs at
the beginning the smallest possible place, a minimum
H
9 8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
of matter, as if the organizing forces only entered space
reluctantly. The spermatozoon, which sets in motion
the evolutionary process of the embryonic life, is one
of the smallest cells of the organism ; and it is only a
small part of the spermatozoon which really takes part
in the operation.
But these are only superficial differences. Digging
beneath them, we think, a deeper difference would be
found.
A manufactured thing delineates exactly the form of
the work of manufacturing it. I mean that the manu
facturer finds in his product exactly what he has put
into it. If he is going to make a machine, he cuts out
its pieces one by one and then puts them together :
the machine, when made, will show both the pieces and
their assemblage. The whole of the result represents
the whole of the work ; and to each part of the work
corresponds a part of the result.
Now I recognise that positive science can and should
proceed as if organization was like making a machine.
Only so will it have any hold on organized bodies. For
its object is not to show us the essence of things, but
to furnish us with the best means of acting on them.
Physics and chemistry are well advanced sciences,
and living matter lends itself to our action only so far
as we can treat it by the processes of our physics and
chemistry. Organization can therefore only be studied
scientifically if the organized body has first been
likened to a machine. The cells will be the pieces of
the machine, the organism their assemblage, and the
elementary labours which have organized the parts will
be regarded as the real elements of the labour which has
organized the whole. This is the standpoint of science.
Quite different, in our opinion, is that of philosophy.
! THE VITAL IMPETUS 99
For us, the whole of an organized machine may,
strictly speaking, represent the whole of the organizing
work (this is, however, only approximately true), yet
the parts of the machine do not correspond to parts of
the work, because the materiality of this machine does not
represent a sum of means employed^ but a sum of obstacles
avoided : it is a negation rather than a positive reality.
So, as we have shown in a former study, vision is a
power which should attain by right an infinity of things
inaccessible to our eyes. But such a vision would not
be continued into action ; it might suit a phantom, but
not a living being. The vision of a living being is an
effective vision, limited to objects on which the being
can act : it is a vision that is canalized^ and the visual
apparatus simply symbolizes the work of canalizing.
Therefore the creation of the visual apparatus is no
more explained by the assembling of its anatomic
elements than the digging of a canal could be ex
plained by the heaping-up of the earth which might
have formed its banks. A mechanistic theory would
maintain that the earth had been brought cart-load by
cart-load ; fmalism would add that it had not been
dumped down at random, that the carters had followed
a plan. But both theories would be mistaken, for the
canal has been made in another way.
With greater precision, we may compare the process
by which nature constructs an eye to the simple act by
which we raise the hand. But we supposed at first that
the hand met with no resistance. Let us now imagine
that, instead of moving in air, the hand has to pass
through iron filings which are compressed and offer
resistance to it in proportion as it goes forward. At a
certain moment the hand will have exhausted its effort,
and, at this very moment, the filings will be massed and
ioo CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP,
coordinated in a certain definite form, to wit, that of the
hand that is stopped and of a part of the arm. Now,
suppose that the hand and arm are invisible. Lookers-
on will seek the reason of the arrangement in the filings
themselves and in forces within the mass. Some will
account for the position of each filing by the action
exerted upon it by the neighbouring filings : these are
the mechanists. Others will prefer to think that a plan
of the whole has presided over the detail of these ele
mentary actions : they are the finalists. But the truth
is that there has been merely one indivisible act, that of
the hand passing through the filings : the inexhaustible
detail of the movement of the grains, as well as the order
of their final arrangement, expresses negatively, in a way,
this undivided movement, being the unitary form of a
resistance, and not a synthesis of positive elementary
actions. For this reason, if the arrangement of the
grains is termed an " effect " and the movement of the
hand a " cause," it may indeed be said that the whole
of the effect is explained by the whole of the cause, but
to parts of the cause parts of the effect will in no wise
correspond. In other words, neither mechanism nor
finalism will here be in place, and we must resort to an
explanation of a different kind. Now, in the hypothesis
we propose, the relation of vision to the visual appar
atus would be very nearly that of the hand to the iron
filings that follow, canalize and limit its motion.
The greater the effort of the hand, the farther it will
go into the filings. But at whatever point it stops,
instantaneously and automatically the filings coordinate
and find their equilibrium. So with vision and its
organ. According as the undivided act constituting
vision advances more or less, the materiality of the
organ is made of a more or less considerable number of
i THE VITAL IMPETUS 101
mutually coordinated elements, but the order is
necessarily complete and perfect. It could not be
partial, because, once again, the real process which gives
rise to it has no parts. That is what neither mechanism
nor finalism takes into account, and it is what we also
fail to consider when we wonder at the marvellous
structure of an instrument such as the eye. At the
bottom of our wondering is always this idea, that it
would have been possible for a part only of this co
ordination to have been realized, that the complete
realization is a kind of special favour. This favour the
finalists consider as dispensed to them all at once, by the
final cause ; the mechanists claim to obtain it little by
little, by the effect of natural selection ; but both see
something positive in this coordination, and conse
quently something fractionable in its cause, something
which admits of every possible degree of achievement. In
reality, the cause, though more or less intense, cannot
produce its effect except in one piece, and completely
finished. According as it goes further and further in
the direction of vision, it gives the simple pigmentary
masses of a lower organism, or the rudimentary eye
of a Serpula, or the slightly differentiated eye of the
Alciope, or the marvellously perfected eye of the bird ;
but all these organs, unequal as is their complexity,
necessarily present an equal coordination. For this
reason, no matter how distant two animal species may
be from each other, if the progress toward vision has
gone equally far in both, there is the same visual organ
in each case, for the form of the organ only expresses
the degree in which the exercise of the function has
been obtained.
But, in speaking of a progress toward vision, are we
not coming back to the old notion of finality ? It
102 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
would be so, undoubtedly, if this progress required the
conscious or unconscious idea of an end to be attained.
But it is really effected in virtue of the original impetus
of life ; it is implied in this movement itself, and that
is just why it is found in independent lines of evolu
tion. If now we are asked why and how it is implied
therein, we reply that life is, more than anything
else, a tendency to act on inert matter. The direc
tion of this action is not predetermined ; hence the
unforeseeable variety of forms which life, in evolving,
sows along its path. But this action always presents,
to some extent, the character of contingency ; it implies
at least a rudiment of choice. Now a choice involves
the anticipatory idea of several possible actions.
Possibilities of action must therefore be marked out
for the living being before the action itself. Visual
perception is nothing else : l the visible outlines of
bodies are the design of our eventual action on them.
Vision will be found, therefore, in different degrees in
the most diverse animals, and it will appear in the
same complexity of structure wherever it has reached
the same degree of intensity.
We have dwelt on these resemblances of structure
in general, and on the example of the eye in particular,
because we had to define our attitude toward mechanism
on the one hand and finalism on the other. It remains
for us to describe it more precisely in itself. This we
shall now do by showing the divergent results of
evolution not as presenting analogies, but as them
selves mutually complementary.
* See, on this subject, Mature et memotre, chap, i.
CHAPTER II
THE DIVERGENT DIRECTIONS OF THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE.
TORPOR, INTELLIGENCE, INSTINCT
THE evolution movement would be a simple one, and
we should soon have been able to determine its direc
tion, if life had described a single course, like that of a
solid ball shot from a cannon. But it proceeds rather
like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments,
which fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their
turn into fragments destined to burst again, and so on
for a time incommensurably long. We perceive only
what is nearest to us, namely, the scattered move
ments of the pulverized explosions. From them we
have to go back, stage by stage, to the original
movement.
When a shell bursts, the particular way it breaks is
explained both by the explosive force of the powder
it contains and by the resistance of the metal. So of
the way life breaks into individuals and species. It
depends, we think, on two series of causes : the
resistance life meets from inert matter, and the explosive
force due to an unstable balance of tendencies
which life bears within itself.
The resistance of inert matter was the obstacle that
had first to be overcome. Life seems to have succeeded
in this by dint of humility, by making itself very small
103
io 4 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
and very insinuating, bending to physical and chemical
forces, consenting even to go a part of the way with
them, like the switch that adopts for a while the direc
tion of the rail it is endeavouring to leave. Of phe
nomena in the simplest forms of life, it is hard to say
whether they are still physical and chemical or whether
they are already vital. Life had to enter thus into the
habits of inert matter, in order to draw it little by
little, magnetized, as it were, to another track. The
animate forms that first appeared were therefore of
extreme simplicity. They were probably tiny masses of
scarcely differentiated protoplasm, outwardly resembling
the amoeba observable to-day, but possessed of the
tremendous internal push that was to raise them even
to the highest forms of life. That in virtue of this
push the first organisms sought to grow as much as
possible, seems likely. But organized matter has a
limit of expansion that is very quickly reached ; beyond
a certain point it divides instead of growing. Ages of
effort and prodigies of subtlety were probably necessary
for life to get past this new obstacle. It succeeded in
inducing an increasing number of elements, ready to
divide, to remain united. By the division of labour it
knotted between them an indissoluble bond. The
complex and quasi-discontinuous organism is thus
made to function as would a continuous living mass
which had simply grown bigger.
But the real and profound causes of division were
those which life bore within its bosom. For life is
tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop
in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth,
divergent directions among which its impetus is
divided. This we observe in ourselves, in the evolution
of that special tendency which we call our character.
n DIVERGENT TENDENCIES 105
Each of us, glancing back over his history, will find
that his child-personality, though indivisible, united
in itself divers persons, which could remain blended
just because they were in their nascent state : this
indecision, so charged with promise, is one of the
greatest charms of childhood. But these interwoven
personalities become incompatible in course of growth,
and, as each of us can live but one life, a choice must
perforce be made. We choose in reality without
ceasing ; without ceasing, also, we abandon many things.
The route we pursue in time is strewn with the
remains of all that we began to be, of all that we might
have become. But nature, which has at command an
incalculable number of lives, is in no wise bound to
make such sacrifices. She preserves the different
tendencies that have bifurcated in their growth. She
creates with them diverging series of species that will
evolve separately.
These series may, moreover, be of unequal import
ance. The author who begins a novel puts into his
hero many things which he is obliged to discard as he
goes on. Perhaps he will take them up later in other
books, and make new characters with them, who will
seem like extracts from, or rather like complements of,
the first ; but they will almost always appear somewhat
poor and limited in comparison with the original
character. So with regard to the evolution of life.
The bifurcations on the way have been numerous, but
there have been many blind alleys beside the two or
three highways ; and of these highways themselves,
only one, that which leads through the vertebrates up
to man, has been wide enough to allow free passage to
the full breath of life. We get this impression when
we compare the societies of bees and ants, for instance,
io6 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
with human societies. The former are admirably
ordered and united, but stereotyped ; the latter are
open to every sort of progress, but divided, and
incessantly at strife with themselves. The ideal would
be a society always in progress and always in equilibrium,
but this ideal is perhaps unrealizable : the two char
acteristics that would fain complete each other, which
do complete each other in their embryonic state, can
no longer abide together when they grow stronger.
If one could speak, otherwise than metaphorically, of
an impulse toward social life, it might be said that
the brunt of the impulse was borne along the line of
evolution ending at man, and that the rest of it was
collected on the road leading to the hymcnoptera : the
societies of ants and bees would thus present the aspect
complementary to ours. But this would be only a
manner of expression. There has been no particular
impulse towards social life ; there is simply the
general movement of life, which on divergent lines is
creating forms ever new. If societies should appear
on two of these lines, they ought to show divergence
of paths at the same time as community of impetus.
They will thus develop two classes of characteristics
which we shall find vaguely complementary of each
other.
So our study of the evolution movement will
have to unravel a certain number of divergent direc
tions, and to appreciate the importance of what has
happened along each of them in a word, to determine
the nature of the dissociated tendencies and estimate
their relative proportion. Combining these tendencies,
then, we shall get an approximation, or rather an
imitation, of the indivisible motor principle whence
their impetus proceeds. Evolution will thus prove to
ii ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 107
be something entirely different from a series of adapta
tions to circumstances, as mechanism claims ; entirely
different also from the realization of a plan of the
whole, as maintained by the doctrine of finality.
That adaptation to environment is the necessary
condition of evolution we do not question for a
moment. It is quite evident, that a species would
disappear, should it fail to bend to the conditions of
existence which are imposed on it. But it is one thing
to recognise that outer circumstances are forces evolu
tion must reckon with, another to claim that they are
the directing causes of evolution. This latter theory is
that of mechanism. It excludes absolutely the hypo
thesis of an original impetus, I mean an internal push
that has carried life, by more and more complex forms,
to higher and higher destinies. Yet this impetus is
evident, and a mere glance at fossil species shows us
that life need not have evolved at all, or might have
evolved only in very restricted limits, if it had chosen
the alternative, much more convenient to itself, of
becoming anchylosed in its primitive forms. Certain
Foraminifera have not varied since the Silurian epoch.
Unmoved witnesses of the innumerable revolutions
that have upheaved our planet, the Lingulae are to-day
what they were at the remotest times of the paleozoic
era.
The truth is that adaptation explains the sinuosities
of the movement of evolution, but not its general
directions, still less the movement itself. 1 The road
that leads to the town is obliged to follow the ups and
1 This view of adaptation has been noted by M. F. Marin in a remark
able article on the origin of species, " L Origine des especes " (Re<vue
icientifique, Nov. 1901, p. 580).
io8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
downs of the hills ; it adapts itself to the accidents of
the ground ; but the accidents of the ground are not
the cause of the road, nor have they given it its
direction. At every moment they furnish it with
what is indispensable, namely, the soil on which it
lies ; but if we consider the whole of the road, instead
of each of its parts, the accidents of the ground appear
only as impediments or causes of delay, for the road
aims simply at the town and would fain be a straight
line. Just so as regards the evolution of life and
the circumstances through which it passes with this
difference, that evolution does not mark out a solitary
route, that it takes directions without aiming at
ends, and that it remains inventive even in its
adaptations.
But, if the evolution of life is something other than
a series of adaptations to accidental circumstances, so
also it is not the realization of a plan. A plan is given
in advance. It is represented, or at least representable,
before its realization. The complete execution of it
may be put off to a distant future, or even indefinitely ;
but the idea is none the less formulable at the present
time, in terms actually given. If, on the contrary,
evolution is a creation unceasingly renewed, it creates,
as it goes on, not only the forms of life, but the ideas
that will enable the intellect to understand it, the terms
which will serve to express it. That is to say that its
future overflows its present, and cannot be sketched
out therein in an idea.
There is the first error of finalism. It involves
another, yet more serious.
If life realizes a plan, it ought to manifest a greater
harmony the further it advances, just as the house
shows better and better the idea of the architect as
ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 109
stone is set upon stone. If, on the contrary, the unity
of life is to be found solely in the impetus that pushes
it along the road of time, the harmony is not in front,
but behind. The unity is derived from a vis a tergo :
it is given at the start as an impulsion, not placed
at the end as an attraction. In communicating itself,
the impetus splits up more and more. Life, in pro
portion to its progress, is scattered in manifestations
which undoubtedly owe to their common origin the
fact that they are complementary to each other in
certain aspects, but which are none the less mutually
incompatible and antagonistic. So the discord between
species will go on increasing. Indeed, we have as yet
only indicated the essential cause of it. We have
supposed, for the sake of simplicity, that each species
received the impulsion in order to pass it on to others,
and that, in every direction in which life evolves, the
propagation is in a straight line. But, as a matter of
fact, there are species which are arrested ; there are
some that retrogress. Evolution is not only a move
ment forward ; in many cases we observe a marking
time, and still more often a deviation or turning back.
It must be so, as we shall show further on, and the
same causes that divide the evolution movement often
cause life to be diverted from itself, hypnotised by the
form it has just brought forth. Thence results an
increasing disorder. No doubt there is progress, if
progress mean a continual advance in the general
direction determined by a first impulsion ; but this
progress is accomplished only on the two or three
great lines of evolution on which forms ever more
and more complex, ever more and more high, appear ;
between these lines run a crowd of minor paths in
which, on the contrary, deviations, arrests, and set-backs
no CREATIVE EVOLUTION
are multiplied. The philosopher, who begins by laying
down as a principle that each detail is connected with
some general plan of the whole, goes from one dis
appointment to another as soon as he comes to examine
the facts ; and, as he had put everything in the same
rank, he finds that, as the result of not allowing for
accident, he must regard everything as accidental. For
accident, then, an allowance must first be made, and
a very liberal allowance. We must recognise that all
is not coherent in nature. By so doing, we shall be
led to ascertain the centres around which the in
coherence crystallizes. This crystallization itself will
clarify the rest : the main directions will appear, in
which life is moving whilst developing the original
impulse. True, we shall not witness the detailed
accomplishment of a plan. Nature is more and better
than a plan in course of realization. A plan is a
term assigned to a labour : it closes the future whose
form it indicates. Before the evolution of life, on
the contrary, the portals of the future remain wide
open. It is a creation that goes on for ever in virtue
of an initial movement. This movement constitutes
the unity of the organized world a prolific unity, of
an infinite richness, superior to any that the intellect
could dream of, for the intellect is only one of its
aspects or products.
But it is easier to define the method than to apply
it. The complete interpretation of the evolution
movement in the past, as we conceive it, would be
possible only if the history of the development of the
organized world were entirely known. Such is far
from being the case. The genealogies proposed for
the different species are generally questionable. They
vary with their authors, with the theoretic views
ii THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL in
inspiring them, and raise discussions to which the
present state of science does not admit of a final
settlement. But a comparison of the different solutions
shows that the controversy bears less on the main lines
of the movement than on matters of detail ; and so, by
following the main lines as closely as possible, we shall
be sure of not going astray. Moreover, they alone
are important to us ; for we do not aim, like the
naturalist, at finding the order of succession of
different species, but only at defining the principal
directions of their evolution. And not all of these
directions have the same interest for us : what concerns
us particularly is the path that leads to man. We shall
therefore not lose sight of the fact, in following one
direction and another, that our main business is to
determine the relation of man to the animal kingdom,
and the place of the animal kingdom itself in the
organized world as a whole.
To begin with the second point, let us say that no
definite characteristic distinguishes the plant from the
animal. Attempts to define the two kingdoms strictly
have always come to naught. There is not a single
property of vegetable life that is not found, in some
degree, in certain animals ; not a single characteristic
feature of the animal that has not been seen in certain
species or at certain moments in the vegetable world.
Naturally, therefore, biologists enamoured of clean-
cut concepts have regarded the distinction between the
two kingdoms as artificial. They would be right, if
O / O
definition in this case must be made, as in the mathe
matical and physical sciences, according to certain
statical attributes which belong to the object defined
and are not found in any other. Very different, in
ii2 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
our opinion, is the kind of definition which befits the
sciences of life. There is no manifestation of life
which does not contain, in a rudimentary state either
latent or potential, the essential characters of most
other manifestations. The difference is in the pro
portions. But this very difference of proportion will
suffice to define the group, if we can establish that it
is not accidental, and that the group, as it evolves,
tends more and more to emphasize these particular
characters. In a word, the group must not be defined by
the possession of certain characters^ but by its tendency
to emphasize them. From this point of view, taking
tendencies rather than states into account, we find
that vegetables and animals may be precisely defined
and distinguished, and that they correspond to two
divergent developments of life.
This divergence is shown, first, in the method of
alimentation. We know that the vegetable derives
directly from the air and water and soil the elements
necessary to maintain life, especially carbon and
nitrogen, which it takes in mineral form. The animal,
on the contrary, cannot assimilate these elements
unless they have already been fixed for it in organic
substances by plants, or by animals which directly
or indirectly owe them to plants ; so that ultimately
the vegetable nourishes the animal. True, this law
allows of many exceptions among vegetables. We do
not hesitate to class amongst vegetables the Drosera,
the Dionaea, the Pinguicula, which are insectivorous
plants. On the other hand, the fungi, which occupy
so considerable a place in the vegetable world, feed like
animals : whether they are ferments, saprophytes or
parasites, it is to already formed organic substances
that they owe their nourishment. It is therefore
ii THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 113
impossible to draw from this difference any static
definition such as would automatically settle in any
particular case the question whether we are deal
ing with a plant or an animal. But the difference may
provide the beginning of a dynamic definition of the
two kingdoms, in that it marks the two divergent
directions in which vegetables and animals have taken
their course. It is a remarkable fact that the fungi,
which nature has spread all over the earth in such
extraordinary profusion, have not been able to evolve.
Organically they do not rise above tissues which, in
the higher vegetables, are formed in the embryonic
sac of the ovary, and precede the germinative develop
ment of the new individual. 1 They might be called
the abortive children of the vegetable world. Their
different species are like so many blind alleys, as if,
by renouncing the mode of alimentation customary
amongst vegetables, they had been brought to a stand
still on the highway of vegetable evolution. As to
the Drosera, the Dionaea, and insectivorous plants
in general, they are fed by their roots, like other
plants ; they too fix, by their green parts, the carbon
of the carbonic acid in the atmosphere. Their faculty
of capturing, absorbing and digesting insects must
have arisen late, in quite exceptional cases where the
soil was too poor to furnish sufficient nourishment.
In a general way, then, if we attach less importance to
the presence of special characters than to their tendency
to develop, and if we regard as essential that tendency
along which evolution has been able to continue
indefinitely, we may say that vegetables are dis
tinguished from animals by their power of creating
organic matter out of mineral elements which they
1 De Saporta and Marion, L Evolution des cryptogames, 1881, p. 37.
I
ii4 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
draw directly from the air and earth and water.
But now we come to another difference, deeper than
this, though not unconnected with it.
The animal, being unable to fix directly the carbon
and nitrogen which are everywhere to be found, has to
seek for its nourishment vegetables which have already
fixed these elements, or animals which have taken them
from the vegetable kingdom. So the animal must be
able to move. From the amoeba, which thrusts out
its pseudopodia at random to seize the organic matter
scattered in a drop of water, up to the higher animals
which have sense-organs with which to recognise their
prey, locomotor organs to go and seize it, and a
nervous system to coordinate their movements with
their sensations, animal life is characterized, in its
general direction, by mobility in space. In its most
rudimentary form, the animal is a tiny mass of
protoplasm enveloped at most in a thin albuminous
pellicle which allows full freedom for change of shape
and movement. The vegetable cell, on the contrary, is
surrounded by a membrane of cellulose, which con
demns it to immobility. And, from the bottom to the
top of the vegetable kingdom, there are the same habits
growing more and more sedentary, the plant having no
need to move, and finding around it, in the air and
water and soil in which it is placed, the mineral elements
it can appropriate directly. It is true that phenomena
of movement are seen in plants. Darwin has written
a well-known work on the movements of climbing
plants. He studied also the contrivances of certain in
sectivorous plants, such as the Drosera and the Dionaea,
to seize their prey. The leaf-movements of the acacia,
the sensitive plant, etc., are well known. Moreover,
the circulation of the vegetable protoplasm within its
ii THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 115
sheath bears witness to its relationship to the proto
plasm of animals, whilst in a large number of animal
species (generally parasites) phenomena of fixation,
analogous to those of vegetables, can be observed. 1
Here, again, it would be a mistake to claim that fixity
and mobility are the two characters which enable us
to decide, by simple inspection alone, whether we have
before us a plant or an animal. But fixity, in the
animal, generally seems like a torpor into which the
species has fallen, a refusal to evolve further in a
certain direction ; it is closely akin to parasitism and
is accompanied by features that recall those of vegetable
life. On the other hand, the movements of vegetables
have neither the frequency nor the variety of those of
animals. Generally, they involve only part of the
organism and scarcely ever extend to the whole. In
the exceptional cases in which a vague spontaneity
appears in vegetables, it is as if we beheld the accidental
awakening of an activity normally asleep. In short,
although both mobility and fixity exist in the vegetable
as in the animal world, the balance is clearly in
favour of fixity in the one case and of mobility in the
other. These two opposite tendencies are so plainly
directive of the two evolutions that the two kingdoms
might almost be defined by them. But fixity and
mobility, again, are only superficial signs of tendencies
that are still deeper.
Between mobility and consciousness there is an
obvious relationship. No doubt, the consciousness
of the higher organisms seems bound up with certain
cerebral arrangements. The more the nervous system
develops, the more numerous and more precise become
1 On fixation and parasitism in general, see the work of Houssay.
La Forme et la vie, Paris, 1900, pp. 721-807.
n6 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP
the movements among which it can choose ; the
clearer, also, is the consciousness that accompanies
them. But neither this mobility nor this choice nor
consequently this consciousness involves as a necessary
condition the presence of a nervous system ; the latter
has only canalized in definite directions, and brought
up to a higher degree of intensity, a rudimentary and
vague activity, diffused throughout the mass of the
organized substance. The lower we descend in the
animal series, the more the nervous centres are simpli
fied, and the more, too, they separate from each other,
till finally the nervous elements disappear, merged in
the mass of a less differentiated organism. But it is
the same with all the other apparatus, with all the
other anatomical elements ; and it would be as absurd
to refuse consciousness to an animal because it has no
brain as to declare it incapable of nourishing itself be
cause it has no stomach. The truth is that the nervous
system arises, like the other systems, from a division
of labour. It does not create the function, it only
brings it to a higher degree of intensity and precision
by giving it the double form of reflex and voluntary
activity. To accomplish a true reflex movement, a
whole mechanism is necessary, set up in the spinal
cord or the medulla. To choose voluntarily between
several definite courses of action, cerebral centres are
necessary, that is, crossways from which paths start,
leading to motor mechanisms of diverse form but equal
precision. But where nervous elements are not yet
canalized, still less concentrated into a system, there is
something from which, by a kind of splitting, both the
reflex and the voluntary will arise, something which
has neither the mechanical precision of the former
nor the intelligent hesitations of the latter, but which,
THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 117
partaking of both it may be infinitesimally, is a reaction
simply undecided, and therefore vaguely conscious.
This amounts to saying that the humblest organism
is conscious in proportion to its power to move freely.
Is consciousness here, in relation to movement, the effect
or the cause ? In one sense it is the cause, since it has
to direct locomotion. But in another sense it is the
effect, for it is the motor activity that maintains it,
and, once this activity disappears, consciousness dies
away or rather falls asleep. In crustaceans such as
the rhizocephala, which must formerly have shown a
more differentiated structure, fixity and parasitism
accompany the degeneration and almost complete dis
appearance of the nervous system. Since, in such a
case, the progress of organization must have localized all
the conscious activity in nervous centres, we may con
jecture that consciousness is even weaker in animals of
this kind than in organisms much less differentiated,
which have never had nervous centres but have
remained mobile.
How then could the plant, which is fixed in the
earth and finds its food on the spot, have developed in
the direction of conscious activity ? The membrane of
cellulose, in which the protoplasm wraps itself up, not
only prevents the simplest vegetable organism from
moving, but screens it also, in some measure, from
those outer stimuli which act on the sensibility of the
animal as irritants and prevent it from going to sleep. 1
The plant is therefore unconscious. Here again,
however, we must beware of radical distinctions.
" Unconscious " and " conscious " are not two labels
which can be mechanically fastened, the one on every
vegetable cell, the other on all animals. While conscious-
1 Cope, op. cit. p. 76.
n8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
ness sleeps in the animal which has degenerated into a
motionless parasite, it probably awakens in the vegetable
that has regained liberty of movement, and awakens in j ust
the degree to which the vegetable has reconquered this
liberty. Nevertheless, consciousness and unconscious
ness mark the directions in which the two kingdoms
have developed, in this sense, that to find the best
specimens of consciousness in the animal we must
ascend to the highest representatives of the series,
whereas, to find probable cases of vegetable conscious
ness, we must descend as low as possible in the scale of
plants down to the zoospores of the algae, for instance,
and, more generally, to those unicellular organisms
which may be said to hesitate between the vegetable
form and animality. From this standpoint, and in this
measure, we should define the animal by sensibility and
awakened consciousness, the vegetable by conscious
ness asleep and by insensibility.
To sum up, the vegetable manufactures organic sub
stances directly with mineral substances ; as a rule, this
aptitude enables it to dispense with movement and so
with feeling. Animals, which are obliged to go in
search of their food, have evolved in the direction of
locomotor activity, and consequently of a consciousness
more and more distinct, more and more ample.
Now, it seems to us most probable that the animal
cell and the vegetable cell are derived from a common
stock, and that the first living organisms oscillated
between the vegetable and animal form, participating
in both at once. Indeed, we have just seen that the
characteristic tendencies of the evolution of the two
kingdoms, although divergent, coexist even now, both
in the plant and in the animal. The proportion alone
ii THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 119
differs. Ordinarily, one of the two tendencies covers
or crushes down the other, but in exceptional circum
stances the suppressed one starts up and regains the
place it had lost. The mobility and consciousness of
the vegetable cell are not so sound asleep that they can
not rouse themselves when circumstances permit or
demand it ; and, on the other hand, the evolution of
the animal kingdom has always been retarded, or stopped,
or dragged back, by the tendency it has kept toward
the vegetative life. However full, however overflow
ing the activity of an animal species may appear, torpor
and unconsciousness are always lying in wait for it. It
keeps up its r61e only by effort, at the price of fatigue.
Along the route on which the animal has evolved,
there have been numberless shortcomings and cases of
decay, generally associated with parasitic habits ; they
are so many shuntings on to the vegetative life. Thus,
everything bears out the belief that vegetable and
animal are descended from a common ancestor which
united the tendencies of both in a rudimentary state.
But the two tendencies mutually implied in this
rudimentary form became dissociated as they grew.
Hence the world of plants with its fixity and insensi
bility, hence the animals with their mobility and con
sciousness. There is no need, in order to explain this
dividing into two, to bring in any mysterious force. It is
enough to point out that the living being leans naturally
toward what is most convenient to it, and that vegetables
and animals have chosen two different kinds of con
venience in the way of procuring the carbon and nitrogen
they need. Vegetables continually and mechanically
draw these elements from an environment that continu
ally provides it. Animals, by action that is discon
tinuous, concentrated in certain moments, and conscious.
120 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
go to find these bodies in organisms that have already
fixed them. They are two different ways of being in
dustrious, or perhaps we may prefer to say, of being idle.
For this very reason we doubt whether nervous elements,
however rudimentary, will ever be found in the plant.
What corresponds in it to the directing will of the
animal is, we believe, the direction in which it bends the
energy of the solar radiation when it uses it to break the
connection of the carbon with the oxygen in carbonic acid.
What corresponds in it to the sensibility of the animal is
the impressionability, quite of its kind, of its chlorophyl
to light. Now, a nervous system being pre-eminently
a mechanism which serves as intermediary between
sensations and volitions, the true " nervous system " of
the plant seems to be the mechanism or rather chemicism
sui generis which serves as intermediary between the im
pressionability of its chlorophyl to light and the produc
ing of starch : which amounts to saying that the plant can
have no nervous elements, and that the same impetus that
has led the animal to give itself nerves and nerve centres must
have ended, in the plant , in the chlorophyllian function. 1
This first glance over the organized world will
enable us to ascertain more precisely what unites the
two kingdoms, and also what separates them.
Suppose, as we suggested in the preceding chapter,
that at the root of life there is an effort to engraft on to
1 Just as the plant, in certain cases, recovers the faculty of moving
actively which slumbers in it, so the animal, in exceptional circumstances,
can replace itself in the conditions of the vegetative life and develop in itself
an equivalent of the chlorophyllian function. It appears, indeed, from
recent experiments of Maria von Linden, that the chrysalides and the
caterpillars of certain Lepidoptera, under the influence of light, fix the
carbon of the carbonic acid contained in the atmosphere (M. von Linden,
" L Assimilation de 1 acide carbonique par les chrysalides de L^pidopteres,"
C.R. de la Soc. de biologif, 1905, pp. 691 ff.).
ii THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 121
the necessity of physical forces the largest possible amount
of indetermination. This effort cannot result in the
creation of energy, or, if it does, the quantity created
does not belong to the order of magnitude apprehended
by our senses and instruments of measurement, our ex
perience and science. All that the effort can do, then, is
to make the best of a pre-existing energy which it finds
at its disposal. Now, it finds only one way of succeed
ing in this, namely, to secure such an accumulation of
potential energy from matter, that it can get, at any
moment, the amount of work it needs for its action,
simply by pulling a trigger. The effort itself possesses
only that power of releasing. But the work of releasing,
although always the same and always smaller than any
given quantity, will be the more effective the heavier
the weight it makes fall and the greater the height or,
in other words, the greater the sum of potential energy
accumulated and disposable. As a matter of fact, the
principal source of energy usable on the surface of our
planet is the sun. So the problem was this : to obtain
from the sun that it should partially and provisionally
suspend, here and there, on the surface of the earth, its
continual outpour of usable energy, and store a certain
quantity of it, in the form of unused energy, in
appropriate reservoirs, whence it could be drawn at the
desired moment, at the desired spot, in the desired
direction. The substances forming the food of animals
are just such reservoirs. Made of very complex mole
cules holding a considerable amount of chemical energy
in the potential state, they are like explosives which only
need a spark to set free the energy stored within them.
Now, it is probable that life tended at the beginning to
compass at one and the same time both the manufac
ture of the explosive and the explosion by which it
122 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
is utilized. In this case, the same organism that
had directly stored the energy of the solar radiation
would have expended it in free movements in space.
And for that reason we must presume that the first living
beings sought on the one hand to accumulate, without
ceasing, energy borrowed from the sun, and on the
other hand to expend it, in a discontinuous and ex
plosive way, in movements of locomotion. Even
to-day, perhaps, a chlorophyl-bearing Infusorian such as
the Euglena may symbolize this primordial tendency of
life, though in a mean form, incapable of evolving. Is
the divergent development of the two kingdoms related
to what one may call the oblivion of each kingdom as
regards one of the two halves of the programme ? Or
rather, which is more likely, was the very nature of
the matter, that life found confronting it on our planet,
opposed to the possibility of the two tendencies evolving
very far together in the same organism ? What is
certain is that the vegetable has trended principally in
the first direction and the animal in the second. But
if, from the very first, in making the explosive, nature
had for object the explosion, then it is the evolution of
the animal, rather than that of the vegetable, that in
dicates, on the whole, the fundamental direction of life.
The "harmony" of the two kingdoms, the com
plementary characters they display, might then be
due to the fact that they develop two tendencies
which at first were fused in one. The more the
single original tendency grows, the harder it finds it to
keep united in the same living being those two elements
which in the rudimentary state implied each other.
Hence a parting in two, hence two divergent evolutions ;
hence also two series of characters opposed in certain
points, complementary in others, but, whether opposed
ii THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 123
or complementary, always preserving an appearance of
kinship. While the animal evolved, not without
accidents along the way, toward a freer and freer ex
penditure of discontinuous energy, the plant perfected
rather its system of accumulation without moving.
We shall not dwell on this second point. Suffice it to
say that the plant must have been greatly benefited, in
its turn, by a new division, analogous to that between
plants and animals. While the primitive vegetable
cell had to fix by itself both its carbon and its nitrogen,
it became able almost to give up the second of these
two functions as soon as microscopic vegetables came
forward which leaned in this direction exclusively, and
even specialised diversely in this still complicated busi
ness. The microbes that fix the nitrogen of the air and
those which convert the ammoniacal compounds into
nitrous ones, and these again into nitrates, have, by the
same splitting up of a tendency primitively one, rendered
to the whole vegetable world the same kind of service as
the vegetables in general have rendered to animals. If
a special kingdom were to be made for these microscopic
vegetables, it might be said that in the microbes of the
soil, the vegetables and the animals, we have before us
the analysis, carried out by the matter that life found at its
disposal on our planet, of all that life contained, at the
outset, in a state of reciprocal implication. Is this,
properly speaking, a "division of labour" ? These words
do not give the exact idea of evolution, such as we con
ceive it. Wherever there is division of labour, there is
association and also convergence of effort. Now, the evolu
tion we are speaking of is never achieved by means of
association, but by dissociation ; it never tends toward
convergence, but toward divergence of efforts. The
harmony between terms that are mutually comple-
i2 4 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
mentary in certain points is not, in our opinion,
produced, in course of progress, by a reciprocal adapta
tion ; on the contrary, it is complete only at the start.
It arises from an original identity, from the fact that
the evolutionary process, splaying out like a sheaf,
sunders, in proportion to their simultaneous growth,
terms which at first completed each other so well that
they coalesced.
Now, the elements into which a tendency splits up
are far from possessing the same importance, or, above
all, the same power to evolve. We have just dis
tinguished three different kingdoms, if one may so
express it, in the organized world. While the first
comprises only micro-organisms which have remained
in the rudimentary state, animals and vegetables have
taken their flight toward very lofty fortunes. Such,
indeed, is generally the case when a tendency divides.
Among the divergent developments to which it
gives rise, some go on indefinitely, others come more
or less quickly to the end of their tether. These latter
do not issue directly from the primitive tendency, but
from one of the elements into which it has divided ;
they are residual developments made and left behind
on the way by some truly elementary tendency which
continues to evolve. Now, these truly elementary
tendencies, we think, bear a mark by which they may
be recognised.
This mark is like a trace, still visible in each, of
what was in the original tendency of which they re
present the elementary directions. The elements of a
tendency are not like objects set beside each other in
space and mutually exclusive, but rather like psychic
states, each of which, although it be itself to begin
with, yet partakes of others, and so virtually includes
ii THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 125
in itself the whole personality to which it belongs.
There is no real manifestation of life, we said, that
does not show us, in a rudimentary or latent state, the
characters of other manifestations. Conversely, when
we meet, on one line of evolution, a recollection, so to
speak, of what is developed along other lines, we must
conclude that we have before us dissociated elements of
one and the same original tendency. In this sense,
vegetables and animals represent the two great divergent
developments of life. Though the plant is distinguished
from the animal by fixity and insensibility, movement
and consciousness sleep in it as recollections which may
waken. But, beside these normally sleeping recollections,
there are others awake and active, just those, namely,
whose activity does not obstruct the development of
the elementary tendency itself. We may then formulate
this law : When a tendency splits up in the course of its
development^ each of the special tendencies which thus arise
tries to preserve and develop everything in the primitive
tendency that is not incompatible with the work for which
it is specialized. This explains precisely the fact we
dwelt on in the preceding chapter, viz., the formation
of identical complex mechanisms on independent lines
of evolution. Certain deep-seated analogies between
the animal and the vegetable have probably no other
cause : sexual generation is perhaps only a luxury for
the plant, but to the animal it was a necessity, and the
plant must have been driven to it by the same impetus
which impelled the animal thereto, a primitive, original
impetus, anterior to the separation of the two king
doms. The same may be said of the tendency of
the vegetable towards a growing complexity. This
tendency is essential to the animal kingdom, ever
tormented by the need of more and more extended
126 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
and effective action. But the vegetable, condemned to
fixity and insensibility, exhibits the same tendency only
because it received at the outset the same impulsion.
Recent experiments show that it varies at random when
the period of " mutation " arrives ; whereas the animal
must have evolved, we believe, in much more definite
directions. But we will not dwell further on this original
doubling of the modes of life. Let us come to the
evolution of animals, in which we are more particularly
interested.
What constitutes animality, we said, is the faculty
of utilizing a releasing mechanism for the conversion
of as much stored-up potential energy as possible into
" explosive " actions. In the beginning the explosion
is haphazard, and does not choose its direction. Thus
the amoeba thrusts out its pseudopodic prolongations
in all directions at once. But, as we rise in the
animal scale, the form of the body itself is observed to
indicate a certain number of very definite directions
along which the energy travels. These directions are
marked by so many chains of nervous elements. Now,
the nervous element has gradually emerged from
the barely differentiated mass of organized tissue.
It may, therefore, be surmised that in the nervous
element, as soon as it appears, and also in its append
ages, the faculty of suddenly freeing the gradually
stored-up energy is concentrated. No doubt, every
living cell expends energy without ceasing, in order
to maintain its equilibrium. The vegetable cell, torpid
from the start, is entirely absorbed in this work of
maintenance alone, as if it took for end what must at
first have been only a means. But, in the animal, all
points to action, that is, to the utilization of energy for
n ANIMAL LIFE 127
movements from place to place. True, every animal
cell expends a good deal often the whole of the
energy at its disposal in keeping itself alive ; but the
organism as a whole tries to attract as much energy as
possible to those points where the locomotive move
ments are effected. So that where a nervous system
exists, with its complementary sense-organs and motor
apparatus, everything should happen as if the rest of
the body had, as its essential function, to prepare for
these and pass on to them, at the moment required, that
force which they are to liberate by a sort of explosion.
The part played by food amongst the higher animals
is, indeed, extremely complex. In the first place it serves
to repair tissues, then it provides the animal with the
heat necessary to render it as independent as possible
of changes in external temperature. Thus it pre
serves, supports, and maintains the organism in which
the nervous system is set and on which the nervous
elements have to live. But these nervous elements
would have no reason for existence if the organism
did not pass to them, and especially to the muscles
they control, a certain energy to expend ; and it may
even be conjectured that there, in the main, is the
essential and ultimate destination of food. This does
not mean that the greater part of the food is used in this
work. A state may have to make enormous expendi
ture to secure the return of taxes, and the sum which
it will have to dispose of, after deducting the cost of
collection, will perhaps be very small : that sum is, none
the less, the reason for the tax and for all that has been
spent to obtain its return. So is it with the energy
which the animal demands of its food.
Many facts seem to indicate that the nervous and
muscular elements stand in this relation towards the
128 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
rest of the organism. Glance first at the distribution
of alimentary substances among the different elements
of the living body. These substances fall into two
classes, one the quaternary or albuminoid, the other the
ternary, including the carbohydrates and the fats. The
albuminoids are properly plastic, destined to repair the
tissues although, owing to the carbon they contain,
they are capable of providing energy on occasion. But
the function of supplying energy has devolved more
particularly on the second class of substances : these,
being deposited in the cell rather than forming part of
its substance, convey to it, in the form of chemical
potential, an expansive energy that may be directly con
verted into either movement or heat. In short, the chief
function of the albuminoids is to repair the machine,
while the function of the other class of substances is to
supply power. It is natural that the albuminoids should
have no specially allotted destination, since every part
of the machine has to be maintained. But not so with
the other substances. The carbohydrates are distributed
very unequally, and this inequality of distribution seems
to us in the highest degree instructive.
Conveyed by the arterial blood in the form of
glucose, these substances are deposited, in the form of
glycogen, in the different cells forming the tissues.
We know that one of the principal functions of the
liver is to maintain at a constant level the quantity of
glucose held by the blood, by means of the reserves
of glycogen secreted by the hepatic cells. Now, in this
circulation of glucose and accumulation of glycogen,
it is easy to see that the effect is as if the whole effort
of the organism were directed towards providing with
potential energy the elements of both the muscular and
the nervous tissues. The organism proceeds differently
ii ANIMAL LIFE 129
in the two cases, but it arrives at the same result. In
the first case, it provides the muscle-cell with a large
reserve deposited in advance : the quantity of glycogen
contained in the muscles is, indeed, enormous in
comparison with what is found in the other tissues.
In the nervous tissue, on the contrary, the reserve
is small (the nervous elements, whose function is
merely to liberate the potential energy stored in the
muscle, never have to furnish much work at one time) ;
but the remarkable thing is that this reserve is restored
by the blood at the very moment that it is expended,
so that the nerve is instantly recharged with potential
energy. Muscular tissue and nervous tissue are,
therefore, both privileged, the one in that it is stocked
with a large reserve of energy, the other in that it is
always served at the instant it is in need and to the
exact extent of its requirements.
More particularly, it is from the sensori-motor
system that the call for glycogen, the potential
energy, comes, as if the rest of the organism were
simply there in order to transmit force to the nervous
system and to the muscles which the nerves control.
True, when we think of the part played by the nervous
system (even the sensori-motor system) as regulator
of the organic life, it may well be asked whether, in this
exchange of good offices between it and the rest of the
body, the nervous system is indeed a master that the
body serves. But we shall already incline to this hypo
thesis when we consider, even in the static state only,
the distribution of potential energy among the tissues ;
and we shall be entirely convinced of it when we reflect
upon the conditions in which the energy is expended
and restored. For suppose the sensori-motor system
is a system like the others, of the same rank as the
K
1 30 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
others. Borne by the whole of the organism, it will
wait until an excess of chemical potential is supplied
to it before it performs any work. In other words,
it is the production of glycogen which will regulate
the consumption by the nerves and muscles. On
the contrary, if the sensori-motor system is the actual
master, the duration and extent of its action will be
independent, to a certain extent at least, of the reserve
of glycogen that it holds, and even of that contained
in the whole of the organism. It will perform work,
and the other tissues will have to arrange as they can
to supply it with potential energy. Now, this is pre
cisely what does take place, as is shown in particular by
the experiments of Morat and Dufourt. 1 While the
glycogenic function of the liver depends on the action
of the excitory nerves which control it, the action of
these nerves is subordinated to the action of those
which stimulate the locomotor muscles in this sense,
that the muscles begin by expending without calculation,
thus consuming glycogen, impoverishing the blood of
its glucose, and finally causing the liver, which has
had to pour into the impoverished blood some of its
reserve of glycogen, to manufacture a fresh supply.
From the sensori-motor system, then, everything
starts ; on that system everything converges ; and we
may say, without metaphor, that the rest of the organism
is at its service.
Consider again what happens in a prolonged fast.
It is a remarkable fact that in animals that have died of
hunger the brain is found to be almost unimpaired, while
the other organs have lost more or less of their weight
and their cells have undergone profound changes. 2 It
1 Archives de physiologic, 1892.
9 De Manaceine, "Quelques Observations experimentales sur [ influence de
ii ANIMAL LIFE 131
seems as though the rest of the body had sustained
the nervous system to the last extremity, treating itself
simply as the means of which the nervous system
is the end.
To sum up : if we agree, in short, to understand by
" the sensori-motor system " the cerebro-spinal nervous
system together with the sensorial apparatus in which it
is prolonged and the locomotor muscles it controls,
we may say that a higher organism is essentially a
sensori-motor system installed on systems of digestion,
respiration, circulation, secretion, etc., whose function
it is to repair, cleanse and protect it, to create an
unvarying internal environment for it, and above all
to pass it potential energy to convert into locomotive
movement. 1 It is true that the more the nervous
function is perfected, the more must the functions
required to maintain it develop, and the more exacting,
consequently, they become for themselves. As the
nervous activity has emerged from the protoplasmic
mass in which it was almost drowned, it has had to
summon around itself activities of all kinds for its
support. These could only be developed on other
I insomnie absolue" (Arch. ital. de biologie, t. xxi., 1894, pp. 322 ff.). Recently,
analogous observations have been made on a man who died of inanition
after a fast of thirty-five days. See, on this subject, in the Annte biologique
of 1898, p. 338, the resume of an article (in Russian) by Tarakevitch and
Stchasny.
1 Cuvier said : " The nervous system is, at bottom, the whole animal ;
the other systems are there only to serve it." (" Sur un nouveau rapproche
ment a etablir entre les classes qui composent le regne animal," Arch, du
Museum d histoire naturelle, Paris, 1812, pp. 73-84). Of course, it would
be necessary to apply a great many restrictions to this formula for example,
to allow for the cases of degradation and retrogression in which the nervous
system passes into the background. And, moreover, with the nervous
system must be included the sensorial apparatus on the one hand and
the motor on the other, between which it acts as intermediary. Cf.
Foster, art. "Physiology," in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Edinburgh, 1885,
p. 17.
132 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
activities, which again implied others, and so on in
definitely. Thus it is that the complexity of functioning
of the higher organisms goes on to infinity. The study
of one of these organisms therefore takes us round in
a circle, as if everything was a means to everything
else. But the circle has a centre, none the less, and that
is the system of nervous elements stretching between
the sensory organs and the motor apparatus.
We will not dwell here on a point we have treated
at length in a former work. Let us merely recall that
the progress of the nervous system has been effected
both in the direction of a more precise adaptation of
movements and in that of a greater latitude left to the
living being to choose between them. These two
tendencies may appear antagonistic, and indeed they
are so ; but a nervous chain, even in its most rudi
mentary form, successfully reconciles them. On the
one hand, it marks a well-defined track between one
point of the periphery and another, the one sensory,
the other motor. It has therefore canalized an activity
which was originally diffused in the protoplasmic mass.
But, on the other hand, the elements that compose it
are probably discontinuous ; at any rate, even supposing
they anastomose, they exhibit a functional discontinuity,
for each of them ends in a kind of cross-road where
probably the nervous current may choose its course.
From the humblest Monera to the best endowed insects,
and up to the most intelligent vertebrates, the progress
realized has been above all a progress of the nervous
system, coupled at every stage with all the new con
structions and complications of mechanism that this
progress required. As we foreshadowed in the be
ginning of this work, the role of life is to insert
some indetermination into matter. Indeterminate, i.e.
i, DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL LIFE 133
unforeseeable, are the forms it creates in the course
of its evolution. More and more indeterminate also,
more and more free, is the activity to which these
forms serve as the vehicle. A nervous system, with
neurones placed end to end in such wise that, at
the extremity of each, manifold ways open in which
manifold questions present themselves, is a veritable
reservoir of inde termination. That the main energy of
the vital impulse has been spent in creating apparatus
of this kind is, we believe, what a glance over the
organized world as a whole easily shows. But con
cerning the vital impulse itself a few explanations are
necessary.
It must not be forgotten that the force which is
evolving throughout the organized world is a limited
force, which is always seeking to transcend itself and
always remains inadequate to the work it would fain
produce. The errors and puerilities of radical finalism
are due to the misapprehension of this point. It has
represented the whole of the living world as a construc
tion, and a construction analogous to a human work.
All the pieces have been arranged with a view to the
best possible functioning of the machine. \ Each species
has its reason for existence, its part to play, its allotted
place ; and all join together, as it were, in a musical
concert, wherein the seeming discords are really meant
to bring out a fundamental harmony. In short, all
goes on in nature as in the works of human genius,
where, though the result may be trifling, there is at
least perfect adequacy between the object made and
the work of making it.
Nothing of the kind in the evolution of life. There,
the disproportion is striking between the work and the
134 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
result. From the bottom to the top of the organized
world we do indeed find one great effort ; but most
often this effort turns short, sometimes paralysed by
contrary forces, sometimes diverted from what it should
do by what it does, absorbed by the form it is engaged
in taking, hypnotized by it as by a mirror. Even in its
most perfect works, though it seems to have triumphed
over external resistances and also over its own, it is
at the mercy of the materiality which it has had to
assume. It is what each of us may experience in himself.
Our freedom, in the very movements by which
it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will
stifle it if it fails to renew itself by a constant
effort : it is dogged by automatism. The most living
thought becomes frigid in the formula that expresses it.
The word turns against the idea. The letter kills the
spirit. And our most ardent enthusiasm, as soon as
it is externalized into action, is so naturally con
gealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity,
the one takes so easily the shape of the other, that
we might confuse them together, doubt our own
sincerity, deny goodness and love, if we did not
know that the dead retain for a time the features
of the living.
The profound cause of this discordance lies in
an irremediable difference of rhythm. Life in general
is mobility itself; particular manifestations of life
accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag
behind. It is always going ahead ; they want to
mark time. Evolution in general would fain go
on in a straight line ; each special evolution is a
kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised by the
wind as it passes, the living turn upon themselves,
borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore
ii DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL LIFE 135
relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well
that we treat each of them as a thing rather than as a
progress, forgetting that the very permanence of their
form is only the outline of a movement. At times,
however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that
bears them is materialized before our eyes. We have
this sudden illumination before certain forms of maternal
love, so striking and in most animals so touching,
observable even in the solicitude of the plant for its
seed. This love, in which some have seen the great
mystery of life, may possibly deliver us life s secret. It
shows us each generation leaning over the generation
that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact
that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and
that the essence of life is in the movement by which
life is transmitted.
This contrast between life in general, and the forms
in which it is manifested, has everywhere the same
character. It might be said that life tends toward the
utmost possible action, but that each species prefers to
contribute the slightest possible effort. Regarded in what
constitutes its true essence, namely, as a transition from
species to species, life is a continually growing action.
But each of the species, through which life passes, aims
only at its own convenience. It goes for that which
demands the least labour. Absorbed in the form it is
about to take, it falls into a partial sleep, in which it
ignores almost all the rest of life ; it fashions itself so
as to take the greatest possible advantage of its im
mediate environment with the least possible trouble.
Accordingly, the act by which life goes forward to the
creation of a new form, and the act by which this
form is shaped, are two different and often antagon
istic movements. The first is continuous with the
136 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
second, but cannot continue in it without being drawn
aside from its direction, as would happen to a man
leaping, if, in order to clear the obstacle, he had to
turn his eyes from it and look at himself all the while.
Living forms are, by their very definition, forms
that are able to live. In whatever way the adaptation of
the organism to its circumstances is explained, it has
necessarily been sufficient, since the species has subsisted.
In this sense, each of the successive species that paleon
tology and zoology describes was a success carried off by
life. But we get a very different impression when we
refer each species to the movement that has left it behind
on its way, instead of to the conditions into which it has
been set. Often this movement has turned aside ; very
often, too, it has stopped short ; what was to have been
a thoroughfare has become a terminus. From this new
o
point of view, failure seems the rule, success exceptional
and always imperfect. We shall see that, of the four
main directions along which animal life bent its course,
two have led to blind alleys, and, in the other two, the
effort has generally been out of proportion to the result.
Documents are lacking to reconstruct this history in
detail, but we can make out its main lines. We have
already said that animals and vegetables must have
separated soon from their common stock, the vegetable
falling asleep in immobility, the animal, on the con
trary, becoming more and more awake and marching on
to the conquest of a nervous system. Probably the effort
of the animal kingdom resulted in creating organisms
still very simple, but endowed with a certain freedom
of action, and, above all, with a shape so undecided
that it could lend itself to any future determination.
These animals may have resembled some of our worms,
but with this difference, however, that the worms living
ii DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL LIFE 137
to-day, to which they could be compared, are but the
empty and fixed examples of infinitely plastic forms,
pregnant with an unlimited future, the common stock
of the echinoderms, molluscs, arthropods, and verte
brates.
One danger lay in wait for them, one obstacle which
might have stopped the soaring course of animal life.
There is one peculiarity with which we cannot help
being struck when glancing over the fauna of primitive
times, namely, the imprisonment of the animal in a
more or less solid sheath, which must have obstructed
and often even paralysed its movements. The
molluscs of that time had a shell more universally than
those of to-day. The arthropods in general were pro
vided with a carapace ; most of them were crustaceans.
The more ancient fishes had a bony sheath of extreme
hardness. 1 The explanation of this general fact should
be sought, we believe, in a tendency of soft organisms
to defend themselves against one another by making
themselves, as far as possible, undevourable. Each
species, in the act by which it comes into being, trends
towards that which is most expedient. Just as among
primitive organisms there were some that turned
towards animal life by refusing to manufacture organic
out of inorganic material and taking organic sub
stances ready made from organisms that had turned
toward the vegetative life, so, among the animal
species themselves, many contrived to live at the
expense of other animals. VFor an organism that is
animal, that is to say mobile, can avail itself of its
mobility to go in search of defenceless animals, and
feed on them quite as well as on vegetables. So, the
1 See, on these different points, the work of Gaudry, Essai de palton-
tologit philosophique, Paris, 1896, pp. 14-16 and 78-79.
138 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
more species became mobile, the more they became
voracious and dangerous to one another. Hence a
sudden arrest of the entire animal world in its pro
gress towards higher and higher mobility ; for the
hard and calcareous skin of the echinoderm, the shell
of the mollusc, the carapace of the crustacean and the
ganoid breast-plate of the ancient fishes probably
all originated in a common effort of the animal species
to protect themselves against hostile species. But this
breast-plate, behind which the animal took shelter,
constrained it in its movements and sometimes fixed
it in one place. If the vegetable renounced con
sciousness in wrapping itself in a cellulose membrane,
the animal that shut itself up in a citadel or in armour
condemned itself to a partial slumber. In this torpor
the echinoderms and even the molluscs live to-day.
Probably arthropods and vertebrates were threatened
with it too. They escaped, however, and to this
fortunate circumstance is due the expansion of the
highest forms of life.
In two directions, in fact, we see the impulse of life
to movement getting the upper hand again. The
fishes exchanged their ganoid breast-plate for scales.
Long before that, the insects had appeared, also dis
encumbered of the breast-plate that had protected their
ancestors. Both supplemented the insufficiency of their
protective covering by an agility that enabled them to
escape their enemies, and also to assume the offensive,
to choose the place and the moment of encounter. We
see a progress of the same kind in the evolution of
human armaments. The first impulse is to seek
shelter ; the second, which is the better, is to become as
supple as possible for flight and above all for attack-
attack being the most effective means of defence. So
ii DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL LIFE 139
the heavy hoplite was supplanted by the legionary ; the
knight, clad in armour, had to give place to the light
free-moving infantryman ; and in a general way, in the
evolution of life, just as in the evolution of human
societies and of individual destinies, the greatest
successes have been for those that have accepted the
heaviest risks.
Evidently, then, it was to the animal s interest to
make itself more mobile. As we said when speaking
of adaptation in general, any transformation of a species
can be explained by its own particular interest. This
will give the immediate cause of the variation, but often
only the most superficial cause. The profound cause is
the impulse which thrust life into the world, which
made it divide into vegetables and animals, which
shunted the animal on to suppleness of form, and
which, at a certain moment, in the animal kingdom
threatened with torpor, secured that, on some points at
least, it should rouse itself up and move forward.
On the two paths along which the vertebrates
and arthropods have separately evolved, development
(apart from retrogressions connected with parasitism
or any other cause) has consisted above all in
the progress of the sensori-motor nervous system.
Mobility and suppleness were sought for, and also
through many experimental attempts, and not with
out a tendency to excess of substance and brute
force at the start variety of movements. But this
quest itself took place in divergent directions. A
glance at the nervous system of the arthropods and that
of the vertebrates shows us the difference. In the
arthropods, the body is formed of a series more or
less long of rings set together ; motor activity is thus
distributed amongst a varying sometimes a con-
1 40 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
siderable number of appendages, each of which has
its special function. In the vertebrates, activity is
concentrated in two pairs of members only, and these
organs perform functions which depend much less
strictly on their form. 1 The independence becomes
complete in man, whose hand is capable of any kind ot
work.
That, at least, is what we see. But behind what
is seen there is what may be surmised two powers,
immanent in life and originally intermingled, which
were bound to part company in course of growth.
To define these powers, we must consider, in the
evolution both of the arthropods and the vertebrates,
the species which mark the culminating point of each.
How is this point to be determined ? Here again,
to aim at geometrical precision will lead us astray.
There is no single simple sign by which we can
recognize that one species is more advanced than another
on the same line of evolution. There are manifold
characters, that must be compared and weighed in each
particular case, in order to ascertain to what extent they
are essential or accidental and how far they must be
taken into account.
It is unquestionable, for example, that success is the
most general criterion of superiority, the two terms
being, up to a certain point, synonymous. By success
must be understood, so far as the living being is con
cerned, an aptitude to develop in the most diverse
environments, through the greatest possible variety of
obstacles, so as to cover the widest possible extent of
ground. A species which claims the entire earth for
its domain is truly a dominating and consequently
1 See, on this subject, Shaler, The Individual, New York, 1900, pp
118-125.
ii DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL LIFE 141
superior species. Such is the human species, which
represents the culminating point of the evolution of the
vertebrates. But such also are, in the series of the
articulate, the insects and in particular certain Hymen-
optera. It has been said of the ants that, as man is
lord of the soil, they are lords of the sub-soil.
On the other hand, a group of species that has
appeared late may be a group of degenerates ; but, for
that, some special cause of retrogression must have
intervened. By right, this group should be superior
to the group from which it is derived, since it would
correspond to a more advanced stage of evolution.
Now man is probably the latest comer of the verte
brates ; 1 and in the insect series no species is later than
the Hymenoptera, unless it be the Lepidoptera, which
are probably degenerates, living parasitically on flower
ing plants.
So, by different ways, we are led to the same con
clusion. The evolution of the arthropods reaches its
culminating point in the insect, and in particular in
the Hymenoptera, as that of the vertebrates in man.
Now, since instinct is nowhere so developed as in the
insect world, and in no group of insects so marvel
lously as in the Hymenoptera, it may be said that the
whole evolution of the animal kingdom, apart from
retrogressions towards vegetative life, has taken place
on two divergent paths, one of which led to instinct
and the other to intelligence.
1 This point is disputed by M. Rene" Quinton, who regards the car
nivorous and ruminant mammals, as well as certain birds, as subsequent
to man (R. Quinton, L Eau de mer milieu organique, Paris, 1904, p. 435).
We may say here that our general conclusions, although very different from
M. Quinton s, are not irreconcilable with them ; for if evolution has really
been such as we represent it, the vertebrates must have made an effort
to maintain themselves in the most favourable conditions of activity
the very conditions, indeed, which life had chosen in the beginning.
1 42 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
Vegetative torpor, instinct, and intelligence these,
then, are the elements that coincided in the vital im
pulsion common to plants and animals, and which,
in the course of a development in which they were
made manifest in the most unforeseen forms, have
been dissociated by the very fact of their growth. The
cardinal error which, from Aristotle onwards, has -vitiated
most of the philosophies of nature, is to see in vegetative,
instinctive and rational life, three successive degrees of the
development of one and the same tendency, whereas they
are three divergent directions of an activity that has split
up as it grew. The difference between them is not a
difference of intensity, nor, more generally, of degree,
but of kind.
It is important to investigate this point. We have
seen in the case of vegetable and animal life how they
are at once mutually complementary and mutually
antagonistic. Now we must show that intelligence and
instinct also are opposite and complementary. But
let us first explain why we are generally led to regard
them as activities of which one is superior to the other
and based upon it, whereas in reality they are not things
of the same order : they have not succeeded one
another, nor can we assign to them different grades.
It is because intelligence and instinct, having origin
ally been interpenetrating, retain something of their
common origin. Neither is ever found in a pure state.
We said that in the plant the consciousness and mobility
of the animal, which lie dormant, can be awakened ; and
that the animal lives under the constant menace of being
drawn aside to the vegetative life. The two tendencies
that of the plant and that of the animal were so
thoroughly interpenetrating, to begin with, that there has
ii INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 143
never been a complete severance between them : they
haunt each other continually ; everywhere we find them
mingled ; it is the proportion that differs. So with in
telligence and instinct. There is no intelligence in which
some traces of instinct are not to be discovered, more
especially no instinct that is not surrounded with a
fringe of intelligence. It is this fringe of intelligence
that has been the cause of so many misunderstandings.
From the fact that instinct is always more or less
intelligent, it has been concluded that instinct and
intelligence are things of the same kind, that there is
only a difference of complexity or perfection between
them, and, above all, that one of the two is expressible
in terms of the other. In reality, they accompany each
other only because they are complementary, and they
are complementary only because they are different,
what is instinctive in instinct being opposite to what
is intelligent in intelligence.
We are bound to dwell on this point. It is one of
the utmost importance.
Let us say at the outset that the distinctions we
are going to make will be too sharply drawn, just
because we wish to define in instinct what is in
stinctive, and in intelligence what is intelligent, whereas
all concrete instinct is mingled with intelligence, as all
real intelligence is penetrated by instinct. Moreover,
neither intelligence nor instinct lends itself to rigid
definition : they are tendencies, and not things.
Also, it must not be forgotten that in the present
chapter we are considering intelligence and instinct
as going out of life which deposits them along its
course. Now the life manifested by an organism
is, in our view, a certain effort to obtain certain
things from the material world. No wonder, there-
i 4 4 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
fore, if it is the diversity of this effort that strikes us in
instinct and intelligence, and if we see in these two
modes of psychical activity, above all else, two different
methods of action on inert matter. This rather narrow
view of them has the advantage of giving us an
objective means of distinguishing them. In return,
however, it gives us, of intelligence in general and of
instinct in general, only the mean position above and
below which both constantly oscillate. For that reason
the reader must expect to see in what follows only a
diagrammatic drawing, in which the respective outlines
of intelligence and instinct are sharper than they
should be, and in which the shading-off which comes
from the indecision of each and from their reciprocal
encroachment on one another is neglected. In a
matter so obscure, we cannot strive too hard for
clearness. It will always be easy afterwards to soften
the outlines and to correct what is too geometrical
in the drawing in short, to replace the rigidity of a
diagram by the suppleness of life.
To what date is it agreed to ascribe the appearance
of man on the earth ? To the period when the first
weapons, the first tools, were made. The memor
able quarrel over the discovery of Boucher de Perthes
in the quarry of Moulin- Quignon is not forgotten.
The question was whether real hatchets had been
found or merely bits of flint accidentally broken.
But that, supposing they were hatchets, we were indeed
in the presence of intelligence, and more particularly
of human intelligence, no one doubted for an instant.
Now let us open a collection of anecdotes on the in
telligence of animals : we shall see that besides many
acts explicable by imitation or by the automatic associa-
ii INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 145
tion of images, there are some that we do not hesitate
to call intelligent : foremost among them are those that
bear witness to some idea of manufacture, whether the
animal itself succeeds in fashioning a crude instrument
or uses for its profit an object made by man. The
animals that rank immediately after man in the matter
of intelligence, the apes and elephants, are those that
can use an artificial instrument occasionally. Below,
but not very far from them, come those that recognize
a constructed object : for example, the fox, which
knows quite well that a trap is a trap. No doubt, there is
intelligence wherever there is inference ; but inference,
which consists in an inflection of past experience in the
direction of present experience, is already a beginning
of invention. Invention becomes complete when it is
materialized in a manufactured instrument. Towards
that achievement the intelligence of animals tends as
towards an ideal. And though, ordinarily, it does not
yet succeed in fashioning artificial objects and in
making use of them, it is preparing for this by the very
variations which it performs on the instincts furnished
by nature. As regards human intelligence, it has not
been sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has
been from the first its essential feature, that even to-day
our social life gravitates around the manufacture and
use of artificial instruments, that the inventions which
strew the road of progress have also traced its direction.
This we hardly realize, because it takes us longer to
change ourselves than to change our tools. Our in
dividual and even social habits survive a good while
the circumstances for which they were made, so that
the ultimate effects of an invention are not observed
until its novelty is already out of sight. A century
has elapsed since the invention of the steam-engine,
L
146 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
and we are only just beginning to feel the depths of
the shock it gave us. But the revolution it has
effected in industry has nevertheless upset human
relations altogether. New ideas are arising, new feel
ings are on the way to flower. In thousands of years,
when, seen from the distance, only the broad lines of
the present age will still be visible, our wars and our
revolutions will count for little, even supposing they
are remembered at all ; but the steam-engine, and
the procession of inventions of every kind that accom
panied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak
of the bronze or of the chipped stone of pre
historic times : it will serve to define an age. 1 If
we could rid ourselves of all pride, if, to define
our species, we kept strictly to what the historic
and the prehistoric periods show us to be the constant
characteristic of man and of intelligence, we should say
perhaps not Homo sapiens, but Homo faber. In short,
intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original
feature^ is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects^
especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying
the manufacture.
Now, does an unintelligent animal also possess tools
or machines ? Yes, certainly, but here the instrument
forms a part of the body that uses it ; and, corre
sponding to this instrument, there is an instinct that
knows how to use it. True, it cannot be maintained
that all instincts consist in a natural ability to use an
inborn mechanism. Such a definition would not apply
to the instincts which Romanes called " secondary " ;
and more than one " primary " instinct would not
1 M. Paul Lacombe has laid great stress on the important influence
that great inventions have exercised on the evolution of humanity (P.
Lacombe, De I histoire consider te comme science, Paris, 1894. See, in
particular, pp. 168-247).
ii INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 147
come under it. But this definition, like that which we
have provisionally given of intelligence, determines at
least the ideal limit toward which the very numerous
forms of instinct are travelling. Indeed, it has often
been pointed out that most instincts are only the con
tinuance, or rather the consummation, of the work of
organization itself. Where does the activity of instinct
begin ? and where does that of nature end ? We
o
cannot tell. In the metamorphoses of the larva into
the nymph and into the perfect insect, metamorphoses
that often require appropriate action and a kind of
initiative on the part of the larva, there is no sharp line
of demarcation between the instinct of the animal and
the organizing work of living matter. We may
say, as we will, either that instinct organizes the
instruments it is about to use, or that the process of
organization is continued in the instinct that has to use
the organ. The most marvellous instincts of the insect
do nothing but develop its special structure into move
ments : indeed, where social life divides the labour
among different individuals and thus allots them differ
ent instincts, a corresponding difference of structure is
observed : the polymorphism of ants, bees, wasps and
certain pseudoneuroptera is well known. Thus, if we
consider only those typical cases in which the complete
triumph of intelligence and of instinct is seen, we
find this essential difference between them : instinct
perfected is a faculty of using and even of constructing
organized instruments ; intelligence -perfected is the faculty
of making and using unorganized instruments.
The advantages and drawbacks of these two modes
of activity are obvious. Instinct finds the appropriate
instrument at hand : this instrument, which makes
and repairs itself, which presents, like all the works of
148 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP,
nature, an infinite complexity of detail combined with a
marvellous simplicity of function, does at once, when
required, what it is called upon to do, without difficulty
and with a perfection that is often wonderful. In
return, it retains an almost invariable structure, since a
modification of it involves a modification of the species.
Instinct is therefore necessarily specialized, being
nothing but the utilization of a specific instrument for
a specific object. The instrument constructed in
telligently, on the contrary, is an imperfect instrument.
It costs an effort. It is generally troublesome to
handle. But, as it is made of unorganized matter, it
can take any form whatsoever, serve any purpose, free
the living being from every new difficulty that arises and
bestow on it an unlimited number of powers. Whilst
it is inferior to the natural instrument for the satisfac
tion of immediate wants, its advantage over it is the
greater, the less urgent the need. Above all, it reacts
on the nature of the being that constructs it ; for in
calling on him to exercise a new function, it confers on
him, so to speak, a richer organization, being an artificial
organ by which the natural organism is extended.
For every need that it satisfies, it creates a new need ;
and so, instead of closing, like instinct, the round of
action within which the animal tends to move auto
matically, it lays open to activity an unlimited field
into which it is driven further and further, and made
more and more free. But this advantage of intelli
gence over instinct only appears at a late stage, when
intelligence, having raised construction to a higher
degree, proceeds to construct constructive machinery.
At the outset, the advantages and drawbacks of
the artificial instrument and of the natural instru
ment balance so well that it is hard to foretell which
ii INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 149
of the two will secure to the living being the greater
empire over nature.
We may surmise that they began by being implied
in each other, that the original psychical activity
included both at once, and that, if we went far enough
back into the past, we should find instincts more nearly
approaching intelligence than those of our insects, in
telligence nearer to instinct than that of our vertebrates,
intelligence and instinct being, in this elementary con
dition, prisoners of a matter which they are not yet able
to control. If the force immanent in life were an un
limited force, it might perhaps have developed instinct
and intelligence together, and to any extent, in the same
organisms. But everything seems to indicate that this
force is limited, and that it soon exhausts itself in its
very manifestation. It is hard for it to go far in several
directions at once : it must choose. Now, it has the
choice between two modes of acting on the material
world : it can either effect this action directly by creating
an organized instrument to work with ; or else it can
effect it indirectly through an organism which, instead of
possessing the required instrument naturally, will itself
construct it by fashioning inorganic matter. Hence in
telligence and instinct, which diverge more and more as
they develop, but which never entirely separate from each
other. On the one hand, the most perfect instinct of the
insect is accompanied by gleams of intelligence, if only
in the choice of place, time and materials of construction :
the bees, for example, when by exception they build in
the open air, invent new and really intelligent arrange
ments to adapt themselves to such new conditions. 1 But,
on the other hand, intelligence has even more need of
1 Bouvicr, " La Nidification de abeilles 1 air libre " (C.R. de I Ac. des
Science*, ^ mai 1906).
150 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
instinct than instinct has of intelligence ; for the power
to give shape to crude matter involves already a superior
degree of organization, a degree to which the animal
could not have risen, save on the wings of instinct. So,
while nature has frankly evolved in the direction of
instinct in the arthropods, we observe in almost all the
vertebrates the striving after rather than the expansion
of intelligence. It is instinct still which forms the basis
of their psychical activity ; but intelligence is there, and
would fain supersede it. Intelligence does not yet
succeed in inventing instruments ; but at least it tries to,
by performing as many variations as possible on the
instinct which it would like to dispense with. It gains
complete self-possession only in man, and this triumph
is attested by the very insufficiency of the natural means
at man s disposal for defence against his enemies, against
cold and hunger. This insufficiency, when we strive to
fathom its significance, acquires the value of a pre
historic document ; it is the final leave-taking between
intelligence and instinct. But it is no less true that
nature must have hesitated between two modes of
psychical activity one assured of immediate success,
but limited in its effects ; the other hazardous, but
whose conquests, if it should reach independence,
might be extended indefinitely. Here again, then, the
greatest success was achieved on the side of the greatest
risk. Instinct and intelligence therefore represent two
divergent solutions, equally fitting^ of one and the same
problem.
There ensue, it is true, profound differences of
internal structure between instinct and intelligence.
We shall dwell only on those that concern our present
study. Let us say, then, that instinct and intelligence
imply two radically different kinds of knowledge. But
ii INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 151
some explanations are first of all necessary on the
subject of consciousness in general.
It has been asked how far instinct is conscious.
Our reply is that there are a vast number of differences
and degrees, that instinct is more or less conscious in
certain cases, unconscious in others. The plant, as we
shall see, has instincts ; it is not likely that these are
accompanied by feeling. Even in the animal there is
hardly any complex instinct that is not unconscious in
some part at least of its exercise. But here we must
point out a difference, not often noticed, between two
kinds of unconsciousness, viz., that in which conscious
ness is absent : , and that in which consciousness is nullified.
Both are equal to zero, but in one case the zero expresses
the fact that there is nothing, in the other that we
have two equal quantities of opposite sign which com
pensate and neutralize each other. The unconsciousness
of a falling stone is of the former kind : the stone
has no feeling of its fall. Is it the same with the
unconsciousness of instinct, in the extreme cases in
which instinct is unconscious ? When we mechanically
perform an habitual action, when the somnambulist
automatically acts his dream, unconsciousness may be
absolute ; but this is merely due to the fact that the
representation of the act is held in check by the per
formance of the act itself, which resembles the idea so
perfectly, and fits it so exactly, that consciousness is
unable to find room between them. Representation is
stopped up by action. The proof of this is, that if the
accomplishment of the act is arrested or thwarted by an
obstacle, consciousness may reappear. It was there,
but neutralized by the action which fulfilled and
thereby filled the representation. The obstacle creates
nothing positive ; it simply makes a void, removes a
1 52 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
stopper. This inadequacy of act to representation is
precisely what we here call consciousness.
If we examine this point more closely, we shall find
that consciousness is the light that plays around the
zone of possible actions or potential activity which
surrounds the action really performed by the living
being. It signifies hesitation or choice. Where many
equally possible actions are indicated without there
being any real action (as in a deliberation that has not
come to an end), consciousness is intense. Where the
action performed is the only action possible (as in
activity of the somnambulistic or more generally auto
matic kind), consciousness is reduced to nothing. Re
presentation and knowledge exist none the less in the
case if we find a whole series of systematized movements
the last of which is already prefigured in the first, and
if, besides, consciousness can flash out of them at the
shock of an obstacle. From this point of view, the
consciousness of a living being may be defined as an
arithmetical difference between potential and real activity.
It measures the interval between representation and action.
It may be inferred from this that intelligence is
likely to point towards consciousness, and instinct
toward unconsciousness. For, where the implement to
be used is organized by nature, the material furnished
by nature, and the result to be obtained willed by nature,
there is little left to choice : the consciousness inherent
in the representation is therefore counterbalanced, when
ever it tends to disengage itself, by the performance of
the act, identical with the representation, which forms its
counter-weight. Where consciousness appears, it does
not so much light up the instinct itself as the thwart-
ings to which instinct is subject ; it is the deficit of
instinct, the distance between the act and the idea, that
ii INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 153
becomes consciousness, so that consciousness, here,
is only an accident. Essentially, consciousness only
emphasizes the starting-point of instinct, the point at
which the whole series of automatic movements is
released. Deficit, on the contrary, is the normal state
of intelligence. Labouring under difficulties is its very
essence. Its original function being to construct
unorganized instruments, it must, in spite of number
less difficulties, choose for this work the place and the
time, the form and the matter. And it can never satisfy
itself entirely, because every new satisfaction creates
new needs. In short, while instinct and intelligence
both involve knowledge, this knowledge is rather acted
and unconscious in the case of instinct, thought and
conscious in the case of intelligence. But it is a
difference rather of degree than of kind. So long as
consciousness is all we are concerned with, we close
our eyes to what is, from the psychological point
of view, the cardinal difference between instinct and
intelligence.
In order to get at this essential difference we must,
without stopping at the more or less brilliant light which
illumines these two modes of internal activity, go
straight to the two objects^ profoundly different from
each other, upon which instinct and intelligence are
directed.
When the horse-fly lays its eggs on the legs or
shoulders of the horse, it acts as if it knew that its
larva has to develop in the horse s stomach and that
the horse, in licking itself, will convey the larva into
its digestive tract. When a paralysing wasp stings its
victim on just those points where the nervous centres
lie, so as to render it motionless without killing it,
it acts like a learned entomologist and a skilful surgeon
154 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
rolled into one. But what shall we say of the little
beetle, the Sitaris, whose story is so often quoted ?
This insect lays its eggs at the entrance of the under
ground passages dug by a kind of bee, the Anthophora.
Its larva, after long waiting, springs upon the male
Anthophora as it goes out of the passage, clings to
it, and remains attached until the " nuptial flight,"
when it seizes the opportunity to pass from the male
to the female, and quietly waits until it lays its eggs.
It then leaps on the egg, which serves as a support
for it in the honey, devours the egg in a few days,
and, resting on the shell, undergoes its first meta
morphosis. Organized now to float on the honey,
it consumes this provision of nourishment, and be
comes a nymph, then a perfect insect. Everything
happens as if the larva of the Sitaris, from the
moment it was hatched, knew that the male Antho
phora would first emerge from the passage ; that the
nuptial flight would give it the means of conveying
itself to the female, who wouH take it to a store of
honey sufficient to feed it after its transformation ;
that, until this transformation, it could gradually
eat the egg of the Anthophora, in such a way that
it could at the same time feed itself, maintain itself
at the surface of the honey, and also suppress the
rival that otherwise would have come out of the egg.
And equally all this happens as if the Sitaris itself
knew that its larva would know all these things.
The knowledge, if knowledge there be, is only im
plicit. It is reflected outwardly in exact movements
instead of being reflected inwardly in consciousness.
It is none the less true that the behaviour of the insect
involves, or rather evolves, the idea of definite things
existing or being produced in definite points of space
INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT
155
and time, which the insect knows without having
learned them.
Now, if we look at intelligence from the same point
of view, we find that it also knows certain things with
out having learned them. But the knowledge in the
two cases is of a very different order. We must be
careful here not to revive again the old philosophical
dispute on the subject of innate ideas. So we will
confine ourselves to the point on which every one is
agreed, to wit, that the young child understands im
mediately things that the animal will never understand,
and that in this sense intelligence, like instinct, is an
inherited function, therefore an innate one. But this
innate intelligence, although it is a faculty of knowing,
knows no object in particular. When the new-born babe
seeks for the first time its mother s breast, so showing
that it has knowledge (unconscious, no doubt) of a thing
it has never seen, we say, just because the innate
knowledge is in this case of a definite object, that it
belongs to instinct and not to intelligence. Intelli
gence does not then imply the innate knowledge of
any object. And yet, if intelligence knows nothing
by nature, it has nothing innate. What, then, if
it be ignorant of all things, can it know ? Besides
things, there are relations. The new-born child, so
far as intelligent, knows neither definite objects nor
a definite property of any object ; but when, a little
later on, he will hear an epithet being applied to a sub
stantive, he will immediately understand what it means.
The relation of attribute to subject is therefore seized
by him naturally, and the same might be said of the
general relation expressed by the verb, a relation so im
mediately conceived by the mind that language can leave
it to be understood, as is instanced in rudimentary
156 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
languages which have no verb. Intelligence, therefore,
naturally makes use of relations of like with like, of
content to container, of cause to effect, etc., which
are implied in every phrase in which there is a
subject, an attribute and a verb, expressed or under
stood. May one say that it has innate knowledge
of each of these relations in particular ? It is for
logicians to discover whether they are so many
irreducible relations, or whether they can be resolved
into relations still more general. But, in whatever
way we make the analysis of thought, we always end
with one or several general categories, of which the
mind possesses innate knowledge since it makes a
natural use of them. Let us say, therefore, that what
ever^ in instinct and intelligence, is innate knowledge, bears
in the first case on things and in the second on relations.
Philosophers distinguish between the matter of our
knowledge and its form. The matter is what is given
by the perceptive faculties taken in the elementary state.
The form is the totality of the relations set up between
these materials in order to constitute a systematic know
ledge. Can the form, without matter, be an object of
knowledge ? Yes, without doubt, provided that this
knowledge is not like a thing we possess so much as
like a habit we have contracted, a direction rather
than a state : it is, if we will, a certain natural bent of
attention. The schoolboy, who knows that the master
is going to dictate a fraction to him, draws a line before
he knows what numerator and what denominator are to
come ; he therefore has present to his mind the general
relation between the two terms although he does not
know either of them ; he knows the form without the
matter. So is it, prior to experience, with the categories
into which our experience comes to be inserted. Let us
ii INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 157
adopt then words sanctioned by usage, and give the
distinction between intelligence and instinct this more
precise formula : Intelligence, in so far as it is innate, is the
knowledge of a form ; instinct implies the knowledge of a
matter.
From this second point of view, which is that of
knowledge instead of action, the force immanent in life
in general appears to us again as a limited principle, in
which originally two different and even divergent
modes of knowing coexisted and intermingled. The first
gets at definite objects immediately, in their materiality
itself. It says, " This is what is." The second gets
at no object in particular ; it is only a natural power
of relating an object to an object, or a part to a part, or
an aspect to an aspect in short, of drawing conclusions
when in possession of the premisses, of proceeding from
what has been learnt to what is still unknown. It
does not say, " This is " ; it says only that " if the
conditions are such, such will be the conditioned."
In short, the first kind of knowledge, the in
stinctive, would be formulated in what philosophers
call categorical propositions, while the second kind,
the intellectual, would always be expressed hypothetic-
ally. Of these two faculties, the former seems, at
first, much preferable to the other. And it would be
so, in truth, if it extended to an endless number of
objects. But, in fact, it applies only to one special
object, and indeed only to a restricted part of that object.
Of this, at least, its knowledge is intimate and full ;
not explicit, but implied in the accomplished action.
The intellectual faculty, on the contrary, possesses
naturally only an external and empty knowledge ; but
it has thereby the advantage of supplying a frame in
which an infinity of objects may find room in turn. It
158 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
is as if the force evolving in living forms, being a
limited force, had had to choose between two kinds of
limitation in the field of natural or innate knowledge,
one applying to the extension of knowledge, the other to
its intension. In the first case, the knowledge may
be packed and full, but it will then be confined to one
specific object ; in the second, it is no longer limited
by its object, but that is because it contains nothing,
being only a form without matter. The two tend
encies, at first implied in each other, had to separate
in order to grow. They both went to seek their
fortune in the world, and turned out to be instinct
and intelligence.
Such, then, are the two divergent modes of
knowledge by which intelligence and instinct must be
defined, from the standpoint of knowledge rather than
that of action. But knowledge and action are here
only two aspects of one and the same faculty. It is
easy to see, indeed, that the second definition is only a
new form of the first.
If instinct is, above all, the faculty of using an
organized natural instrument, it must involve innate
knowledge (potential or unconscious, it is true) both of
this instrument and of the object to which it is applied.
Instinct is therefore innate knowledge of a thing. But
intelligence is the faculty of constructing unorganized
that is to say artificial instruments. If, on its
account, nature gives up endowing the living being
with the instrument that may serve him, it is in order
that the living being may be able to vary his construction
according to circumstances. The essential function of
intelligence is therefore to see "the way out of a difficulty
in any circumstances whatever, to find what is most suit
able, what answers best the question asked. Hence it
ii INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 159
bears essentially on the relations between a given
situation and the means of utilizing it. What is innate
in intellect, therefore, is the tendency to establish
relations, and this tendency implies the natural know
ledge of certain very general relations, a kind of stuff
that the activity of each particular intellect will cut up
into more special relations. Where activity is directed
toward manufacture, therefore, knowledge necessarily
bears on relations. But this entirely formal knowledge
of intelligence has an immense advantage over the
material knowledge of instinct. A form, just because
it is empty, may be filled at will with any number of
things in turn, even with those that are of no use. So
o
that a formal knowledge is not limited to what is
practically useful, although it is in view of practical
utility that it has made its appearance in the world.
An intelligent being bears within himself the means
to transcend his own nature.
He transcends himself, however, less than he wishes,
less also than he imagines himself to do. The purely
formal character of intelligence deprives it of the ballast
necessary to enable it to settle itself on the objects that
are of the most powerful interest to speculation.
Instinct, on the contrary, has the desired materiality,
but it is incapable of going so far in quest of its object ;
it does not speculate. Here we reach the point that
most concerns our present inquiry. The difference
that we shall now proceed to denote between instinct
and intelligence is what the whole of this analysis was
meant to bring out. We formulate it thus : There
are things that intelligence alone is able to seek^
but which, by itself, it will never find. These
things instinct alone could find ; but it will never seek
them.
160 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
It is necessary here to consider some preliminary
details that concern the mechanism of intelligence. We
have said that the function of intelligence is to
establish relations. Let us determine more precisely
the nature of these relations. On this point we are
bound to be either vague or arbitrary so long as we
see in the intellect a faculty intended for pure
speculation. We are then reduced to taking the
general frames of the understanding for something
absolute, irreducible and inexplicable. The under
standing must have fallen from heaven with its
form, as each of us is born with his face. This form
may be defined, of course, but that is all ; there is no
asking why it is what it is rather than anything else.
Thus, it will be said that the function of the intellect is
essentially unification, that the common object of all its
operations is to introduce a certain unity into the
diversity of phenomena, and so forth. But, in the first
place, " unification " is a vague term, less clear than
" relation " or even " thought," and says nothing more.
And, moreover, it might be asked if the function of
intelligence is not to divide even more than to unite.
Finally, if the intellect proceeds as it does because it
wishes to unite, and if it seeks unification simply because
it has need of unifying, the whole of our knowledge
becomes relative to certain requirements of the mind
that probably might have been entirely different from
what they are : for an intellect differently shaped,
knowledge would have been different. Intellect being
no longer dependent on anything, everything becomes
dependent on it ; and so, having placed the understand
ing too high, we end by putting too low the knowledge
it gives us. Knowledge becomes relative as soon as
the intellect is made a kind of absolute. We regard the
,i THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 161
human intellect, on the contrary, as relative to the needs
of action. Postulate action, and the very form of the
intellect can be deduced from it. This form is therefore
neither irreducible nor inexplicable. And, precisely
because it is not independent, knowledge cannot be said
to depend on it : knowledge ceases to be a product of
the intellect and becomes, in a certain sense, part and
parcel of reality.
Philosophers will reply that action takes place in an
ordered world, that this order is itself thought, and
that we beg the question when we explain the intellect
by action, which presupposes it. They would be right
if our point of view in the present chapter was to be
our final one. We should then be dupes of an illusion
like that of Spencer, who believed that the intellect is
sufficiently explained as the impression left on us by
the general characters of matter : as if the order in
herent in matter were not intelligence itself! But we
reserve for the next chapter the question up to what
point and with what method philosophy can attempt
a real genesis of the intellect at the same time as of
matter. For the moment, the problem that engages
our attention is of a psychological order. We are
asking what is the portion of the material world to
which our intellect is specially adapted. To reply to
this question, there is no need to choose a system of
philosophy : it is enough to take up the point of view
of common sense.
Let us start, then, from action, and lay down that
the intellect aims, first of all, at constructing. This
fabrication is exercised exclusively on inert matter,
in this sense, that even if it makes use of organized
material, it treats it as inert, without troubling about
the life which animated it. And of inert matter
M
1 62 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
itself, fabrication deals only with the solid ; the rest
escapes by its very fluidity. If, therefore, the tendency
of the intellect is to fabricate, we may expect to find
that whatever is fluid in the real will escape it in part,
and whatever is life in the living will escape it
altogether. Our intelligence, as it leaves the hands of
nature -, has for its chief object the unorganised solid.
When we pass in review the intellectual functions,
we see that the intellect is never quite at its ease,
never entirely at home, except when it is working upon
inert matter, more particularly upon solids. What is
the most general property of the material world ? It
is extended : it presents to us objects external to other
objects, and, in these objects, parts external to parts.
No doubt, it is useful to us, in view of our ulterior
manipulation, to regard each object as divisible into
parts arbitrarily cut up, each part being again divisible
as we like, and so on ad infinitum. But it is above all
necessary, for our present manipulation, to regard the
real object in hand, or the real elements into which
we have resolved it, as provisionally final^ and to
treat them as so many units. To this possibility of
decomposing matter as much as we please, and in any
way we please, we allude when we speak of the
continuity of material extension ; but this continuity, as
we see it, is nothing else but our ability, an ability that
matter allows to us to choose the mode of discontinuity
we shall find in it. It is always, in fact, the mode of
discontinuity once chosen that appears to us as the
actually real one and that which fixes our attention,
just because it rules our action. Thus discontinuity
is thought for itself ; it is thinkable in itself ; we form
an idea of it by a positive act of our mind ; while the
intellectual representation of continuity is negative.
,i THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 163
being, at bottom, only the refusal of our mind, before
any actually given system of decomposition, to regard
it as the only possible one. Of the discontinuous alone
does the intellect form a clear idea.
On the other hand, the objects we act on are cer
tainly mobile objects, but the important thing for us to
know is whither the mobile object is going and where
it is at any moment of its passage. In other words, our
interest is directed, before all, to its actual or future
positions, and not to the progress by which it passes
from one position to another, progress which is the
movement itself. In our actions, which are systematized
movements, what we fix our mind on is the end or
meaning of the movement, its design as a whole in
a word, the immobile plan of its execution. That
which really moves in action interests us only so far as
the whole can be advanced, retarded, or stopped by
any incident that may happen on the way. From
mobility itself our intellect turns aside, because it has
nothing to gain in dealing with it. If the intellect were
meant for pure theorizing, it would take its place
within movement, for movement is reality itself, and
immobility is always only apparent or relative. But
the intellect is meant for something altogether different.
Unless it does violence to itself, it takes the opposite
course ; it always starts from immobility, as if this
were the ultimate reality : when it tries to form an
idea of movement, it does so by constructing movement
out of immobilities put together. This operation,
whose illegitimacy and danger in the field of specula
tion we shall show later on (it leads to dead-locks,
and creates artificially insoluble philosophical problems),
is easily justified when we refer it to its proper goal.
Intelligence, in its natural state, aims at a practically
1 64 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
useful end. When it substitutes for movement im-
mobilities put together, it does not pretend to recon
stitute the movement such as it actually is ; it merely
replaces it with a practical equivalent. It is the
philosophers who are mistaken when they import into
the domain of speculation a method of thinking which
is made for action. But of this more anon. Suffice it
now to say that to the stable and unchangeable our
intellect is attached by virtue of its natural disposition.
Of immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea.
Now, fabricating consists in carving out the form
of an object in matter. What is the most important is
the form to be obtained. As to the matter, we choose
that which is most convenient ; but, in order to choose
it, that is to say, in order to go and seek it among
many others, we must have tried, in imagination at
least, to endow every kind of matter with the form of
the object conceived. In other words, an intelligence
which aims at fabricating is an intelligence which never
stops at the actual form of things nor regards it as final,
but, on the contrary, looks upon all matter as if it were
carvable at will. Plato compares the good dialectician
to the skilful cook who carves the animal without
breaking its bones, by following the articulations marked
out by nature. 1 An intelligence which always proceeded
thus would really be an intelligence turned toward
speculation. But action, and in particular fabrication,
requires the opposite mental tendency : it makes us
consider every actual form of things, even the form of
natural things, as artificial and provisional ; it makes
our thought efface from the object perceived, even
though organized and living, the lines that outwardly
mark its inward structure ; in short, it makes us
1 Plato, Phatdrus, 265 K.
ii THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 165
regard its matter as indifferent to its form. The
whole of matter is made to appear to our thought
as an immense piece of cloth in which we can cut
out what we will and sew it together again as we
please. Let us note, in passing, that it is this power
that we affirm when we say that there is a space, that
is to say, a homogeneous and empty medium, infinite
and infinitely divisible, lending itself indifferently to any
mode of decomposition whatsoever. A medium of this
kind is never perceived ; it is only conceived. What
is perceived is extension coloured, resistant, divided
according to the lines which mark out the boundaries of
real bodies or of their real elements. But when we think
of our power over this matter, that is to say, of our faculty
of decomposing and recomposing it as we please, we
project the whole of these possible decompositions and
recompositions behind real extension in the form of a
homogeneous space, empty and indifferent, which is
supposed to underlie it. This space is therefore, pre
eminently, the plan of our possible action on things,
although, indeed, things have a natural tendency, as we
shall explain further on, to enter into a frame of this
kind. It is a view taken by mind. The animal has
probably no idea of it, even when, like us, it perceives ex
tended things. It is an idea that symbolizes the tendency
of the human intellect to fabrication. But this point
must not detain us now. Suffice it to say that the intellect
is characterized by the unlimited -power of decomposing
according to any law and of recomposing into any system.
We have now enumerated a few of the essential
features of human intelligence. But we have hitherto
considered the individual in isolation, without taking
account of social life. In reality, man is a being who
lives in society. If it be true that the human intellect
66 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
CHAP.
aims at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well
as for other purposes, it is associated with other
intellects. Now, it is difficult to imagine a society
whose members do not communicate by signs. Insect
societies probably have a language, and this language
must be adapted, like that of man, to the necessities of
life in common. By language community of action is
made possible. But the requirements of joint action
are not at all the same in a colony of ants and in a
human society. In insect societies there is generally
polymorphism, the subdivision of labour is natural,
and each individual is riveted by its structure to the
function it performs. In any case, these societies are
based on instinct, and consequently on certain actions
or fabrications that are more or less dependent on the
form of the organs. So if the ants, for instance, have
a language, the signs which compose it must be very
limited in number, and each of them, once the species
is formed, must remain invariably attached to a ce :uin
object or a certain operation : the sign is adherent to
the thing signified. In human society, on the con
trary, fabrication and action are of variable form, and,
moreover, each individual must learn his part, because
he is not preordained to it by his structure. So a
language is required which makes it possible to be
always passing from what is known to what is yet
to be known. There must be a language whose signs
which cannot be infinite in number are extensible
to an infinity of things. This tendency of the sign to
transfer itself from one object to another is character
istic of human language. It is observable in the little
child as soon as he begins to speak. Immediately
and naturally he extends the meaning of the words
he learns, availing himself of the most accidental con-
THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 167
nection or the most distant analogy to detach and
transfer elsewhere the sign that had been associated in
his hearing with a particular object. "Anything can
designate anything " : such is the latent principle of
infantine language. This tendency has been wrongly
confused with the faculty of generalizing. The animals
themselves generalize ; and, moreover, a sign even
an instinctive sign always to some degree represents
a genus. But what characterizes the signs of human
language is not so much their generality as their
mobility. The instinctive sign is adherent, the intelligent
sign is mobile.
Now, this mobility of words, that makes them able
to pass from one thing to another, has enabled them to
be extended from things to ideas. Certainly, language
would not have given the faculty of reflecting to an
intelligence entirely externalized and incapable of turn
ing homeward. An intelligence which reflects is one
that originally had a surplus of energy to spend, over
and above practically useful efforts. It is a conscious
ness that has virtually reconquered itself. But still the
virtual has to become actual. Without language, in
telligence would probably have remained riveted to the
material objects which it was interested in considering.
It would have lived in a state of somnambulism, outside
itself, hypnotized on its own work. Language has
greatly contributed to its liberation. The word, made
to pass from one thing to another, is, in fact, by nature
transferable and free. It can therefore be extended, not
only from one perceived thing to another, but even from
a perceived thing to a recollection of that thing, from
the precise recollection to a more fleeting image, and
finally from an image fleeting, though still pictured,
to the picturing of the act by which the image is
1 68 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
pictured, that is to say, to the idea. Thus is revealed
to the intelligence, hitherto always turned outwards, a
whole internal world the spectacle of its own work
ings. It required only this opportunity, at length
offered by language. It profits by the fact that the
word is an external thing, which the intelligence can
catch hold of and cling to, and at the same time an
immaterial thing, by means of which the intelligence
can penetrate even to the inwardness of its own work.
Its first business was indeed to make instruments, but
this fabrication is possible only by the employment of
certain means which are not cut to the exact measure
of their object, but go beyond it and thus allow intelli
gence a supplementary that is to say disinterested
work. From the moment that the intellect, reflecting
upon its own doings, perceives itself as a creator or
ideas, as a faculty of representation in general, there is
no object of which it may not wish to have the idea,
even though that object be without direct relation to
practical action. That is why we said there are things
that intellect alone can seek. Intellect alone, indeed,
troubles itself about theory ; and its theory would fain
embrace everything not only inanimate matter, over
which it has a natural hold, but even life and thought.
By what means, what instruments, in short by what
method it will approach these problems, we can easily
guess. Originally, it was fashioned to the form of
matter. Language itself, which has enabled it to
extend its field of operations, is made to designate
things, and naught but things : it is only because the
word is mobile, because it flies from one thing to
another, that the intellect was sure to take it, sooner or
later, on the wing, while it was not settled on anything,
and apply it to an object which is not a thing and
ii THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 169
which, concealed till then, awaited the coming of the
word to pass from darkness to light. But the word, by
covering up this object, again converts it into a thing.
So intelligence, even when it no longer operates upon
its own object, follows habits it has contracted in that
operation : it applies forms that are indeed those of
unorganized matter. It is made for this kind of work.
O
With this kind of work alone is it fully satisfied. And
that is what intelligence expresses by saying that thus
only it arrives at distinctness and clearness.
It must, therefore, in order to think itself clearly
and distinctly, perceive itself under the form of dis
continuity. Concepts, in fact, are outside each other,
like objects in space ; and they have the same stability
as such objects, on which they have been modelled.
Taken together, they constitute an " intelligible world,"
that resembles the world of solids in its essential char
acters, but whose elements are lighter, more diaphanous,
easier for the intellect to deal with than the image of
concrete things : they are not, indeed, the perception
itself of things, but the representation of the act by
which the intellect is fixed on them. They are, there
fore, not images, but symbols. Our logic is the
complete set of rules that must be followed in using
symbols. As these symbols are derived from the
consideration of solids, as the rules for combining
these symbols hardly do more than express the most
general relations among solids, our logic triumphs in
that science which takes the solidity of bodies for its
object, that is, in geometry. Logic and geometry
engender each other, as we shall see a little further on.
It is from the extension of a certain natural geometry,
suggested by the most general and immediately per
ceived properties of solids, that natural logic has arisen ;
170 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
then from this natural logic, in its turn, has sprung
scientific geometry, which extends further and further
the knowledge of the external properties of solids. 1
Geometry and logic are strictly applicable to matter ;
in it they are at home, and in it they can proceed quite
alone. But, outside this domain, pure reasoning
needs to be supervised by common sense, which is an
altogether different thing.
Thus, all the elementary forces of the intellect tend
to transform matter into an instrument of action, that
is, in the etymological sense of the word, into an organ.
Life, not content with producing organisms, would fain
give them as an appendage inorganic matter itself,
converted into an immense organ by the industry of
the living being. Such is the initial task it assigns to
intelligence. That is why the intellect always behaves
as if it were fascinated by the contemplation of inert
matter. It is life looking outward, putting itself out
side itself, adopting the ways of unorganized nature
in principle, in order to direct them in fact. Hence
its bewilderment when it turns to the living and is
confronted with organization. It does what it can,
it resolves the organized into the unorganized, for
it cannot, without reversing its natural direction and
twisting about on itself, think true continuity, real
mobility, reciprocal penetration, in a word, that creative
evolution which is life.
Consider continuity. The aspect of life that is
accessible to our intellect as indeed to our senses,
of which our intellect is the extension -is that which
offers a hold to our action. Now, to modify an
object, we have to perceive it as divisible and dis
continuous. From the point of view of positive
1 We shall return to these points in the next chapter.
u THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 171
science, an incomparable progress was realized when the
organized tissues were resolved into cells. The study
of the cell, in its turn, has shown it to be an organism
whose complexity seems to grow, the more thoroughly
it is examined. The more science advances, the more
it sees the number grow of heterogeneous elements
which are placed together, outside each other, to make
up a living being. Does science thus get any nearer
to life ? Does it not, on the contrary, find that what
is really life in the living seems to recede with every
step by which it pushes further the detail of the parts
combined ? There is indeed already among scientists
a tendency to regard the substance of the organism
as continuous, and the cell as an artificial entity. 1
But, supposing this view were finally to prevail, it
could only lead, on deeper study, to some other
mode of analysing of the living being, and so to a
new discontinuity although less removed, perhaps,
from the real continuity of life. The truth is that
this continuity cannot be thought by the intellect while
it follows its natural movement. It implies at once the
multiplicity of elements and the interpenetration of
all by all, two conditions that can hardly be reconciled
in the field in which our industry, and consequently
our intellect, is engaged.
Just as we separate in space, we fix in time. The
intellect is not made to think evolution, in the proper sense
of the word that is to say, the continuity of a change
that is pure mobility. We shall not dwell here on this
point, which we propose to study in a special chapter.
Suffice it to say that the intellect represents becoming as
a series of states, each of which is homogeneous with itself
and consequently does not change. Is our attention
1 We shall return to this point in chapter iii. p. 273.
172 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
called to the internal change of one of these states ?
At once we decompose it into another series of states
which, reunited, will be supposed to make up this
internal modification. Each of these new states must
be invariable, or else their internal change, if we are
O *
forced to notice it, must be resolved again into a fresh
series of invariable states, and so on to infinity. Here
again, thinking consists in reconstituting, and, natur
ally, it is with given elements, and consequently with
stable elements, that we reconstitute. So that, though
O
we may do our best to imitate the mobility of becoming
by an addition that is ever going on, becoming itself
slips through our fingers just when we think we are
holding it tight.
Precisely because it is always trying to reconstitute,
and to reconstitute with what is given, the intellect lets
what is new in each moment of a history escape. It
does not admit the unforeseeable. It rejects all
creation. That definite antecedents bring forth a
definite consequent, calculable as a function of them,
is what satisfies our intellect. That a definite end
calls forth definite means to attain it, is what we also
understand. In both cases we have to do with the known
which is combined with the known, in short, with the
old which is repeated. Our intellect is there at its ease ;
and, whatever be the object, it will abstract, separate,
eliminate, so as to substitute for the object itself, if
necessarv, an approximate equivalent in which things
will happen in this way. But that each instant is a
fresh endowment, that the new is ever upspringing,
that the form just come into existence (although,
when once produced, it may be regarded as an effect
determined by its causes) could never have been
foreseen because the causes here, unique in their
ii THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 173
kind, are part of the effect, have come into existence
with it, and are determined by it as much as they
determine it, all this we can feel within ourselves and
also divine, by sympathy, outside ourselves, but we
cannot think it, in the strict sense of the word, nor
express it in terms of pure understanding. No
wonder at that : we must remember what our intellect
is meant for. The causality it seeks and finds every
where expresses the very mechanism of our industry,
in which we go on recomposing the same whole with
the same parts, repeating the same movements to obtain
the same result. The finality it understands best is
the finality of our industry, in which we work on a
model given in advance, that is to say, old or com
posed of elements already known. As to invention
properly so called, which is, however, the point of
departure of industry itself, our intellect does not
succeed in grasping it in its up springing^ that is to say,
in its indivisibility, nor in its fervour^ that is to say,
in its creativeness. Explaining it always consists in re
solving it, it the unforeseeable and new, into elements
old or known, arranged in a different order. The
intellect can no more admit complete novelty than real
becoming ; that is to say, here again it lets an essential
aspect of life escape, as if it were not intended to think
such an object.
All our analyses bring us to this conclusion. But it
is hardly necessary to go into such long details con
cerning the mechanism of intellectual working ; it is
enough to consider the results. We see that the
intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward
the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants
to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it
proceeds with the rigour, the stiffness and the brutality
174 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
of an instrument not designed for such use. The
history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much
in this matter. When we think of the cardinal,
urgent and constant need we have to preserve our
bodies and to raise our souls, of the special facilities
given to each of us, in this field, to experiment
continually on ourselves and on others, of the palpable
injury by which the wrongness of a medical or
pedagogical practice is both made manifest and
punished at once, we are amazed at the stupidity
and especially at the persistence of errors. We
may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy
with which we treat the living like the lifeless and
think all reality, however fluid, under the form of
the sharply defined solid. We are at ease only
in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead.
The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to
comprehend life.
Instinct, on the contrary, is moulded on the very
form of life. While intelligence treats everything
mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organi
cally. If the consciousness that slumbers in it
should awake, if it were wound up into knowledge
instead of being wound off into action, if we could
ask and it could reply, it would give up to us the
most intimate secrets of life. For it only carries out
further the work by which life organizes matter,
so that we cannot say, as has often been shown,
where organization ends and where instinct begins.
When the little chick is breaking its shell with a peck
of its beak, it is acting by instinct, and yet it does but
carry on the movement which has borne it through
embryonic life. Inversely, in the course of embryonic
ii THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 175
life itself (especially when the embryo lives freely in
the form of a larva), many of the acts accomplished
must be referred to instinct. The most essential of
the primary instincts are really, therefore, vital pro
cesses. The potential consciousness that accompanies
them is generally actualized only at the outset of the
act, and leaves the rest of the process to go on by
itself. It would only have to expand more widely,
and then dive into its own depth completely, to be
one with the generative force of life.
When we see in a living body thousands of cells
working together to a common end, dividing the task
between them, living each for itself at the same time
as for the others, preserving itself, feeding itself,
reproducing itself, responding to the menace of danger
by appropriate defensive reactions, how can we help
thinking of so many instincts ? And yet these are the
natural functions of the cell, the constitutive elements
of its vitality. On the other hand, when we see the
bees of a hive forming a system so strictly organized
that no individual can live apart from the others beyond
a certain time, even though furnished with food and
shelter, how can we help recognizing that the hive
is really, and not metaphorically, a single organism,
of which each bee is a cell united to the others by
invisible bonds ? The instinct that animates the bee
is indistinguishable, then, from the force that animates
the cell, or is only a prolongation of that force. In
extreme cases like this, instinct coincides with the work
of organization.
Of course there are degrees of perfection in the same
instinct. Between the humble-bee and the honey-bee,
for instance, the distance is great ; and we pass from
one to the other through a great number of inter-
176 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
mediaries, which correspond to so many complications
of the social life. But the same diversity is found
in the functioning of histological elements belonging
to different tissues more or less akin. In both cases
there are manifold variations on one and the same
theme. The constancy of the theme is manifest,
however, and the variations only fit it to the diversity
of the circumstances.
Now, in both cases, in the instinct of the animal and
in the vital properties of the cell, the same knowledge
and the same ignorance are shown. All ocs on as
if the cell knew, of the other cells, what concerns itself ;
as if the animal knew, of the other animals, what it
can utilise all else remaining in shade. It seems as
if life, as soon as it has become bound up in a
species, is cut off from the rest of its own work,
save at one or two points that are of vital concern
to the species just arisen. Is it not plain that life
goes to work here exactly like consciousness, exactly
like memory ? \Ye trail behind us, unawares, the
whole of our past ; but our memory pours into the
present only the odd recollection or two that in
some way complete our present situation. Thus the
instinctive knowledge which one species possesses of
another on a certain particular point has its root in the
very unity of life, which is, to use the expression of an
ancient philosopher, a " whole sympathetic to itself."
It is impossible to consider some of the special instincts
of the animal and of the plant, evidently arisen in
extraordinary circumstances, without relating them to
those recollections, seemingly forgotten, which spring
up suddenly under the pressure of an urgent need.
No doubt many secondary instincts, and also many
varieties of primary instinct, admit of a scientific ex-
ii THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 177
planation. Yet it is doubtful whether science, with
its present methods of explanation, will ever succeed in
analysing instinct completely. The reason is that
instinct and intelligence are two divergent develop
ments of one and the same principle, which in the one
case remains within itself, in the other steps out of
itself and becomes absorbed in the utilization of inert
matter. This gradual divergence testifies to a radical
incompatibility, and points to the fact that it is im
possible for intelligence to reabsorb instinct. That
which is instinctive in instinct cannot be expressed
in terms of intelligence, nor, consequently, can it be
analysed.
A man born blind, who had lived among others
born blind, could not be made to believe in the
possibility of perceiving a distant object without first
perceiving all the objects in between. Yet vision
performs this miracle. In a certain sense the blind
man is right, since vision, having its origin in the
stimulation of the retina by the vibrations of the light,
is nothing else, in fact, but a retinal touch. Such is
indeed the scientific explanation, for the function of
science is just to express all perceptions in terms of
touch. But we have shown elsewhere that the philo
sophical explanation of perception (if it may still be
called an explanation) must be of another kind. 1 Now
instinct also is a knowledge at a distance. It has the
same relation to intelligence that vision has to touch.
Science cannot do otherwise than express it in terms of
intelligence ; but in so doing it constructs an imitation
of instinct rather than penetrates within it.
Any one can convince himself of this by studying
the ingenious theories of evolutionist biology. They
1 Mature et m/moire, chap. i.
i 7 8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
may be reduced to two types, which are often inter
mingled. One type, following the principles of neo-
Darwinism, regards instinct as a sum of accidental
differences preserved by selection : such and such a
useful behaviour, naturally adopted by the individual
in virtue of an accidental predisposition of the germ,
has been transmitted from germ to germ, waiting for
chance to add fresh improvements to it by the same
method. The other type regards instinct as lapsed
intelligence : the action, found useful by the species or
by certain of its representatives, is supposed to have
engendered a habit, which, by hereditary transmission,
has become an instinct. Of these two types of theory,
the first has the advantage of being able to bring in
hereditary transmission without raising grave objection ;
for the accidental modification which it places at the
origin of the instinct is not supposed to have been
acquired by the individual, but to have been inherent
in the germ. But, on the other hand, it is absolutely
incapable of explaining instincts as sagacious as those
of most insects. These instincts surely could not have
attained, all at once, their present degree of complexity ;
they have probably evolved ; but, in a hypothesis like
that of the neo-Darwinians, the evolution of instinct
could have come to pass only by the progressive
addition of new pieces which, in some way, by happy
accidents, came to fit into the old. Now it is evident
that, in most cases, instinct could not have perfected
itself by simple accretion : each new piece really re
quires, if all is not to be spoiled, a complete recasting
of the whole. How could mere chance work a recast
ing of the kind ? I agree that an accidental modifica
tion of the germ may be passed on hereditarily, and
may somehow wait for fresh accidental modifications
n THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 179
to come and complicate it. I agree also that natural
selection may eliminate all those of the more compli
cated forms of instinct that are not fit to survive.
Still, in order that the life of the instinct may evolve,
complications fit to survive have to be produced.
Now they will be produced only if, in certain cases, the
addition of a new element brings about the correlative
change of all the old elements. No one will maintain
that chance could perform such a miracle : in one form
or another we shall appeal to intelligence. We shall
suppose that it is by an effort, more or less conscious,
that the living being develops a higher instinct. But
then we shall have to admit that an acquired habit can
become hereditary, and that it does so regularly enough
to ensure an evolution. The thing is doubtful, to put
it mildly. Even if we could refer the instincts of
animals to habits intelligently acquired and hereditarily
transmitted, it is not clear how this sort of explanation
could be extended to the vegetable world, where effort
is never intelligent, even supposing it is sometimes
conscious. And yet, when we see with what sureness
and precision climbing plants use their tendrils, what
marvellously combined manoeuvres the orchids perform
to procure their fertilization by means of insects, 1 how
can we help thinking that these are so many instincts ?
This is not saying that the theory of the neo-
Darwinians must be altogether rejected, any more
than that of the neo - Lamarckians. The first are
probably right in holding that evolution takes place
from germ to germ rather than from individual to
individual ; the second are right in saying that at the
origin of instinct there is an effort (although it is
1 See the two works of Darwin, Climbing Plants and The Fertilization of
Orchids by Insects,
180 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
something quite different, we believe, from an intelligent
effort). But the former are probably wrong when they
make the evolution of instinct an accidental evolution,
and the latter when they regard the effort from which
instinct proceeds as an individual effort. The effort
by which a species modifies its instinct, and modifies
itself as well, must be a much deeper thing, dependent
solely neither on circumstances nor on individuals.
It is not purely accidental, although accident has a
large place in it ; and it does not depend solely
on the initiative of individuals, although individuals
collaborate in it.
Compare the different forms of the same instinct
in different species of Hymenoptera. The impression
derived is not always that of an increasing complexity
made of elements that have been added together one
after the other. Nor does it suggest the idea of steps
up a ladder. Rather do we think, in many cases at
least, of the circumference of a circle, from different
points of which these different varieties have started,
all facing the same centre, all making an effort in that
direction, but each approaching it only to the extent of
its means, and to the extent also to which this central
point has been illumined for it. In other words, instinct
is everywhere complete, but it is more or less simpli
fied, and, above all, simplified differently. On the other
hand, in cases where we do get the impression of an
ascending scale, as if one and the same instinct had
gone on complicating itself more and more in one
direction and along a straight line, the species which
are thus arranged by their instincts into a linear series
are by no means always akin. Thus, the comparative
study, in recent years, of the social instinct in the
different apidae proves that the instinct of the meli-
ii THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 181
ponines is intermediary in complexity between the
still rudimentary tendency of the humble bees and the
consummate science of the true bees ; yet there can be
no kinship between the bees and the meliponines. 1
Most likely, the degree of complexity of these different
societies has nothing to do with any greater or smaller
number of added elements. We seem rather to be
before a musical theme^ which had first been transposed,
the theme as a whole, into a certain number of tones,
and on which, still the whole theme, different variations
had been played, some very simple, others very skilful.
As to the original theme, it is everywhere and nowhere.
It is in vain that we try to express it in terms of any
idea : it must have been, originally, felt rather than
thought. We get the same impression before the
paralysing instinct of certain wasps. We know that
the different species of Hymenoptera that have this
paralysing instinct lay their eggs in spiders, beetles or
caterpillars, which, having first been subjected by the
wasp to a skilful surgical operation, will go on living
motionless a certain number of days, and thus provide
the larvae with fresh meat. In the sting which they
give to the nerve-centres of their victim, in order to
destroy its power of moving without killing it, these
different species of Hymenoptera take into account, so
to speak, the different species of prey they respectively
attack. The Scolia, which attacks a larva of the rose-
beetle, stings it in one point only, but in this point
the motor ganglia are concentrated, and those ganglia
alone : the stinging of other ganglia might cause death
and putrefaction, which it must avoid. 2 The yellow-
1 Buttel-Reepen, " Die phylogenetische Entstehung des Bienenstaates "
(Biol. Centralblatt, xxiii., 1903, p. 108 in particular).
2 Fabre, Souvenirs entomologiquet, 3 serie, Paris, 1890, pp. 1-69.
1 82 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
winged Sphex, which has chosen the cricket for its
victim, knows that the cricket has three nerve-centres
which serve its three pairs of legs or at least it acts as
if it knew this. It stings the insect first under the
neck, then behind the prothorax, and then where the
thorax joins the abdomen. 1 The Ammophila Hirsuta
gives nine successive strokes of its sting upon nine
nerve-centres of its caterpillar, and then seizes the head
and squeezes it in its mandibles, enough to cause
paralysis without death. 2 The general theme is " the
necessity of paralysing without killing " ; the variations
are subordinated to the structure of the victim on
which they are played. No doubt the operation is not
always perfect. It has recently been shown that the
Ammophila sometimes kills the caterpillar instead of
paralysing it, that sometimes also it paralyses it incom
pletely. 3 But, because instinct is, like intelligence,
fallible, because it also shows individual deviations, it
does not at all follow that the instinct of the Ammo
phila has been acquired, as has been claimed, by tenta
tive intelligent experiments. Even supposing that the
Ammophila has come in course of time to recognize,
one after another, by tentative experiment, the points
of its victim which must be stung to render it motion
less, and also the special treatment that must be
inflicted on the head to bring about paralysis without
death, how can we imagine that elements so special of
a knowledge so precise have been regularly transmitted,
one by one, by heredity ? If, in all our present ex
perience, there were a single indisputable example of a
transmission of this kind, the inheritance of acquired
1 Fabre, Souvenirs entomologiques, i re se"rie, 3* Edition, Paris, 1894, pp.
93 ff
Fabre, Nouveaux souvenirs entotnologiijufs, Paris, 1882, pp. 14 ff.
3 Peckham, Wasps, Solitary and Social, Westminster, 1905, pp. 28 ff.
ii THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 183
characters would be questioned by no one. As a
matter of fact, the hereditary transmission of a con
tracted habit is effected in an irregular and far from
precise manner, supposing it is ever really effected
at all.
But the whole difficulty comes from our desire to
express the knowledge of the Hymenoptera in terms of
intelligence. It is this that compels us to compare the
Ammophila with the entomologist, who knows the
caterpillar as he knows everything else from the out
side, and without having on his part a special or vital
interest. The Ammophila, we imagine, must learn,
one by one, like the entomologist, the positions of
the nerve-centres of the caterpillar must acquire at
least the practical knowledge of these positions by
trying the effects of its sting. But there is no need
for such a view if we suppose a sympathy (in the
etymological sense of the word) between the Ammo
phila and its victim, which teaches it from within, so
to say, concerning the vulnerability of the caterpillar.
This feeling of vulnerability might owe nothing to
outward perception, but result from the mere presence
together of the Ammophila and the caterpillar, con
sidered no longer as two organisms, but as two
activities. It would express, in a concrete form, the
relation of the one to the other. Certainly, a scientific
theory cannot appeal to considerations of this kind.
It must not put action before organization, sympathy
before perception and knowledge. But, once more,
either philosophy has nothing to see here, or its r61e
begins where that of science ends.
Whether it makes instinct a " compound reflex," or
a habit formed intelligently that has become automatism,
or a sum of small accidental advantages accumulated
184 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP
and fixed by selection, in every case science claims to
resolve instinct completely either into intelligent actions,
or into mechanisms built up piece by piece like those
combined by our intelligence. I agree indeed that
science is here within its function. It gives us, in
default of a real analysis of the object, a translation
of this object in terms of intelligence. But is it not
plain that science itself invites philosophy to consider
things in another way ? If our biology was still that
of Aristotle, if it regarded the series of living beings as
unilinear, if it showed us the whole of life evolving
towards intelligence and passing, to that end, through
sensibility and instinct, we should be right, we, the
intelligent beings, in turning back towards the earlier
and consequently inferior manifestations of life and in
claiming to fit them, without deforming them, into the
moulds of our understanding. But one of the clearest
results of biology has been to show that evolution has
taken place along divergent lines. It is at the ex
tremity of two of these lines the two principal that
we find intelligence and instinct in forms almost pure.
Why, then, should instinct be resolvable into intelligent
elements ? Why, even, into terms entirely intelligible ?
Is it not obvious that to think here of the intelligent,
or of the absolutely intelligible, is to go back to the
Aristotelian theory of nature ? No doubt it is better
to go back to that than to stop short before instinct as
before an unfathomable mystery. But, though instinct
is not within the domain of intelligence, it is not
situated beyond the limits of mind. In the pheno
mena of feeling, in unreflecting sympathy and anti
pathy, we experience in ourselves, though under a
much vaguer form, and one too much penetrated with
intelligence, something of what must happen in the
n THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 185
consciousness of an insect acting by instinct. Evolu
tion does but sunder, in order to develop them to the
end, elements which, at their origin, interpenetrated
each other. More precisely, intelligence is, before
anything else, the faculty of relating one point of
space to another, one material object to another ; it
applies to all things, but remains outside them ; and
of a deep cause it perceives only the effects spread out
side by side. Whatever be the force that is at work
in the genesis of the nervous system of the caterpillar,
to our eyes and our intelligence it is only a juxta
position of nerves and nervous centres. It is true that
we thus get the whole outer effect of it. The Ammo-
phila, no doubt, discerns but a very little of that force,
just what concerns itself ; but at least it discerns it from
within, quite otherwise than by a process of knowledge
by an intuition (lived rather than represented)^ which
is probably like what we call divining sympathy.
A very significant fact is the swing to and fro of
scientific theories of instinct, from regarding it as in
telligent to regarding it as simply intelligible, or, shall
I say, between likening it to an intelligence " lapsed "
and reducing it to a pure mechanism. 1 Each of these
systems of explanation triumphs in its criticism of the
other, the first when it shows us that instinct cannot be
a mere reflex, the other when it declares that instinct is
something different from intelligence, even fallen into
unconsciousness. What can this mean but that they
are two symbolisms, equally acceptable in certain
respects, and, in other respects, equally inadequate to
their object ? The concrete explanation, no longer
1 See, in particular, among recent works, Bethe, " Dttrfen wir den
Ameisen und Bienen psychische Qualitaten zuschreiben ? " (Arch.f. d. ges.
Physiologie, 1898), and Forel, " Un Aperc.u de psychologic compares"
(Annfe psyctiologique, 1895).
1 86 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
scientific, but metaphysical, must be sought along quite
another path, not in the direction of intelligence, but in
that of " sympathy."
Instinct is sympathy. If this sympathy could extend
its object and also reflect upon itself, it would give us
the key to vital operations just as intelligence,
developed and disciplined, guides us into matter. For
we cannot too often repeat it intelligence and
instinct are turned in opposite directions, the former
towards inert matter, the latter towards life. Intelli
gence, by means of science, which is its work, will
deliver up to us more and more completely the secret
of physical operations ; of life it brings us, and more
over only claims to bring us, a translation in terms of
inertia. It goes all round life, taking from outside the
greatest possible number of views of it, drawing it into
itself instead of entering into it. But it is to the very
inwardness of life that intuition leads us, by intuition
I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-
conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of
enlarging it indefinitely.
That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is
proved by the existence in man of an aesthetic faculty
along with normal perception. Our eye perceives the
features of the living being, merely as assembled, not as
mutually organized. The intention of life, the simple
movement that runs through the lines, that binds them
together and gives them significance, escapes it. This
intention is just what the artist tries to regain, in
placing himself back within the object by a kind of
sympathy, in breaking down, by an effort of intuition,
the barrier that space puts up between him and his
model. It is true that this aesthetic intuition, like
ii LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 187
external perception, only attains the individual. But
we can conceive an inquiry turned in the same direc
tion as art, which would take life in general for its
object, just as physical science, in following to the end
the direction pointed out by external perception, pro
longs the individual facts into general laws. No doubt
this philosophy will never obtain a knowledge of its
object comparable to that which science has of its own.
Intelligence remains the luminous nucleus around
which instinct, even enlarged and purified into in
tuition, forms only a vague nebulosity. But, in default
of knowledge properly so called, reserved to pure
intelligence, intuition may enable us to grasp what it is
that intelligence fails to give us, and indicate the means
of supplementing it. On the one hand, it will utilize
the mechanism of intelligence itself to show how in
tellectual moulds cease to be strictly applicable ; and
on the other hand, by its own work, it will suggest to
us the vague feeling, if nothing more, of what must
take the place of intellectual moulds. Thus, intuition
may bring the intellect to recognize that life does not
quite go into the category of the many nor yet into
that of the one ; that neither mechanical causality nor
finality can give a sufficient interpretation of the vital
process. Then, by the sympathetic communication
which it establishes between us and the rest of the
living, by the expansion of our consciousness which it
brings about, it introduces us into life s own domain,
which is reciprocal interpenetration, endlessly continued
creation. But, though it thereby transcends intelli
gence, it is from intelligence that has come the push
that has made it rise to the point it has reached.
Without intelligence, it would have remained in the
form of instinct, riveted to the special object of its
1 88 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
practical interest, and turned outward by it into move
ments of locomotion.
How theory of knowledge must take account of
these two faculties, intellect and intuition, and how
also, for want of establishing a sufficiently clear dis
tinction between them, it becomes involved in inextric
able difficulties, creating phantoms of ideas to which
there cling phantoms of problems, we shall endeavour
to show a little further on. We shall see that the
problem of knowledge, from this point of view, is one
with the metaphysical problem, and that both one and
the other depend upon experience. On the one hand,
indeed, if intelligence is charged with matter and
instinct with life, we must squeeze them both in order
to get the double essence from them ; metaphysics is
therefore dependent upon theory of knowledge. But,
on the other hand, if consciousness has thus split up
into intuition and intelligence, it is because of the
need it had to apply itself to matter at the same time
as it had to follow the stream of life. The double
form of consciousness is then due to the double form
of the real, and theory of knowledge must be de
pendent upon metaphysics. In fact, each of these two
lines of thought leads to the other ; they form a circle,
and there can be no other centre to the circle but the
empirical study of evolution. It is only in seeing
consciousness run through matter, lose itself there and
find itself there again, divide and reconstitute itself,
that we shall form an idea of the mutual opposition of
the two terms, as also, perhaps, of their common origin.
But, on the other hand, by dwelling on this opposition
of the two elements and on this identity of origin,
perhaps we shall bring out more clearly the meaning
of evolution itself.
ii LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 189
Such will be the aim of our next chapter. But
the facts that we have just noticed must have already
suggested to us the idea that life is connected either
with consciousness or with something that resembles it.
Throughout the whole extent of the animal kingdom,
we have said, consciousness seems proportionate to the
living being s power of choice. It lights up the zone
of potentialities that surrounds the act. It fills the
interval between what is done and what might be done.
Looked at from without, we may regard it as a simple
aid to action, a light that action kindles, a momentary
spark flying up from the friction of real action against
possible actions. But we must also point out that
things would go on in just the same way if conscious
ness, instead of being the effect, were the cause. We
might suppose that consciousness, even in the most rudi
mentary animal, covers by right an enormous field, but
is compressed in fact in a kind of vice : each advance
of the nervous centres, by giving the organism a choice
between a larger number of actions, calls forth the
potentialities that are capable of surrounding the real,
thus opening the vice wider and allowing consciousness
to pass more freely. In this second hypothesis, as in
the first, consciousness is still the instrument of action ;
but it is even more true to say that action is the
instrument of consciousness ; for the complicating of
action with action, and the opposing of action to action,
are for the imprisoned consciousness the only possible
means to set itself free. How, then, shall we choose
between the two hypotheses ? If the first is true,
consciousness must express exactly, at each instant, the
state of the brain ; there is strict parallelism (so far as
intelligible) between the psychical and the cerebral
state. On the second hypothesis, on the contrary,
i 9 o CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP
there is indeed solidarity and interdependence between
the brain and consciousness, but not parallelism : the
more complicated the brain becomes, thus giving the
organism greater choice of possible actions, the more
does consciousness outrun its physical concomitant.
Thus, the recollection of the same spectacle probably
modifies in the same way a dog s brain and a man s
brain, if the perception has been the same ; yet the
recollection must be very different in the man s con
sciousness from what it is in the dog s. In the dog,
the recollection remains the captive of perception ;
it is brought back to consciousness only when an
analogous perception recalls it by reproducing the same
spectacle, and then it is manifested by the recognition,
acted rather than thought^ of the present perception
much more than by an actual reappearance of the
recollection itseli". Man, on the contrary, is capable
of calling up the recollection at will, at any moment,
independently of the present perception. He is not
limited to -playing his past life again ; he represents and
dreams it. The local modification of the brain to
which the recollection is attached being the same in each
case, the psychological difference between the two
recollections cannot have its ground in a particular
difference of detail between the two cerebral mechanisms,
but in the difference between the two brains taken each
as a whole. The more complex of the two, in putting
a greater number of mechanisms in opposition to one
another, has enabled consciousness to disengage itself
from the restraint of one and all and to reach inde
pendence. That things do happen in this way, that the
second of the two hypotheses is that which must be
chosen, is what we have tried to prove, in a former
work, by the study of facts that best bring into relief
n LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 191
the relation of the conscious state to the cerebral state,
the facts of normal and pathological recognition, in
particular the forms of aphasia. 1 But it could have
been proved by pure reasoning, before even it was
evidenced by facts. We have shown on what self-
contradictory postulate, on what confusion of two
mutually incompatible symbolisms, the hypothesis of
equivalence between the cerebral state and the psychic
state rests. 2
The evolution of life, looked at from this point,
receives a clearer meaning, although it cannot be sub
sumed under any actual idea. It is as if a broad
current of consciousness had penetrated matter, loaded,
as all consciousness is, with an enormous multiplicity
of interwoven potentialities. It has carried matter
along to organization, but its movement has been at
once infinitely retarded and infinitely divided. On
the one hand, indeed, consciousness has had to fall
asleep, like the chrysalis in the envelope in which it is
preparing for itself wings ; and, on the other hand, the
manifold tendencies it contained have been distributed
among divergent series of organisms which, moreover,
express these tendencies outwardly in movements rather
than internally in representations. In the course of
this evolution, while some beings have fallen more
and more asleep, others have more and more com
pletely awakened, and the torpor of some has served
the activity of others. But the waking could be
effected in two different ways. Life, that is to say
consciousness launched into matter, fixed its attention
either on its own movement or on the matter it was
1 Mature et mtmoire^ chaps, ii. and iii.
8 "Le Paralogisme psycho-physiologique " (Revue de
Nov. 1904).
192 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
passing through ; and it has thus been turned either
in the direction of intuition or in that of intellect.
Intuition, at first sight, seems far preferable to intellect,
since in it life and consciousness remain within them
selves. But a glance at the evolution of living beings
shows us that intuition could not go very far. On the
o /
side of intuition, consciousness found itself so restricted
by its envelope that intuition had to shrink into
instinct, that is, to embrace only the very small portion
of life that interested it ; and this it embraces only in
the dark, touching it while hardly seeing it. On this
side, the horizon was soon shut out. On the contrary,
consciousness, in shaping itself into intelligence, that is
to say in concentrating itself at first on matter, seems
to externalise itself in relation to itself; but, just
because it adapts itself thereby to objects from without,
it succeeds in moving among them and in evading the
barriers they oppose to it, thus opening to itself an
unlimited field. Once freed, moreover, it can turn
inwards on itself, and awaken the potentialities of in
tuition which still slumber within it.
From this point of view, not only does consciousness
appear as the motive principle of evolution, but also,
among conscious beings themselves, man comes to
occupy a privileged place. Between him and the
animals the difference is no longer one of degree, but
of kind. We shall show how this conclusion is arrived
at in our next chapter. Let us now show how the
preceding analyses suggest it.
A noteworthy fact is the extraordinary disproportion
between the consequences of an invention and the
invention itself. We have said that intelligence is
modelled on matter and that it aims in the first place
at fabrication. But does it fabricate in order to
n LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 193
fabricate, or does it not pursue involuntarily, and even
unconsciously, something entirely different ? Fabri
cating consists in shaping matter, in making it supple
and in bending it, in converting it into an instrument
in order to become master of it. It is this mastery that
profits humanity, much more even than the material
result of the invention itself. Though we derive an
immediate advantage from the thing made, as an
intelligent animal might do, and though this advantage
be all the inventor sought, it is a slight matter com
pared with the new ideas and new feelings that the
invention may give rise to in every direction, as if
the essential part of the effect were to raise us above
ourselves and enlarge our horizon. Between the effect
and the cause the disproportion is so great that it is
difficult to regard the cause as producer of its effect. It
releases it, whilst settling, indeed, its direction. Every
thing happens as though the grip of intelligence on
matter were, in its main intention, to let something pass
that matter is holding back.
The same impression arises when we compare
the brain of man with that of the animals. The
difference at first appears to be only a difference of
size and complexity. But, judging by function, there
must be something else besides. In the animal, the
motor mechanisms that the brain succeeds in setting
up, or, in other words, the habits contracted voluntarily,
have no other object nor effect than the accomplish
ment of the movements marked out in these habits,
stored in these mechanisms. But, in man, the motor
habit may have a second result, out of proportion to
the first : it can hold other motor habits in check, and
thereby, in overcoming automatism, set consciousness
free. We know what vast regions in the human
o
194 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
brain language occupies. The cerebral mechanisms that
correspond to the words have this in particular, that
they can be made to grapple with other mechanisms,
those, for instance, that correspond to the things them
selves, or even be made to grapple with one another.
Meanwhile consciousness, which would have been
dragged down and drowned in the accomplishment
of the act, is restored and set free. 1
The difference must therefore be more radical than
a superficial examination would lead us to suppose.
It is the difference between a mechanism which engages
the attention and a mechanism from which it can
be diverted. The primitive steam-engine, as New-
comen conceived it, required the presence of a
person exclusively employed to turn on and off the
taps, either to let the steam into the cylinder or to
throw the cold spray into it in order to condense the
steam. It is said that a boy employed on this work,
and very tired of having to do it, got the idea of
tying the handles of the taps, with cords, to the
beam of the engine. Then the machine opened and
closed the taps itself; it worked all alone. Now,
if an observer had compared the structure of this
second machine with that of the first without taking
into account the two boys left to watch over them,
he would have found only a slight difference of com
plexity. That is, indeed, all we can perceive when
we look only at the machines. But if we cast a
glance at the two boys, we shall see that whilst one
is wholly taken up by the watching, the other is free to
1 A geologist whom we have already had occasion to cite, N. S. Shaler,
well says that "when we come to man, it seems as if we find the ancient
subjection of mind to body abolished, and the intellectual parts develop with
an extraordinary rapidity, the structure of the body remaining identical
in essentials" (Shaler, The Interpretation of Nature, Boston, 1899, p. 187).
ii LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
go and play as he chooses, and that, from this point of
view, the difference between the two machines is radical,
the first holding the attention captive, the second setting
it at liberty. A difference of the same kind, we think,
would be found between the brain of an animal and the
human brain.
If, now, we should wish to express this in terms of
finality, we should have to say that consciousness, after
having been obliged, in order to set itself free, to divide
organization into two complementary parts, vegetables
on one hand and animals on the other, has sought
an issue in the double direction of instinct and of
intelligence. It has not found it with instinct, and it has
not obtained it on the side of intelligence except by a
sudden leap from the animal to man. So that, in the
last analysis, man might be considered the reason for the
existence of the entire organization of life on our planet.
But this would be only a manner of speaking. There
is, in reality, only a current of existence and the opposing
current ; thence proceeds the whole evolution of life.
We must now grasp more closely the opposition of
these two currents. Perhaps we shall thus discover for
them a common source. By this we shall also, no
doubt, penetrate the most obscure regions of meta
physics. However, as the two directions we have to
follow are clearly marked, in intelligence on the
one hand, in instinct and intuition on the other,
we are not afraid of straying. A survey of the
evolution of life suggests to us a certain conception of
knowledge, and also a certain metaphysics, which imply
each other. Once made clear, this metaphysics and
this critique may throw some light, in their turn, on
evolution as a whole.
CHAPTER III
ON THE MEANING OF LIFE THE ORDER OF NATURE
AND THE FORM OF INTELLIGENCE
IN the course of our first chapter we traced a line of
demarcation between the inorganic and the organized,
but we pointed out that the division of unorganized
matter into separate bodies is relative to our senses and
to our intellect, and that matter, looked at as an un
divided whole, must be a flux rather than a thing. In
this we were preparing the way for a reconciliation
between the inert and the living.
On the other side, we have shown in our second
chapter that the same opposition is found again between
instinct and intelligence, the one turned to certain
determinations of life, the other moulded on the
configuration of matter. But instinct and intelligence,
we have also said, stand out from the same background,
which, for want of a better name, we may call con
sciousness in general, and which must be coextensive
with universal life. In this way, we have disclosed the
possibility of showing the genesis of intelligence in set
ting out from general consciousness, which embraces it.
We are now, then, to attempt a genesis of intellect
at the same time as a genesis of material bodies two
enterprises that are evidently correlative, if it be true
that the main lines of our intellect mark out the genera]
196
CH. in THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 197
form of our action on matter, and that the detail of
matter is ruled by the requirements of our action.
Intellectuality and materiality have been constituted,
in detail, by reciprocal adaptation. Both are derived
from a wider and higher form of existence. It is
there that we must replace them, in order to see them
issue forth.
Such an attempt may appear, at first, more daring
than the boldest speculations of metaphysicians. It
claims to go further than psychology, further than
cosmology, further than traditional metaphysics ; for
psychology, cosmology and metaphysics take intelli
gence, in all that is essential to it, as given, instead of,
as we now propose, engendering it in its form and in
its matter. The enterprise is in reality much more
modest, as we are going to show. But let us first say
how it differs from others.
To begin with psychology, we are not to believe
that it engenders intelligence when it follows the pro
gressive development of it through the animal series.
Comparative psychology teaches us that the more an
animal is intelligent, the more it tends to reflect on the
actions by which it makes use of things, and thus to
approximate to man. But its actions have already by
themselves adopted the principal lines of human action ;
they have made out the same general directions in the
material world as we have ; they depend upon the
same objects bound together by the same relations ; so
that animal intelligence, although it does not form
concepts properly so called, already moves in a
conceptual atmosphere. Absorbed at every instant by
the actions it performs and the attitudes it must adopt,
drawn outward by them and so externalized in relation
to itself, it no doubt plays rather than thinks its ideas ;
198 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
this play none the less already corresponds, in the main,
to the general plan of human intelligence. 1 To explain
the intelligence of man by that of the animal consists
then simply in following the development of an embryo
of humanity into complete humanity. We show how a
certain direction has been followed further and further
by beings more and more intelligent. But the moment
we admit the direction, intelligence is given.
In a cosmogony like that of Spencer, intelligence is
taken for granted, as matter also at the same time. We
are shown matter obeying laws, objects connected with
objects and facts with facts by constant relations, con
sciousness receiving the imprint of these relations and
laws, and thus adopting the general configuration of
nature and shaping itself into intellect. But how can
we fail to see that intelligence is supposed when we
admit objects and facts ? A priori and apart from any
hypothesis on the nature of matter, it is evident that the
materiality of a body does not stop at the point at which
we touch it : a body is present wherever its influence is
felt ; its attractive force, to speak only of that, is exerted
on the sun, on the planets, perhaps on the entire
universe. The more physics advances, the more
it effaces the individuality of bodies and even of the
particles into which the scientific imagination began by
decomposing them : bodies and corpuscles tend to
dissolve into a universal interaction. Our percep
tions give us the plan of our eventual action on
things much more than that of things themselves.
The outlines we find in objects simply mark^what
we can attain and modify in them. The lines we see
traced through matter arc just the paths on which
1 We have developed this point in Matilre et mimoire, chaps, ii. and iii^
notably pp. 78-80 and 169-186.
in THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 199
we are called to move. Outlines and paths have
declared themselves in the measure and proportion
that consciousness has prepared for action on un
organized matter that is to say, in the measure and
proportion that intelligence has been formed. It is
doubtful whether animals built on a different plan a
mollusc or an insect, for instance, cut matter up along
the same articulations. It is not indeed necessary that
they should separate it into bodies at all. In order to
follow the indications of instinct, there is no need to
perceive objects, it is enough to distinguish properties.
Intelligence, on the contrary, even in its humblest form,
already aims at getting matter to act on matter. If on
one side matter lends itself to a division into active
and passive bodies, or more simply into coexistent and
distinct fragments, it is from this side that intelligence
will regard it ; and the more it busies itself with dividing,
the more it will spread out in space, in the form of
extension adjoining extension, a matter that undoubtedly
itself has a tendency to spatiality, but whose parts are
yet in a state of reciprocal implication and interpenetra-
tion. Thus the same movement by which the mind is
brought to form itself into intellect, that is to say, into
distinct concepts, brings matter to break itself up into
objects excluding one another. The more consciousness is
intellectualized, the more is mailer spatialized. So that
the evolutionist philosophy, when it imagines in space
a matter cut up on the very lines that our action
will follow, has given itself in advance, reajdjjmade^ jhe
intelligence of which it claims to showthe^genesis.
Metaphysics applies -itself ""tcT"lTlvork of the same
kind, though subtler and more self-conscious, when it
deduces a priori the categories of thought. It com
presses intellect, reduces it to its quintessence, holds
200 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
it tight in a principle so simple that it can be thought
empty : from this principle we then draw out what
we have virtually put into it. In this way we may
no doubt show the coherence of intelligence, define
intellect, give its formula, but we do not trace its
genesis. An enterprise like that of Fichte, although
more philosophical than that of Spencer, in that it
pays more respect to the true order of things, hardly
leads us any further. Fichte takes thought in a
concentrated state, and expands it into reality ; Spencer
starts from external reality, and condenses it into
intellect. But, in the one case as in the other, the in
tellect must be taken at the beginning as given, either
condensed or expanded, grasped in itself by a direct
vision or perceived by reflection in nature, as in a mirror.
The agreement of most philosophers on this point
comes from the fact that they are at one in affirming
the unity of nature, and in representing this unity
under an abstract and geometrical form. Between
the organized and the unorganized they do not see and
they will not see the cleft. Some start from the inorganic,
and, by compounding it with itself, claim to form the
living ; others place life first, and proceed towards
matter by a skilfully managed decrescendo ; but, for
both, there are only differences of degree in nature
degrees of complexity in the first hypothesis, of
intensity in the second. Once this principle is
admitted, intelligence becomes as vast as reality ; for
it is unquestionable that whatever is geometrical in
things is entirely accessible to human intelligence, and
if the continuity between geometry and the rest is
perfect, all the rest must indeed be equally intelligible,
equally intelligent. Such is the postulate of most
systems. Any one can easily be convinced of this by
in THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 201
comparing doctrines that seem to have no common
point, no common measure, those of Fichte and Spencer
for instance, two names that we happen to have just
brought together.
At the _root_.. of _these speculations, then, there are
the two convictions correlative ancTcompIementary, that
nature is one and that the function of intellect is to
embrace it in its entirety. The faculty of knowing
being supposed coextensive with the whole of experi
ence, there can no longer be any question of engendering
it. It is already given, and we merely have to use it,
as we use our sight to take in the horizon. It is
true that opinions differ as to the value of the result.
For some, it is reality itself that the intellect embraces ;
for others, it is only a phantom. But, phantom or
reality 3 what intelligence grasps is thought to be all
that can be attained.
Hence the exaggerate9 confidence of philosophy in
the powers of the individual mind. Whether it is
dogmatic or critical, whether it admits the relativity of
our knowledge or claims to be established within the
absolute, a philosophy is generally the work of a
philosopher, a single and unitary vision of the whole.
It is to be taken or left.
More modest, and also alone capable of being
completed and perfected, is the philosophy we advocate.
Human intelligence, as we represent it, is not at all
what Plato taught in the allegory of the cave. Its
function is not to look at passing shadows nor yet to
turn itself round and contemplate the glaring sun.
It has something else to do. Harnessed, like yoked
oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the play of our muscles
and joints, the weight of the plough and the re
sistance of the soil. To act and to know that we are
>
202 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
acting, to come into touch with reality and even to
live it, but only in the measure in which it concerns
the work that is being accomplished and the furrow
that is being ploughed, such is the function of human
intelligence. Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence
we draw the very force to labour and to live. From
this ocean of life, in which we are immersed, we are
continually drawing something, and we feel that our
being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has
been formed therein by a kind of local concentration.
Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve again into
the Whole. Intelligence, rcabsorbed into its principle,
may thus live back again its own genesis. But the
enterprise cannot be achieved in one stroke ; it is
necessarily collective and progressive. It consists in an
interchange of impressions which, correcting and adding
to each other, will end by expanding the humanity in
us and making us even transcend it.
But this method has against it the most inveterate
habits of the mind. It at once suggests the idea of a
vicious circle. In vain, we shall be told, you claim to
go beyond intelligence : how can you do that except
by intelligence ? All that is clear in your conscious
ness is intelligence. You are inside your own thought;
you cannot get out of it. Say, if you like, that the
intellect is capable of progress, that it will see more
and more clearly into a greater and greater number
of things ; but do not speak of engendering it, for
it is with your intellect itself that you would have to
do the work.
The objection presents itself naturally to the mind.
But the same reasoning would prove also the im
possibility of acquiring any new habit. It is of the
essence of reasoning to shut us up in trie circle of
in THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 203
the given. But action breaks the circle. If we had
never seen a man swim, we might say that swimming
is an impossible thing, inasmuch as, to learn to swim,
we must begin by holding ourselves up in the water and,
consequently, already know how to swim. Reasoning, in
fact, always nails us down to the solid grounHT_l3 uTTrT""
quite simply, 1 throw myself into the water without
fear, I may keep myself up well enough at first by
merely struggling, and gradually adapt myself to the
new environment : I shall thus have learnt to swim.
So, in theory, there is a kind of absurdity in trying to
know otherwise than by intelligence; but if the r4sk--
be frankly accepted, action win perhaps cut the ""knot" "
that reasoning has tied and will not unloose.
Besides, the risk will appear to grow less, the more
our point of view is adopted. We have shown that
intellect has detached itself from a vastly wider reality,
but that there has never been a clean cut between
the two ; all around conceptual thought there remains
an indistinct fringe which recalls its origin. And further
we compared the intellect to a solid nucleus formed by
means of condensation. This nucleus does not differ
radically from the fluid surrounding it. It can only be
reabsorbed in it because it is made of the same
substance. He who throws himself into the water,
having known only the resistance of the solid earth,
will immediately be drowned if he does not struggle
against the fluidity of the new environment : he must
perforce still cling to that solidity, so to speak,
which even water presents. Only on this condition
can he get used to the fluid s fluidity. So of our
thought, when it has decided to make the leap.
But leap it must, that is, leave its own environment.
Reason, reasoning on its powers, will never succeed in
204 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
extending them, though the extension would not appear
at all unreasonable once it were accomplished. Thousands
and thousands of variations on the theme of walking
will never yield a rule for swimming : come, enter the
water, and when you know how to swim, you will
understand how the mechanism of swimming is con
nected with that of walking. Swimming is an extension
of walking, but walking would never have pushed you
on to swimming. So you may speculate as intelligently
as you will on the mechanism of intelligence ; you will
never, by this method, succeed in going beyond it.
You may get something more complex, but not some
thing higher nor even something different. You must
take things by storm : you must thrust intelligence
outside itself by an act of will.
So the vicious circle is only apparent. It is, on
the contrary, real, we think, in every other method
of philosophy. This we must try to show in a
few words, if only to prove that philosophy cannot
and must not accept the relation established by pure
intellectualism between the theory of knowledge and
the theory of the known, between metaphysics and
science.
At first sight, it may seem prudent to leave the
consideration of facts to positive science, to let physics
and chemistry busy themselves with matter, the bio
logical and psychological sciences with life. The task
of the philosopher is then clearly defined. He takes
facts and laws from the scientist s hand ; and whether
he tries to go beyond them in order to reach their
deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to
go further and even proves it by the analysis of
scientific knowledge, in both cases he has for the facts
SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 205
and relations, handed over by science, the sort of
respect that is due to a final verdict. To this Know
ledge he adds a critique of the faculty of knowing,
and also, if he thinks proper, a metaphysic fJ^t the
^matter of knowledge he regards as the affair of science
_ and not of philosophy.
But lio^sTcLoes he Fail to^see that the real result of
this so-called division of labour is to mix up everything
and confuse everything ? The metaphysic or the critique
that the philosopher has reserved for himself he has
to receive, ready-made, from positive science, it being
already contained in the descriptions and analyses, the
whole care of which he left to the scientists. For
not having wished to intervene, at the beginning, in
questions of fact, he finds himself reduced, in questions
of principle, to formulating purely and simply in more
precise terms the unconscious and consequently incon
sistent metaphysic and critique which the very attitude of
.science to reality marks out. Let us not be deceived by
an apparent analogy between natural things and human
things. Here we are not in the judiciary domain,
where the description of fact and the judgment on
the fact are two distinct things, distinct for the very
simple reason that above the fact, and independent of it,
there is a law promulgated by a legislator. Here the
laws are internal to the facts and relative to the lines
that have been followed in cutting the real into distinct
facts. We cannot describe the outward appearance of
the object without prejudging its inner nature and its
organization. Form is no longer entirely isolable from
matter, and he who has begun by reserving to philo
sophy questions of principle, and who has thereby
tried to put philosophy above the sciences, as a " court
of cassation " is above the courts of assizes and of
206 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
appeal, will gradually come to make no more of
philosophy than a registration court, charged at most
with wording more precisely the sentences that are
brought to it, pronounced and irrevocable.
Positive science is, in fact, a work of pure intellect.
Now, whether our conception of the intellect be
accepted or rejected, there is one point on which
everybody will agree with us, and that is that the
intellect is at home in the presence of unorganized
matter. This matter it makes use of more and more
by mechanical inventions, and mechanical inventions
become the easier to it the more it thinks matter as
mechanism. The intellect bears within itself, in the
form of natural logic, a latent geometrism that is set
free in the measure and proportion that the intellect
penetrates into the inner nature of inert matter. In
telligence is in tune with this matter, and that is why
the physics and metaphysics of inert matter are so near
each other. Now, when the intellect undertakes the
study of life, it necessarily treats the living like the
inert, applying the same forms to this new object,
carrying over into this new field. -thje same habits that
have succeeded so well in the old ; and it is right to
do so, for only on such terms does the living .offer to
our action the same hold as inert matter. But__tl
truthr-we thus arrive at becomes altogether relative to
jiur.jfaculty of action. It is no more than a sym^trc
It cannot have the same value as the physical
beifig only an extension of physics to an object^
wjiich_w^jire a^pnorr^greoS~io look at only in its
ext^nmJN;^ should be to
intervene- here actively, to examine the living without
any reservation as to practical utility, by freeing itself
from forms and habits that are strictly intellectual.
in SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 207
Its own special object is to speculate, that is to say,
to see ; its attitude toward the living should not be
that ofjjcience, which aims only at action, and which,
.being able to act only by means jyf^ jflfidLJKLattery . .
. presents .. jto itself^tFe rest oF reality in this single
respect. What musFBie~HsuT^
and psychological facts to positive science alone, as it
has left, and rightly left, physical facts ? It will accept
^^r^ri_ajnechanistic conception of all nature, a con
ception .unreflectecl~and even unconscious, the outcome 7
of the material need. It will a -priori accept the
doctrine of the simple unity of knowledge and of the.
abstract unity of nature.
The moment it does so, its fate is sealed. The
philosopher has no longer any choice save between a
metaphysical dogmatism and a metaphysical scepticism,
both of which rest, at bottom, on the same postulate,
and neither of which adds anything to positive science.
He may hypostasize the unity of nature, or, what
comes to the same thing, the unity of science, in a
being who is nothing since he does nothing, an in
effectual God who simply sums up in himself all the
given ; or in an eternal Matter from whose womb
have been poured out the properties of things and
the laws of nature ; or, again, in a pure Form which
endeavours to seize an unseizable multiplicity, and
which is, as we will, the form of nature or the form
of thought. All these philosophies tell us, in their
different languages^ that^science ls~"rigrIFTo"~treat--t
livin a g T^t* i *"***;. P.H; j7* qf there is no difference o
_ value, no distinction to be made between the results^,,
which intellect arrives at in applying its categories,
whether it rests on inert matter or attacks life.
In many cases, however, we feel the frame cracking.
208 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
But as we did not begin by distinguishing between the
inert and the living, the one adapted in advance to the
frame in which we insert it, the other incapable of
being held in the frame otherwise than by a con
vention which eliminates from it all that is essential,
we find ourselves, in the end, reduced to regarding
everything the frame contains with equal suspicion.
To a metaphysical dogmatism, which has erected
into an absolute the factitious unity of science, there
succeeds a scepticism or a relativism that universalizes
and extends to all the results of science the artificial
character of some among them. So philosophy swings
to and fro between the doctrine that regards absolute
reality as unknowable and that which, in the idea it
gives us of this reality, says nothing more than science
has said. For having wished to prevent all conflict
between science and philosophy, we have sacrificed
philosophy without any appreciable gain to science.
And for having tried to avoid the seeming vicious
circle which consists in using the intellect to transcend
the intellect, we find ourselves turning in a real circle,
that which consists in laboriously rediscovering by
metaphysics a unity that we began by positing a priori^
a unity that we admitted blindly and unconsciously
by the very act of abandoning the whole of experience
to science and the whole of reality to the pure
understanding.
Let us begin, on the contrary, by tracing a line. o;
demarcation between the inert and the living.. We
shall find that the inert enters naturally into the frames
of the intellect, but that the living is adapted to these
frames only artificially, so that we must adopt a special
attitude towards it and examine it with other eyes than
those of positive science. Philosophy, then, invades the
in SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 209
domain of experience. She busies herself with many
things which hitherto have not concerned her. Science,
theory of knowledge, and metaphysics find themselves
on the same ground. At first there may be a certain
confusion. All three may think they have lost some
thing. But all three will profit from the meeting.
Positive science, indeed, may pride itself on the
uniform value attributed to its affirmations in the
whole field of experience. But, if they are all placed
on the same footing, they are all tainted with the same
relativity. It is not so, if we begin by making the
distinction which, in our view, is forced upon us. The
understanding is at home in the domain of unorganized
matter. On this matter human action is naturally
exercised ; and action, as we said above, cannot be set
in motion in the unreal. - Thus, of physics, so long
r J o
as we are considering only its general form and not
the particular cutting out of matter in which it is mani
fested, we may say that it touches the absolute. On
the contrary, it is by accident chance or convention,
as you please that science obtains a hold on the living
analogous to the hold it has on matter. Here the use
of conceptual frames is no longer natural. I do not
wish to say that it is not legitimate, in the scientific
meaning of the term. If science is to extend our
action on things, and if we can act only with inert
matter for instrument, science can and must continue
to treat the living as it has treated the inert. But, in
doing so, it must be understood that the further, ,i
penetrates trie depths of life, the more symbolic, the.
more relative to the contingencies" oF action, the know
ledge it supplies to us becomes. On this new ground
philosophy ought then to follow science, in order to
superpose cm scientific truth a knowledge of another kin<^
210 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
which may be called metaphysical^- (Thus combined,
" ~^tf our knawl e (ige", - 6otTi"~scienf i fie and metaphysical, is
heightened.! In the absolute we live and move and
have our being. The knowledge we possess of it is
incomplete, no doubt, but not external or relative. It
is reality itself, in the profoundest meaning of the
word, that we reach by the combined and progressive
development of science and of philosophy.
Thus, in renouncing the factitious unity which the
understanding imposes on nature from outside, we
shall perhaps find its true, inward and living unity.
For the effort we make to transcend the pure under
standing introduces us into that more vast something
out of which our understanding is cut, and from
which it has detached itself. And, as matter is
determined by intelligence, as there is between them
an evident agreement, we cannot make the genesis of
the one without making the genesis of the other. An
identical process must have cut out matter and the
intellect, at the same time, from a stuff that contained
both.. Into this reality we hiiall.get. ha.c_k_more and
more completely, in proportion as we compel ourselves
JLoJjranscend pure intelligence.
Let us then concentrate attention on that which we
have that is at the same time the most removed from
externality and the least penetrated with intellectuality.
Let us seek, in the depths of our experience, the point
where we feel ourselves most intimately within our
own life. It is into pure duration that we then plunge
back, a duration in which the past, always moving on,
is swelling unceasingly with a present that is absolutely
new. But, at the same time, we feel the spring of our
will strained to its utmost limit. We must, by a
in INTELLECT AND MATERIALITY 211
strong recoil of our personality on itself, gather up our
past which is slipping away, in order to thrust it,
compact and undivided, into a present which it will
create by entering. Rare indeed are the moments
when we are self-possessed to this extent : it is then that
our actions are truly free. And even at these moments
we do not completely possess ourselves. Our feeling
of duration, I should say the actual coinciding of
ourself with itself, admits of degrees. But the more
the feeling is deep and the coincidence complete, the
more the life in which it replaces us absorbs intel
lectuality by transcending it. For the natural function
of the intellect is to bind like to like, and it is only
facts that can be repeated that are entirely adaptable
to intellectual conceptions. Now, our intellect does
undoubtedly grasp the real moments of real duration
after they are past ; we do so by reconstituting the
new state of consciousness out of a series of views
taken of it from the outside, each of which resembles
as much as possible something already known ; in this
sense we may say that the state of consciousness
contains intellectuality implicitly. Yet the state of
consciousness overflows the intellect ; it is indeed
incommensurable with the intellect, being itself in
divisible and new.
Now let us relax the strain, let us interrupt the
effort to crowd as much as possible of the past into the
present. If the relaxation were complete, there would
no longer be either memory or will, which amounts to
saying that, in fact, we_ji&ver__dQLj^.J^ntg_th].s absolute
passivity^ any_more. than we can make ourselves absol
utely free. Btrt r ift~the limit, we get a glimpse of an
existence made of a present which recommences
unceasingly -devoid of real duration, nothing but the
212 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
instantaneous which dies and is born again endlessly.
Is the existence of matter of this nature ? Not
altogether, for analysis resolves it into elementary
vibrations, the shortest of which are of very slight
duration, almost vanishing, but not nothing. It may
be presumed, nevertheless, that physical existence
inclines in this second direction, as psychical existence
in the first.
Behind " spirituality " on the one hand, and
" materiality " with intellectuality on the other, there
are then two processes opposite in their direction, and
we pass from the first to the second by way of
inversion, or perhaps even by simple interruption, if it
is true that inversion and interruption are two terms
which in this case must be held to be synonymous,
as we shall show at more length later on. This pre
sumption is confirmed when we consider things from
the point of view of extension, and no longer from
that of duration alone.
The more we succeed in making ourselves conscious
of our progress in pure duration, the more we feel the
different parts of our being enter into each other, and
our whole personality concentrate itself in a point, or
rather a sharp edge, pressed against the future and
cutting into it unceasingly. It is in this that life and
action are free. But suppose we let ourselves go and,
instead of acting, dream. At once the self is scattered ;
our past, which till then was gathered together into the
indivisible impulsion it communicated to us, is broken
up into a thousand recollections made external to one
another. They give up interpenetrating in the degree
that they become fixed. Our personality thus descends
in the direction of space. It coasts around it continu
ally in sensation. We will not dwell here on a point
HI INTELLECT AND MATERIALITY 213
we have studied elsewhere. Let us merely recall that
extension admits of degrees, that all sensation is
extensive in a certain measure, and that the idea of
unextended sensations, artificially localized in space,
is a mere view of the mind, suggested by an uncon
scious metaphysic much more than by psychological
observation.
No doubt we make only the first steps in the
direction of the extended, even when we let ourselves
go as much as we can. But suppose for a moment
that matter consists in this very movement pushed
further, and that physics is simply psychics inverted.
We shall now understand why the mind feels at its
ease, moves about naturally in space, when matter
suggests the more distinct idea of it. This space it
already possessed as an implicit idea in its own eventual
detcnsion y that is to say, of its own possible extension.
The mind finds space in things, but could have got
it without them if it had had imagination strong
enough to push the inversion of its own natural
movement to the end. On the other hand, we are
able to explain how matter accentuates still more its
materiality, when viewed by the mind. Matter, at first,
aided mind to run down its own incline ; it gave the
impulsion. But, the impulsion once received, mind
continues its course. The idea that it forms of pure
space is only the schema of the limit at which this
movement would end. Once in possession of the
form of space, mind uses it like a net with meshes
that can be made and unmade at will, which, thrown
over matter, divides it as the needs of our action
demand. Thus, the space of our geometry and the
spatiality of things are mutually engendered by the
reciprocal action and reaction of two terms which arc
2i 4 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
essentially the same, but which move each in the
direction inverse of the other. Neither is space so
foreign to our nature as we imagine, nor is matter
as completely extended in space as our senses and
intellect represent it.
We have treated of the first point elsewhere.
As to the second, we will limit ourselves to pointing
out that perfect spatiality would consist in a perfect
externality of parts in their relation to one another,
that is to say, in a complete reciprocal independence.
Now, there is no material point that does not act on
every other material point. When we observe that a
thing really is there where it acts, we shall be led to
say (as Faraday l was) that all the atoms interpenetrate
and that each of them fills the world. On such a
hypothesis, the atom or, more generally, the material
point, becomes simply a view of the mind, a view
which we come to take when we continue far enough
the work (wholly relative to our faculty of acting) by
which we subdivide matter into bodies. Yet it is
undeniable that matter lends itself to this subdivision,
and that, in supposing it breakable into parts external
to one another, we are constructing a science sufficiently
representative of the real. It is undeniable that if
there be no entirely isolated system, yet science finds
means of cutting up the universe into systems relatively
independent of each other, and commits no appreciable
error in doing so. What else can this mean but that
matter extends itself in space without being absolutely
extended therein, and that in regarding matter as de
composable into isolated systems, in attributing to it
quite distinct elements which change in relation to
1 Faraday, "A Speculation concerning Electric Conduction" (Philo
sophical Magazine, 3d. scries, vol. xxiv.).
in INTELLECT AND MATERIALITY 215
each other without changing in themselves (which are
" displaced," shall we say, without being " altered "), in
short, in conferring on matter the properties of pure
space, we are transporting ourselves to the terminal
point of the movement of which matter simply
indicates the direction ?
What the Transcendental Aesthetic of Kant appears
to have established once for all is that extension is
not a material attribute of the same kind as others.
We cannot reason indefinitely on the notions of heat,
colour, or weight : in order to know the modalities
of weight or of heat, we must have recourse to
experience. Not so of the notion of space. Supposing
even that it is given empirically by sight and touch (and
Kant has not questioned the fact) there is this about it
that is remarkable that our mind, speculating on it with
its own powers alone, cuts out in it, a priori, figures
whose properties we determine a priori : experience,
with which we have not kept in touch, yet follows us
through the infinite complications of our reasonings
and invariably justifies them. That is the fact. Kant
has set it in clear light. But the explanation of the
fact, we believe, must be sought in a different direction
to that which Kant followed.
Intelligence, as Kant represents it to us, is bathed
in an atmosphere of spatiality to which it is as
inseparably united as the living body to the air it
breathes. Our perceptions reach us only after having
passed through this atmosphere. They have been
impregnated in advance by our geometry, so that our
faculty of thinking only finds again in matter the
mathematical properties which our faculty of per
ceiving has already deposed there. We are assured,
therefore, of seeing matter yield itself with docility
216 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
to our reasonings ; but this matter, in all that it has
that is intelligible, is our own work ; of the reality
"in itself" we know nothing and never shall know
anything, since we only get its refraction through the
forms of our faculty of perceiving. So that if we
claim to affirm something of it, at once there rises
the contrary affirmation, equally demonstrable, equally
plausible. The ideality of space is proved directly by
the analysis of knowledge, indirectly by the antinomies
to which the opposite theory leads. Such is the
governing idea of the Kantian criticism. It has
inspired Kant with a peremptory refutation of
" empiricist " theories of knowledge. It is, in our
opinion, definitive in what it denies. But, in what
it affirms, does it give us the solution of the problem ?
With Kant, space is given as a ready-made form of
our perceptive faculty, a veritable dcus ex machina, of
which we see neither how it arises, nor why it is
what it is rather than anything else. " Things-in-
themselves " are also given, of which he claims that we
can know nothing : by what right, then, can he affirm
their existence, even as " problematic " ? If the un
knowable reality projects into our perceptive faculty a
" sensuous manifold " capable of fitting into it exactly,
is it not, by that very fact, in part known ? And
when we examine this exact fitting, shall we not be
led, in one point at least, to suppose a pre-established
harmony between things and our mind, an idle
hypothesis, which Kant was right in wishing to avoid ?
At bottom, it is for not having distinguished degrees
in spatiality that he has had to take space ready made
as given whence the question how the " sensuous
manifold " is adapted to it. It is for the same reason
that he has supposed matter wholly developed into
in INTELLECT AND MATERIALITY 217
parts absolutely external to one another ; whence
antinomies, of which we may plainly see that the thesis
and antithesis suppose the perfect coincidence of matter
with geometrical space, but which vanish the moment
we cease to extend to matter what is true only of pure
space. Whence, finally, the conclusion that there are
three alternatives, and three only, among which to
choose a theory of knowledge : either the mind is
determined by things, or things are determined by the
mind, or between mind and things we must suppose
a mysterious agreement.
But the truth is that there is a fourth, which does
not seem to have occurred to Kant in the first place
because he did not think that the mind overflowed the
intellect, and in the second place (and this is at bottom
the same thing) because he did not attribute to duration
an absolute existence, having put time, a priori, on the
same plane as space. This alternative consists, first
of all, in regarding the intellect as a special function
of the mind, essentially turned toward inert matter ;
then in saying that neither does matter determine
the form of the intellect, nor does the intellect impose
its form on matter, nor have matter and intellect been
regulated in regard to one another by we know not
what pre-established harmony, but that intellect and
matter have progressively adapted themselves one to
the other in order to attain at last a common form.
This adaptation has, moreover, been brought about quite
naturally, because it is the same inversion of the same
movement which creates at once the intellectuality of mind
and the materiality of things.
From this point of view, the knowledge of matter
that our perception on one hand and science on the
other give to us appears, no doubt, as approximative,
2i 8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
CHAP.
but not as relative. Our perception, whose role it is
to hold up a light to our actions, works a dividing up
of matter that is always too sharply defined, always
subordinated to practical needs, consequently always
requiring revision. Our science, which aspires to the
mathematical form, over-accentuates the spatiality of
matter ; its formulae are, in general, too precise, and
ever need remaking. For a scientific theory to be
final, the mind would have to embrace the totality
of things in block and place each thing in its exact
relation to every other thing ; but in reality we are
obliged to consider problems one by one, in terms
which are, for that very reason, provisional, so that
the solution of each problem will have to be corrected
indefinitely by the solution that will be given to the
problems that will follow : thus, science as a whole is
relative to the particular order in which the problems
happen to have been put. It is in this meaning,
and to this degree, that science must be regarded as
conventional. But it is a conventionality of fact,
so to speak, and not of right. In principle, positive
science bears on reality itself, provided it does not
overstep the limits of its own domain, which is inert
matter.
Scientific knowledge, thus regarded, rises to a higher
plane. In return, the theory of knowledge becomes
an infinitely difficult enterprise, and which passes
the powers of the intellect alone. It is not enough
to determine, by careful analysis, the categories of
thought ; we must engender them. As regards space,
we must, by an effort of mind sui generis^ follow
the progression or rather the regression of the extra-
spatial degrading itself into spatiality. When we
make ourselves self-conscious in the highest possible
in THE GEOMETRICAL ORDER 219
degree and then let ourselves fall back little by
little, we get the feeling of extension : we have an
extension of the self into recollections that are fixed
and external to one another, in place of the tension
it possessed as an indivisible active will. But this
is only a beginning. Our consciousness, sketching
the movement, shows us its direction and reveals
to us the possibility of continuing it to the end ; but
consciousness itself does not go so far. Now, on the
other hand, if we consider matter, which seems to us
at first coincident with space, we find that the more
our attention is fixed on it, the more the parts which
we said were laid side by side enter into each other,
each of them undergoing the action of the whole,
which is consequently somehow present in it. Thus,
although matter stretches itself out in the direction
of space, it does not completely attain it ; whence
we may conclude that it only carries very much
further the movement that consciousness is able to
sketch within us in its nascent state. We hold, there
fore, the two ends of the chain, though we do not
succeed in seizing the intermediate links. Will
they always escape us ? We must remember that
philosophy, as we define it, has not yet become
completely conscious of itself. Physics understands
its role when it pushes matter in the direction of
spatiality ; but has metaphysics understood its role
when it has simply trodden in the steps of physics,
in the chimerical hope of going further in the same
direction ? Should not its own task be, on the con
trary, to remount the incline that physics descends,
to bring back matter to its origins, and to build up
progressively a cosmology which would be, so to
speak, a reversed psychology ? All that which seems
720 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
positive to the physicist and to the geometrician
would become, from this new point of view, an inter
ruption or inversion of the true positivity, which
would have to be defined in psychological terms.
When we consider the admirable order of mathe
matics, the perfect agreement of the objects it deals
with, the immanent logic in numbers and figures,
our certainty of always getting the same conclusion,
however diverse and complex our reasonings on
the same subject, we hesitate to see in properties
apparently so positive a system of negations, the
absence rather than the presence of a true reality.
But we must not forget that our intellect, which
finds this order and wonders at it, is directed in
the same line of movement that leads to the
materiality and spatiality of its object. The more
complexity the intellect puts into its object by analys
ing it, the more complex is the order it finds there.
And this order and this complexity necessarily appear
to the intellect as a positive reality, since reality and
intellectuality are turned in the same direction.
When a poet reads me his verses, I can interest
myself enough in him to enter into his thought, put
myself into his feelings, live over again the simple
state he has broken into phrases and words. I
sympathize then with his inspiration, I follow it
with a continuous movement which is, like the
inspiration itself, an undivided act. Now, I need
only relax my attention, let go the tension that there
is in me, for the sounds, hitherto swallowed up in
the sense, to appear to me distinctly, one by one, in
their materiality. For this I have not to do any
thing ; it is enough to withdraw something. In
in THE GEOMETRICAL ORDER 221
proportion as I let myself go, the successive sounds
will become the more individualized ; as the phrases
were broken into words, so the words will scan in
syllables which I shall perceive one after another. Let
me go further still in the direction of dream : the
letters themselves will become loose and will be seen
to dance along, hand in hand, on some fantastic sheet
of paper. I shall then admire the precision of the
interweavings, the marvellous order of the procession,
the exact insertion of the letters into the syllables, of
the syllables into the words and of the words into the
sentences. The further I pursue this quite negative
direction of relaxation, the more extension and com
plexity I shall create ; and the more the complexity in
its turn increases, the more admirable will seem to be
the order which continues to reign, undisturbed, among
the elements. Yet this complexity and extension repre
sent nothing positive ; they express a deficiency of
will. And, on the other hand, the order must grow
with the complexity, since it is only an aspect of
it. The more we perceive, symbolically, parts in an
indivisible whole, the more the number of the relations
that the parts have between themselves necessarily
increases, since the same undividedness of the real whole
continues to hover over the growing multiplicity of the
symbolic elements into which the scattering of the
attention has decomposed it. A comparison of this kind
will enable us to understand, in some measure, how the
same suppression of positive reality, the same inversion
of a certain original movement, can create at once exten
sion in space and the admirable order which mathematics
finds there. There is, of course, this difference between
the two cases, that words and letters have been invented
by a positive effort of humanity, while space arises
222 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
CHAP.
automatically, as the remainder of a subtraction arises
once the two numbers are posited. 1 But, in the one
case as in the other, the infinite complexity of the parts
and their perfect coordination among themselves are
created at one and the same time by an inversion
which is, at bottom, an interruption, that is to say, a
diminution of positive reality.
All the operations of our intellect tend to geometry,
as to the goal where they find their perfect fulfilment.
But, as geometry is necessarily prior to them (since
these operations have not as their end to construct
space and cannot do otherwise than take it as given),
it is evident that it is a latent geometry, immanent
in our idea of space, which is the mainspring of our
intellect and the cause of its working. We shall be
convinced of this if we consider the two essential
functions of intellect, the faculty of deduction and that
of induction.
Let us begin with deduction. The same move-
1 Oar comparison does no more than develop the content of the term
\byos, as P .otinus understands it. For while the X.^/os of this philosopher
is a generating and informing power, an aspect or a fragment of the faxy,
on the other hand Plotinus sometimes speaks of it as of a discourse. More
generally, the relation that we establish in the present chapter between
"extension" and "detension" resembles in some aspects that which
Plotinus supposes (some developments of which must have inspired M.
Ravaisson) wnen he makes extension not indeed an inversion of original
Being, but an enfeeblement of its essence, one of the last stages of the
procession (see in particular, Enn. IV. iii. 9-11, and III. vi. 17-18). Yet
ancient philosophy did not see what consequences would result from this
for mathematics, for Plotinus, like Plato, erected mathematical essences
into absolute realities. Above all, it suffered itself to be deceived by the
purely superficial analogy of duration with extension. It treated the one
as it treated the other, regarding change as a degradation of immutability,
the sensible as a fall from the intelligible. Whence, as we shall show in
the next chapter, a philosophy which fails to recognise the real function
and scope of the intellect.
in GEOMETRY AND DEDUCTION 223
ment by which I trace a figure in space engenders its
properties : they are visible and tangible in the move
ment itself; I feel, I see in space the relation of the
definition to its consequences, of the premisses to the
conclusion. All the other concepts of which experience
suggests the idea to me are only in part constructible
a priori ; the definition of them is therefore imperfect,
and the deductions into which these concepts enter,
however closely the conclusion is linked to the pre
misses, participate in this imperfection. But when I
trace roughly in the sand the base of a triangle, as I
begin to form the two angles at the base, I know
positively, and understand absolutely, that if these
two angles are equal the sides will be equal also, the
figure being then able to be turned over on itself
without there being any change whatever. I know
it before I have learnt geometry. Thus, prior to the
science of geometry, there is a natural geometry whose
clearness and evidence surpass the clearness and evidence
of other deductions. Now, these other deductions bear
on qualities, and not on magnitudes purely. They are,
then, likely to have been formed on the model of the first,
and to borrow their force from the fact that, behind
quality, we see magnitude vaguely showing through.
We may notice, as a fact, that questions of situation and
of magnitude are the first that present themselves to our
activity, those which intelligence externalized in action
resolves even before reflective intelligence has appeared.
The savage understands better than the civilized
man how to judge distances, to determine a direction,
to retrace by memory the often complicated plan
of the road he has travelled, and so to return in a
straight line to his starting-point. 1 If the animal
1 Bastian, The Brain as an Organ of the Mind, pp. 214-16.
224 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
does not deduce explicitly, if he does not form
explicit concepts, neither does he form the idea of a
homogeneous space. You cannot present this space to
yourself without introducing, in the same act, a virtual
geometry which will, of itself, degrade itself into logic.
All the repugnance that philosophers manifest towards
this manner of regarding things comes from this, that
the logical work of the intellect represents to their eyes
a positive spiritual effort. But, if we understand by
spirituality a progress to ever new creations, to con
clusions incommensurable with the premisses and inde
terminable by relation to them, we must say of an idea
that moves among relations of necessary determination,
through premisses which contain their conclusion in
advance, that it follows the inverse direction, that of
materiality. What appears, from the point of view of
the intellect, as an effort, is in itself a letting go. And
while, from the point of view of the intellect, there is a
petitio principii in making geometry arise automatically
from space, and logic from geometry, on the contrary,
if space is the ultimate goal of the mind s movement of
detention^ space cannot be given without positing also
logic and geometry, which are along the course of the
movement of which pure spatial intuition is the goal.
It has not been enough noticed how feeble is the
reach of deduction in the psychological and moral
sciences. From a proposition verified by facts, verifiable
consequences can here be drawn only up to a certain
point, only in a certain measure. Very soon appeal has
to be made to common sense, that is to say, to the
continuous experience of the real, in order to inflect the
consequences deduced and bend them along the sinu
osities of life. Deduction succeeds in things moral only
metaphorically, so to speak, and just in the measure
in GEOMETRY AND INDUCTION 225
in which the moral is transposable into the physical,
I should say translatable into spatial symbols. The
metaphor never goes very far, any more than a curve
can long be confused with its tangent. Must we not
be struck by this feebleness of deduction as something
very strange and even paradoxical ? Here is a pure
operation of the mind, accomplished solely by the
power of the mind. It seems that, if anywhere it
should feel at home and evolve at ease, it would be
among the things of the mind, in the domain of the
mind. Not at all ; it is there that it is immediately
at the end of its tether. On the contrary, in geo
metry, in astronomy, in physics, where we have to do
with things external to us, deduction is all-powerful !
Observation and experience are undoubtedly necessary
in these sciences to arrive at the principle, that is, to
discover the aspect under which things must be re
garded ; but, strictly speaking, we might, by good
luck, have hit upon it at once ; and, as soon as we
possess this principle, we may draw from it, at any
length, consequences which experience will always verify.
Must we not conclude, therefore, that deduction is an
operation governed by the properties of matter, moulded
on the mobile articulations of matter, implicitly given,
in fact, with the space that underlies matter ? As long
as it turns upon space or spatialized time, it has only to
let itself go. It is duration that puts spokes in its wheels.
Deduction, then, does not work unless there be
spatial intuition behind it. But we may say the same
of induction. It is not necessary indeed to think
geometrically, nor even to think at all, in order to
expect from the same conditions a repetition of the
same fact. The consciousness of the animal already
Q
226 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
CHAP.
does this work, and indeed, independently of all con
sciousness, the living body itself is so constructed that
it can extract from the successive situations in which
it finds itself the similarities which interest it, and so
respond to the stimuli by appropriate reactions. But
it is a far cry from a mechanical expectation and reaction
of the body, to induction properly so called, which is
an intellectual operation. Induction rests on the belief
that there are causes and effects, and that the same
effects follow the same causes. Now, if we examine
this double belief, this is what we find. It implies, in
the first place, that reality is decomposable into groups,
which can be practically regarded as isolated and in
dependent. If I boil water in a kettle on a stove, the
operation and the objects that support it are, in reality,
bound up with a multitude of other objects and a
multitude of other operations ; in the end, I should
find that our entire solar system is concerned in what
is being done at this particular point of space. But,
in a certain measure, and for the special end I am
pursuing, I may admit that things happen as if the
group water-kettle-stove were an independent microcosm.
That is my first affirmation. Now, when I say that
this microcosm will always behave in the same way,
that the heat will necessarily, at the end of a certain
time, cause the boiling of the water, I admit that it is
sufficient that a certain number of elements of the
system be given in order that the system should be
complete ; it completes itself automatically, I am not free
to complete it in thought as I please. The stove, the
kettle and the water being given, with a certain interval
of duration, it seems to me that the boiling, which
experience showed me yesterday to be the only thing
wanting to complete the system, will complete it
in GEOMETRY AND INDUCTION 227
to-morrow, no matter when to-morrow may be. What
is there at the base of this belief ? Notice that the belief
is more or less assured, according as the case may be, but
that it is forced upon the mind as an absolute necessity
when the microcosm considered contains only magni
tudes. If two numbers be given, I am not free to
choose their difference. If two sides of a triangle and
the contained angle are given, the third side arises of
itself and the triangle completes itself automatically.
I can, it matters not where and it matters not when,
trace the same two sides containing the same angle : it
is evident that the new triangles so formed can be
superposed on the first, and that consequently the same
third side will come to complete the system. Now, if
my certitude is perfect in the case in which I reason on
pure space determinations, must I not suppose that, in
the other cases, the certitude is greater the nearer it
approaches this extreme case ? Indeed, may it not be
the limiting case which is seen through all the others
and which colours them, accordingly as they are more or
less transparent, with a more or less pronounced tinge
of geometrical necessity ? 1 In fact, when I say that
the water on the fire will boil to-day as it did yesterday,
and that this is an absolute necessity, I feel vaguely
that my imagination is placing the stove of yesterday
on that of to-day, kettle on kettle, water on water,
duration on duration, and it seems then that the rest
must coincide also, for the same reason that, when two
triangles are superposed and two of their sides coincide,
their third sides coincide also. But my imagination
acts thus only because it shuts its eyes to two essential
points. For the system of to-day actually to be
1 We have dwelt on this point in a former work. See the Essai sur /
donnfes imm/diates de la conscience, Paris, 1889, pp. 155-160.
228 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
superimposed on that of yesterday, the latter must have
waited for the former, time must have halted, and
everything become simultaneous : that happens in
geometry, but in geometry alone. Induction therefore
implies first that, in the world of the physicist as in
that of the geometrician, time does not count. But it
implies also that qualities can be superposed on each
other like magnitudes. If, in imagination, I place the
stove and fire of to-day on that of yesterday, I find
indeed that the form has remained the same ; it suffices,
for that, that the surfaces and edges coincide ; but
what is the coincidence of two qualities, and how can
they be superposed one on another in order to ensure
that they are identical ? Yet I extend to the second
order of reality all that applies to the first. The
physicist legitimates this operation later on by reducing,
as far as possible, differences of quality to differences
of magnitude ; but, prior to all science, I incline to
liken qualities to quantities, as if I perceived behind
the qualities, as through a transparency, a geometrical
mechanism. 1 The more complete this transparency,
the more it seems to me that in the same conditions
there must be a repetition of the same fact. Our
inductions are certain, to our eyes, in the exact degree
in which we make the qualitative differences melt into
the homogeneity of the space which subtends them,
so that geometry is the ideal limit of our inductions
as well as of our deductions. The movement at the
end of which is spatiality lays down along its course
the faculty of induction as well as that of deduction,
in fact, intellectuality entire.
It creates them in the mind. But it creates also, in
* Op, cit. chaps, i. and ii. passim.
Ill
PHYSICAL LAWS 229
things, the " order " which our induction, aided by
deduction, finds there. This order, on which our
action leans and in which our intellect recognizes itself,
seems to us marvellous. Not only do the same general
causes always produce the same general effects, but
beneath the visible causes and effects our science dis
covers an infinity of infinitesimal changes which work
more and more exactly into one another, the further we
push the analysis : so much so that, at the end of this
analysis, matter becomes, it seems to us, geometry itself.
Certainly, the intellect is right in admiring here the
growing order in the growing complexity ; both the
one and the other must have a positive reality for it,
since it looks upon itself as positive. But things change
their aspect when we consider the whole of reality as
an undivided advance forward to successive creations.
It seems to us, then, that the complexity of the material
elements and the mathematical order that binds them
together must arise automatically when within the whole
a partial interruption or inversion is produced. More
over, as the intellect itself is cut out of mind by a
process of the same kind, it is attuned to this order
and complexity, and admires them because it recog
nizes itself in them. But what is admirable in itself,
what really deserves to provoke wonder, is the ever-
renewed creation which reality, whole and undivided,
accomplishes in advancing ; for no complication of the
mathematical order with itself, however elaborate we may
suppose it, can introduce an atom of novelty into the
world, whereas this power of creation once given (and
it exists, for we are conscious of it in ourselves, at least
when we act freely) has only to be diverted from itself
to relax its tension, only to relax its tension to extend,
only to extend for the mathematical order of the
230 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
elements so distinguished and the inflexible deter
minism connecting them to manifest the interruption
of the creative act : in fact, inflexible determinism and
mathematical order are one with this very interruption.
It is this merely negative tendency that the particular
laws of the physical world express. None of them,
taken separately, has objective reality ; each is the
work of an investigator who has regarded things from
a certain bias, isolated certain variables, applied certain
conventional units of measurement. And yet there is
an order approximately mathematical immanent in
matter, an objective order, which our science approaches
in proportion to its progress. For if matter is a
relaxation of the inextensive into the extensive and,
thereby, of liberty into necessity, it does not indeed
wholly coincide with pure homogeneous space, yet it is
constituted by the movement which leads to space, and
is therefore on the way to geometry. It is true that
laws of mathematical form will never apply to it com
pletely. For that, it would have to be pure space and
step out of duration.
We cannot insist too strongly that there is something
artificial in the mathematical form of a physical law,
and consequently in our scientific knowledge of things. 1
Our standards of measurement are conventional, and,
so to say, foreign to the intentions of nature : can we
suppose that nature has related all the modalities of heat
to the expansion of the same mass of mercury, or to the
change of pressure of the same mass of air kept at a
constant volume? But we may go further. In a general
way, measuring is a wholly human operation, which
implies that we really or ideally superpose two objects
1 Cf. especially the profound studies of M. Ed. Le Roy in the Re<vue
de mttaph. et de morale.
Ill
PHYSICAL LAWS 231
one on another a certain number of times. Nature did
not dream of this superposition. It does not measure,
nor does it count. Yet physics counts, measures,
relates "quantitative" variations to one another to
obtain laws, and it succeeds. Its success would be
inexplicable, if the movement which constitutes materi
ality were not the same movement which, prolonged
by us to its end, that is to say, to homogeneous space,
results in making us count, measure, follow in their
respective variations terms that are functions one of
another. To effect this prolongation of the movement,
our intellect has only to let itself go, for it runs
naturally to space and mathematics, intellectuality and
materiality being of the same nature and having been
produced in the same way.
If the mathematical order were a positive thing, if
there were, immanent in matter, laws comparable to
those of our codes, the success of our science would
have in it something of the miraculous. What chances
should we have indeed of finding the standard of nature
and of isolating exactly, in order to determine their
reciprocal relations, the very variables which nature has
chosen ? But the success of a science of mathematical
form would be no less incomprehensible, if matter did
not already possess everything necessary to adapt itself
to our formulae. One hypothesis only, therefore,
remains plausible, namely, that the mathematical order
is nothing positive, that it is the form toward which
a certain interruption tends of itself, and that materiality
consists precisely in an interruption of this kind. We
shall understand then why our science is contingent,
relative to the variables it has chosen, relative to the
order in which it has successively put the problems,
and why nevertheless it succeeds. It might have been,
232 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
as a whole, altogether different, and yet have succeeded.
This is so, just because there is no definite system of
mathematical laws at the base of nature, and because
mathematics in general represents simply the side to
which matter inclines. Put one of those little cork dolls
with leaden feet in any posture, lay it on its back, turn
it up on its head, throw it into the air : it will always
stand itself up again, automatically. So likewise with
matter : we can take it by any end and handle it in
any way, it will always fall back into some one of our
mathematical formulae, because it is weighted with
geometry.
But the philosopher will perhaps refuse to found a
theory of knowledge on such considerations. They will
be repugnant to him, because the mathematical order,
being order, will appear to him to contain something
positive. It is in vain that we assert that this order
produces itself automatically by the interruption of the
inverse order, that it is this very interruption. The
idea persists, none the less, that there might be no order
at all) and that the mathematical order of things, being
a conquest over disorder, possesses a positive reality.
In examining this point, we shall see what a prominent
part the idea of disorder plays in problems relative
to the theory of knowledge. It does not appear
explicitly, and that is why it escapes our attention. It
is, however, with the criticism of this idea that a theory
of knowledge ought to begin, for if the great problem
is to know why and how reality submits itself to an
order, it is because the absence of every kind of order
appears possible or conceivable. It is this absence of
order that realists and idealists alike believe they
are thinking of, the realist when he speaks of the
tit THE IDEA OF DISORDER 233
regularity that "objective" laws actually impose on a
virtual disorder of nature, the idealist when he supposes
a " sensuous manifold " which is coordinated (and con
sequently itself without order) under the organizing
influence of our understanding. The idea of disorder,
in the sense of absence of order ^ is then what must be
analysed first. Philosophy borrows it from daily life.
And it is unquestionable that, when ordinarily we
speak of disorder, we are thinking of something. But
of what ?
It will be seen in the next chapter how hard it is to
determine the content of a negative idea, and what
illusions one is liable to, what hopeless difficulties
philosophy falls into, for not having undertaken this
task. Difficulties and illusions are generally due to
this, that we accept as final a manner of expression
essentially provisional. They are due to our bringing
into the domain of speculation a procedure made
for practice. If I choose a volume in my library
at random, I may put it back on the shelf after
glancing at it and say, "This is not verse." Is this
what I have really seen in turning over the leaves
of the book ? Obviously not. I have not seen, I
never shall see, an absence of verse. I have seen
prose. But as it is poetry I want, I express what I
find as a function of what I am looking for, and instead
of saying, " This is prose," I say, " This is not verse."
In the same way, if the fancy takes me to read prose,
and I happen on a volume of verse, I shall say, " This
is not prose," thus expressing the data of my perception,
which shows me verse, in the language of my expectation
and attention, which are fixed on the idea of prose and
will hear of nothing else. Now, if Mons. Jourdain
heard me. he would infer, no doubt, from my two
234 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
exclamations that prose and poetry are two forms of
language reserved for books, and that these learned
forms have come and overlaid a language which was
neither prose nor verse. Speaking of this thing which
is neither verse nor prose, he would suppose, moreover,
that he was thinking of it : it would be only a pseudo-
idea, however. Let us go further still : the pseudo-
idea would create a pseudo-problem, if M. Jourdain
were to ask his professor of philosophy how the prose
form and the poetry form have been superadded to
that which possessed neither the one nor the other,
and if he wished the professor to construct a theory of
the imposition of these two forms upon this formless
matter. His question would be absurd, and the
absurdity would lie in this, that he was hypostasizing
as the substratum of prose and poetry the simultaneous
negation of both, forgetting that the negation of the
one consists in the affirmation of the other.
Now, suppose that there are two species of order, and
that these two orders are two contraries within one and
the same genus. Suppose also that the idea of disorder
arises in our mind whenever, seeking one of the two
kinds of order, we find the other. The idea of disorder
would then have a clear meaning in the current practice
of life : it would objectify, for the convenience of
language, the disappointment of a mind that finds
before it an order different from what it wants, an
order with which it is not concerned at the moment,
and which, in this sense, does not exist for it. But the
idea would not admit a theoretical use. So if we claim,
notwithstanding, to introduce it into philosophy, we
shall inevitably lose sight of its true meaning. It
denotes the absence of a certain order, but to the profit
of another (with which we are not concerned) ; only, as
in THE IDEA OF DISORDER
235
it applies to each of the two in turn, and as it even
goes and comes continually between the two, we take
it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock
between two battledores, and treat it as if it represented,
not the absence of the one or other order as the case
may be, but the absence of both together a thing that
is neither perceived nor conceived, a simple verbal
entity. So there arises the problem how order is
imposed on disorder, form on matter. In analysing
the idea of disorder thus subtilized, we shall see that
it represents nothing at all, and at the same time the
problems that have been raised around it will vanish.
It is true that we must begin by distinguishing,
and even by opposing one to the other, two kinds of
order which we generally confuse. As this confusion
has created the principal difficulties of the problem of
knowledge, it will not be useless to dwell once more
on the marks by which the two orders are distinguished.
In a general way, reality is ordered exactly to the
degree in which it satisfies our thought. Order is
therefore a certain agreement between subject and object.
It is the mind finding itself again in things. But the
mind, we said, can go in two opposite ways. Sometimes
it follows its natural direction : there is then progress in
the form of tension, continuous creation, free activity.
Sometimes it inverts it, and this inversion, pushed to
the end, leads to extension, to the necessary reciprocal
determination of elements externalised each by relation
to the others, in short, to geometrical mechanism.
Now, whether experience seems to us to adopt the
first direction or whether it is drawn in the direction
of the second, in both cases we say there is order,
for in the two processes the mind finds itself again.
The confusion between them is therefore natural. To
236 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
escape it, different names would have to be given to
the two kinds of order, and that is not easy, because of
the variety and variability of the forms they take. The
order of the second kind may be defined as geometry,
which is its extreme limit ; more generally, it is that
kind of order that is concerned whenever a relation of
necessary determination is found between causes and
effects. It evokes ideas ot inertia, of passivity, of
automatism. As to the first kind of order, it oscillates
no doubt around finality ; and yet we cannot define it
as finality, for it is sometimes above, sometimes below.
In its highest forms, it is more than finality, for of
a free action or a work of art we may say that they
show a perfect order, and yet they can only be expressed
in terms of ideas approximately, and after the event.
Life in its entirety, regarded as a creative evolution, is
something analogous ; it transcends finality, if we
understand by finality the realization of an idea con
ceived or conceivable in advance. The category of
finality is therefore too narrow for life in its entirety.
It is, on the other hand, often too wide for a particular
manifestation of life taken separately. Be that as it
may, it is with the vital that we have here to do, and the
whole present study strives to prove that the vital is
in the direction of the voluntary. We may say then
that this first kind of order is that of the vital or of
the willed, in opposition to the second, which is that of
the inert and the automatic. Common sense instinctively
distinguishes between the two kinds of order, at least
in the extreme cases ; instinctively, also, it brings them
together. We say of astronomical phenomena that
they manifest an admirable order, meaning by this
that they can be foreseen mathematically. And we
find an order no less admirable in a symphony of
ni LAWS AND GENERA 237
Beethoven, which is genius, originality, and therefore
unforeseeability itself.
But it is exceptional for order of the first kind to
take so distinct a form. Ordinarily, it presents features
that we have every interest in confusing with those of
the opposite order. It is quite certain, for instance,
that if we could view the evolution of life in its entirety,
the spontaneity of its movement and the unforesee
ability of its procedures would thrust themselves on
our attention. But what we meet in our daily experi
ence is a certain determinate living being, certain special
manifestations of life, which repeat, almost^ forms and
facts already known ; indeed, the similarity of structure
that we find everywhere between what generates and
what is generated a similarity that enables us to
include any number of living individuals in the same
group is to our eyes the very type of the generic :
the inorganic genera seem to us to take living genera
as models. Thus the vital order, such as it is offered to
us piecemeal in experience, presents the same character
and performs the same function as the physical order :
both cause experience to repeat itself^ both enable our
mind to generalise. In reality, this character has
entirely different origins in the two cases, and even
opposite meanings. In the second case, the type of
this character, its ideal limit, as also its foundation, is
the geometrical necessity in virtue of which the same
components give the same resultant. In the first case,
this character involves, on the contrary, the interven
tion of something which manages to obtain the same
total effect although the infinitely complex elementary
causes may be quite different. We insisted on this
last point in our first chapter, when we showed how
identical structures are to be met with on independent
238 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
lines of evolution. But, without looking so far, we
may presume that the reproduction only of the type of
the ancestor by his descendants is an entirely different
thing from the repetition of the same composition of
forces which yields an identical resultant. When we
think of the infinity of infinitesimal elements and of
infinitesimal causes that concur in the genesis of a
living being, when we reflect that the absence or the
deviation of one of them would spoil everything, the
first impulse of the mind is to consider this army of
little workers as watched over by a skilled foreman, the
"vital principle," which is ever repairing faults, cor
recting effects of neglect or absent-mindedness, putting
things back in place : this is how we try to express the
difference between the physical and the vital order, the
former making the same combination of causes give
the same combined effect, the latter securing the
constancy of the effect even when there is some wavering
in the causes. But that is only a comparison ; on
reflection, we find that there can be no foreman, for
the very simple reason that there are no workers.
The causes and elements that physico-chemical analysis
discovers are real causes and elements, no doubt, as
far as the facts of organic destruction are concerned ;
they are then limited in number. But vital phenomena,
properly so called, or facts of organic creation open up
to us, when we analyse them, the perspective of an
analysis passing away to infinity : whence it may be
inferred that the manifold causes and elements are here
only views of the mind, attempting an ever closer and
closer imitationof theoperation of nature, while the opera
tion imitated is an indivisible act. The likeness between
individuals of the same species has thus an entirely
different meaning, an entirely different origin, to that
in LAWS AND GENERA 239
of the likeness between complex effects obtained by the
same composition of the same causes. But in the one
case as in the other, there is likeness, and consequently
possible generalization. And as that is all that interests
us in practice, since our daily life is and must be an
expectation of the same things and the same situations,
it is natural that this common character, essential from
the point of view of our action, should bring the two
orders together, in spite of a merely internal diversity
between them which interests speculation only. Hence
the idea of a general order of nature^ everywhere the
same, hovering over life and over matter alike. Hence
our habit of designating by the same word and represent
ing in the same way the existence of laws in the domain
of inert matter and that of genera in the domain of life.
Now, it will be found that this confusion is the
origin of most of the difficulties raised by the problem
of knowledge, among the ancients as well as among the
moderns. The generality of laws and that of genera
having been designated by the same word and subsumed
under the same idea, the geometrical order and the
vital order are accordingly confused together. Ac
cording to the point of view, the generality of laws is
explained by that of genera, or that of genera by that
of laws. The first view is characteristic of ancient
thought ; the second belongs to modern philosophy.
But in both ancient and modern philosophy the idea of
" generality " is an equivocal idea, uniting in its denota
tion and in its connotation incompatible objects and
elements. In both there are grouped under the same
concept two kinds of order which are alike only in the
facility they give to our action on things. We bring
together the two terms in virtue of a quite external
likeness, which justifies no doubt their designation by
2 4 o CREATIVE EVOLUTION
the same word for practice, but which does not authorize
us at all, in the speculative domain, to confuse them in
the same definition.
The ancients, indeed, did not ask why nature
submits to laws, but why it is ordered according to
genera. The idea of genus corresponds more especially
to an objective reality in the domain of life, where it
expresses an unquestionable fact, heredity. Indeed,
there can only be genera where there are individual
objects ; now, while the organized being is cut out from
the general mass of matter by his very organization,
that is to say naturally, it is our perception which cuts
inert matter into distinct bodies. It is guided in this
by the interests of action, by the nascent reactions that
our body indicates that is, as we have shown else
where, 1 by the potential genera that are trying to gain
existence. In this, then, genera and individuals
determine one another by a semi-artificial operation
entirely relative to our future action on things. Never
theless the ancients did not hesitate to put all genera
in the same rank, to attribute the same absolute
existence to all of them. Reality thus being a system
of genera, it is to the generality of the genera (that is,
in effect, to the generality expressive of the vital order)
that the generality of laws itself had to be brought. It
is interesting, in this respect, to compare the Aristotelian
theory of the fall of bodies with the explanation
furnished by Galileo. Aristotle is concerned solely
with the concepts " high " and " low," " own proper
place" as distinguished from "place occupied," "natural
movement " and " forced movement " ; 2 the physical
1 Mature et m/moire, chapters iii. and iv.
2 See in particular Phys. iv. 215 a z ; v. 230 b 12 ; viii 255 a 2 : and
Df caelo, iv. 1-5 ; ii. 296 b 27 ; iv. 308 a )+.
in LAWS AND GENERA 241
law in virtue of which the stone falls expresses for
him that the stone regains the " natural place " of
all stones, to wit, the earth. The stone, in his view,
is not quite stone so long as it is not in its normal
place ; in falling back into this place it aims at complet
ing itself, like a living being that grows, thus realizing
fully the essence of the genus stone. 1 If this concep
tion of the physical law were exact, the law would no
longer be a mere relation established by the mind ; the
subdivision of matter into bodies would no longer be
relative to our faculty of perceiving ; all bodies would
have the same individuality as living bodies, and the
laws of the physical universe would express relations
of real kinship between real genera. We know what
kind of physics grew out of this, and how, for having
believed in a science unique and final, embracing the
totality of the real and at one with the absolute, the
ancients were confined, in fact, to a more or less clumsy
interpretation of the physical in terms of the vital.
But there is the same confusion in the moderns,
with this difference, however, that the relation between
the two terms is inverted : laws are no longer reduced
to genera, but genera to laws ; and science, still supposed
to be uniquely one, becomes altogether relative, instead
of being, as the ancients wished, altogether at one with
the absolute. A noteworthy fact is the eclipse of the
problem of genera in modern philosophy. Our theory
of knowledge turns almost entirely on the question of
laws : genera are left to make shift with laws as best
they can. The reason is, that modern philosophy has
its point of departure in the great astronomical and
physical discoveries of modern times. The laws of
1 De caelo, iv. 310 a 34 T 6 8 ek rbv ai/rou rbwov (ptpeffdcu ^/cacrroj rb
fly rb avrou eIS6s e<
242 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
Kepler and of Galileo have remained for it the ideal and
unique type of all knowledge. Now, a law is a relation
between things or between facts. More precisely, a
law of mathematical form expresses the fact that a
certain magnitude is a function of one or several other
variables appropriately chosen. Now, the choice of the
variable magnitudes, the distribution of nature into
objects and into facts, has already something of the
contingent and the conventional. But, admitting that
the choice is hinted at, if not prescribed, by experience,
the law remains none the less a relation, and a relation
is essentially a comparison ; it has objective reality only
for an intelligence that represents to itself several terms
at the same time. This intelligence may be neither
mine nor yours : a science which bears on laws may
therefore be an objective science, which experience
contains in advance and which we simply make it
disgorge ; but it is none the less true that a comparison
of some kind must be effected here, impersonally if not
by any one in particular, and that an experience made
of laws, that is, of terms related to other terms, is an
experience made of comparisons, which, before we
receive it, has already had to pass through an atmo
sphere of intellectuality. The idea of a science and of
an experience entirely relative to the human under
standing was therefore implicitly contained in the
conception of a science one and integral, composed
of laws : Kant only brought it to light. But this
conception is the result of an arbitrary confusion
between the generality of laws and that of genera.
Though an intelligence be necessary to condition terms
by relation to each other, we may conceive that in
certain cases the terms themselves may exist inde
pendently. And if, beside relations of term to term,
in LAWS AND GENERA
243
experience also presents to us independent terms, the
living genera being something quite different from
systems of laws, one half, at least, of our knowledge
bears on the " thing-in-itself," the very reality. This
knowledge may be very difficult, just because it no
longer builds up its own object and is obliged, on the
contrary, to submit to it ; but, however little it cuts
into its object, it is into the absolute itself that it bites.
We may go further : the other half of knowledge is no
longer so radically, so definitely relative as certain
philosophers say, if we can establish that it bears on
a reality of inverse order, a reality which we always
express in mathematical laws, that is to say in relations
that imply comparisons, but which lends itself to this
work only because it is weighted with spatiality and
consequently with geometry. Be that as it may, it is
the confusion of two kinds of order that lies behind
the relativism of the moderns, as it lay behind the
dogmatism of the ancients.
We have said enough to mark the origin of this
confusion. It is due to the fact that the " vital " order,
which is essentially creation, is manifested to us less in
its essence than in some of its accidents, those which
imitate the physical and geometrical order ; like it, they
present to us repetitions that make generalization
possible, and in that we have all that interests us.
There is no doubt that life as a whole is an evolution,
that is, an unceasing transformation. But life can
progress only by means of the living, which are its
depositaries. Innumerable living beings, almost alike,
have to repeat each other in space and in time for the
novelty they are working out to grow and mature.
It is like a book that advances towards a new
edition by going through thousands of reprints with
244 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
thousands of copies. There is, however, this difference
between the two cases, that the successive impressions
are identical, as well as the simultaneous copies of the
same impression, whereas representatives of one and
the same species are never entirely the same, either in
different points of space or at different moments of
time. Heredity does not only transmit characters ; it
transmits also the impetus in virtue of which the
characters are modified, and this impetus is vitality
itself. That is why we say that the repetition which
serves as the base of our generalizations is essential in
the physical order, accidental in the vital order. The
physical order is " automatic " ; the vital order is, I will
not say voluntary, but analogous to the order " willed."
Now, as soon as we have clearly distinguished
between the order that is " willed " and the order that
is " automatic," the ambiguity that underlies the idea
of disorder is dissipated, and, with it, one of the principal
difficulties of the problem of knowledge.
The main problem of the theory of knowledge is
to know how science is possible, that is to say, in effect,
why there is order and not disorder in things. That
order exists is a. fact. But, on the other hand, disorder,
which appears to us to be less than order, is, it seems, of
right. The existence of order is then a mystery to be
cleared up, at any rate a problem to be solved. More
simply, when we undertake to found order, we regard
it as contingent, if not in things, at least as viewed
by the mind : of a thing that we do not judge to
be contingent we do not require an explanation. If
order did not appear to us as a conquest over some
thing, or as an addition to something (which some
thing is thought to be the " absence of order "), ancient
realism would not have spoken of a " matter " to
in THE TWO KINDS OF ORDER 245
which the Idea superadded itself, nor would modern
idealism have supposed a tc sensuous manifold " that
the understanding organizes into nature. Now, it
is unquestionable that all order is contingent, and
conceived as such. But contingent in relation to what r
The reply, to our thinking, is not doubtful. An
order is contingent, and seems so, in relation to the
inverse order, as verse is contingent in relation to prose
and prose in relation to verse. But, just as all speech
which is not prose is verse and necessarily conceived
as verse, just as all speech which is not verse is prose
and necessarily conceived as prose, so any state of
things that is not one of the two orders is the other and
is necessarily conceived as the other. But it may happen
that we do not realize what we are actually thinking
of, and perceive the idea really present to our mind
only through a mist of affective states. Any one can
be convinced of this by considering the use we make of
the idea of disorder in daily life. When I enter a room
and pronounce it to be " in disorder," what do I mean ?
The position of each object is explained by the
automatic movements of the person who has slept in the
room, or by the efficient causes, whatever they may be,
that have caused each article of furniture, clothing, etc.,
to be where it is : the order, in the second sense of the
word, is perfect. But it is order of the first kind that
I am expecting, the order that a methodical person
consciously puts into his life, the willed order and not
the automatic : so I call the absence of this order
"disorder." At bottom, all there is that is real,
perceived and even conceived, in this absence of one of
the two kinds of order, is the presence of the other.
But the second is indifferent to me, / am interested only
in the first, and 1 express the presence of the second
246 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
as a function of the first, instead of expressing it, so to
speak, as a function of itself, by saying it is disorder.
Inversely, when we affirm that we are imagining a
chaos, that is to say a state of things in which the
physical world no longer obeys laws, what are we
thinking of ? We imagine facts that appear and
disappear capriciously. First we think of the physical
universe as we know it, with effects and causes well
proportioned to each other ; then, by a series of
arbitrary decrees, we augment, diminish, suppress, so
as to obtain what we call disorder. In reality we have
substituted will for the mechanism of nature ; we have
replaced the u automatic order " by a multitude of
elementary wills, just to the extent that we imagine
the apparition or vanishing of phenomena. No doubt,
for all these little wills to constitute a " willed order,"
they must have accepted the direction of a higher will.
But, on looking closely at them, we see that that is
just what they do : our own will is there, which
objectifies itself in each of these capricious wills in
turn, and takes good care not to connect the same with
the same, nor to permit the effect to be proportional
to the cause in fact makes one simple intention hover
over the whole of the elementary volitions. Thus,
here again, the absence of one of the two orders
consists in the presence of the other. In analysing the
idea of chance, which is closely akin to the idea of
disorder, we find the same elements. When the
wholly mechanical play of the causes which stop the
wheel on a number makes me win, and consequently
acts like a good genius, careful of my interests, or
when the wholly mechanical force of the wind tears a
tile off the roof and throws it on to my head, that is
to say acts like a bad genius, conspiring against my
in THE TWO KINDS OF ORDER 247
person : in both cases I find a mechanism where I
should have looked for, where, indeed, it seems as if
I ought to have found, an intention. That is what I
express in speaking of chance. And of an anarchi
cal world, in which phenomena succeed each other
capriciously, I should say again that it is a realm of
chance, meaning that I find before me wills, or rather
decrees, when what I am expecting is mechanism.
Thus is explained the singular vacillation of the mind
when it tries to define chance. Neither efficient cause
nor final cause can furnish the definition sought. The
o
mind swings to and fro, unable to rest, between the
idea of an absence of final cause and that of an absence
of efficient cause, each of these definitions sending it
back to the other. The problem remains insoluble, in
fact, so long as the idea of chance is regarded as a
pure idea, without mixture of feeling. But, in reality,
chance merely objectifies the state of mind of one who,
expecting one of the two kinds of order, finds himself
confronted with the other. Chance and disorder are
therefore necessarily conceived as relative. So if we
wish to represent them to ourselves as absolute, we
perceive that we are going to and fro like a shuttle
between the two kinds of order, passing into the one just
at the moment at which we might catch ourselves in the
other, and that the supposed absence of all order is really
the presence of both, with, besides, the swaying of a
mind that cannot rest finally in either. Neither in things
nor in our idea of things can there be any question of
presenting this disorder as the substratum of order,
since it implies the two kinds of order and is made of
their combination.
But our intelligence is not stopped by this. By a
simple sic jubeo it posits a disorder which is an " absence
CREATIVE EVOLUTION
of order." In so doing it thinks a word or a set of
words, nothing more. If it seeks to attach an idea to
the word 3 it finds that disorder may indeed be the
negation of order, but that this negation is then the
implicit affirmation of the presence of the opposite
order, which we shut our eyes to because it does not
interest us, or which we evade by denying the second
order in its turn that is, at bottom, by re-establishing
the first. How can we speak, then, of an incoherent
diversity which an understanding organizes ? It is no
use for us to say that no one supposes this incoherence
to be realized or realizable : when we speak of it, we
believe we are thinking of it ; now, in analysing the idea
actually present, we find, as we said before, only the dis
appointment of the mind confronted with an order that
does not interest it, or a swaying of the mind between
two kinds of order, or, finally, the idea pure and simple
of the empty word that we have created by joining a
negative prefix to a word which itself signifies some
thing. But it is this analysis that we neglect to make.
We omit it, precisely because it does not occur to us
to distinguish two kinds of order that are irreducible
to one another.
We said, indeed, that all order necessarily appears
as contingent. If there are two kinds of order, this
contingency of order is explained : one of the forms
is contingent in relation to the other. Where I find
the geometrical order, the vital was possible ; where
the order is vital, it might have been geometrical.
But suppose that the order is everywhere of the same
kind, and simply admits of degrees which go from the
geometrical to the vital : if a determinate order still
appears to me to be contingent, and can no longer
be so by relation to an order of another kind, I shall
in IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 249
necessarily believe that the order is contingent by
relation to an absence of itself, that is to say by relation
to a state of things " in which there is no order at all."
And this state of things I shall believe that I am
thinking of, because it is implied, it seems, in the very
contingency of order, which is an unquestionable fact.
I shall therefore place at the summit of the hierarchy
the vital order ; then, as a diminution or lower
complication of it, the geometrical order ; and finally,
at the bottom of all, an absence of order, incoherence
itself, on which order is superposed. This is why
incoherence has the effect on me of a word behind which
there must be something real, if not in things, at least in
thought. But if I observe that the state of things implied
by the contingency of a determinate order is simply
the presence of the contrary order, and if by this very
fact I posit two kinds of order, each the inverse of the
other, I perceive that no intermediate degrees can be
imagined between the two orders, and that there is no
going down from the two orders to the " incoherent."
Either the incoherent is only a word, devoid of meaning,
or, if I give it a meaning, it is on condition of putting
incoherence midway between the two orders, and not
below both of them. There is not first the in
coherent, then the geometrical, then the vital ; there is
only the geometrical and the vital, and then, by a
swaying of the mind between them, the idea of the
incoherent. To speak of an uncoordinated diversity
to which order is superadded is therefore to commit a
veritable petitio principii ; for in imagining the unco
ordinated we really posit an order, or rather two.
This long analysis was necessary to show how the
real can pass from tension to extension and from
250 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
freedom to mechanical necessity by way of inversion.
It was not enough to prove that this relation between
the two terms is suggested to us, at once, by con
sciousness and by sensible experience. It was necessary
to prove that the geometrical order has no need of
explanation, being purely and simply the suppression
of the inverse order. And, for that, it was indispensable
to prove that suppression is always a substitution
and is even necessarily conceived as such : it is the
requirements of practical life alone that suggest to us
here a way of speaking that deceives us both as to
what happens in things and as to what is present to
our thought. We must now examine more closely the
inversion whose consequences we have just described.
What, then, is the principle that has only to let go its
tension, may we say to defend^ in order to extend, the
interruption of the cause here being equivalent to a
reversal of the effect ?
For want of a better word we have called it
consciousness. But we do not mean the narrowed
consciousness that functions in each of us. Our own
consciousness is the consciousness of a certain living
being, placed in a certain point of space ; and though it
does indeed move in the same direction as its principle,
it is continually drawn the opposite way, obliged,
though it goes forward, to look behind. This retro
spective vision is, as we have shown, the natural
function of the intellect, and consequently of distinct
consciousness. In order that our consciousness shall
coincide with something of its principle, it must detach
itself from the already-made and attach itself to the
being-made. It needs that, turning back on itself
and twisting on itself, the faculty of seeing should be
made to be one with the act of willing, a painful
iii IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 251
effort which we can make suddenly, doing violence
to our nature, but cannot sustain more than a few
moments. In free action, when we contract our whole
being in order to thrust it forward, we have the more
or less clear consciousness of motives and of impelling
forces, and even, at rare moments, of the becoming by
which they are organized into an act : but the pure
willing, the current that runs through this matter,
communicating life to it, is a thing which we hardly
feel, which at most we brush lightly as it passes. Let
us try, however, to install ourselves within it, if only for a
moment ; even then it is an individual and fragmentary
will that we grasp. To get to the principle of all life,
as also of all materiality, we must go further still. Is
it impossible ? No, by no means ; the history of
philosophy is there to bear witness. There is no
durable system that is not, at least in some of its parts,
vivified by intuition. Dialectic is necessary to put
intuition to the proof, necessary also in order that
intuition should break itself up into concepts and
so be propagated to other men ; but all it does, often
enough, is to develop the result of that intuition which
transcends it. The truth is, the two procedures are of
opposite direction : the same effort, by which ideas are
connected with ideas, causes the intuition which the
ideas were storing up to vanish. The philosopher is
obliged to abandon intuition, once he has received from
it the impetus, and to rely on himself to carry on the
movement by pushing the concepts one after another.
But he soon feels he has lost foothold ; he must come
into touch with intuition again ; he must undo most of
what he has done. In short, dialectic is what ensures
the agreement of our thought with itself. But by
dialectic which is only a relaxation of intuition many
252 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
different agreements are possible, while there is only
one truth. Intuition, if it could be prolonged beyond
a few instants, would not only make the philosopher
agree with his own thought, but also all philosophers
with each other. Such as it is, fugitive and incomplete,
it is, in each system, what is worth more than the system
and survives it. The object of philosophy would be
reached if this intuition could be sustained, generalized
and, above all, assured of external points of reference in
order not to go astray. To that end a continual coming
and going is necessary between nature and mind.
When we put back our being into our will, and
our will itself into the impulsion it prolongs, we
understand, we feel, that reality is a perpetual growth,
a creation pursued without end. Our will already
performs this miracle. Every human work in which
there is invention, every voluntary act in which
there is freedom, every movement of an organism that
manifests spontaneity, brings something new into the
world. True, these are only creations of form. How
could they be anything else ? We are not the vital
current itself ; we are this current already loaded with
matter, that is, with congealed parts of its own
substance which it carries alonor its course. In the
o
composition of a work of genius, as in a simple free
decision, we do, indeed, stretch the spring of our
activity to the utmost and thus create what no mere
assemblage of materials could have given (what
assemblage of curves already known can ever be
equivalent to the pencil-stroke of a great artist ?), but
there are, none the less, elements here that pre-exist
and survive their organization. But if a simple arrest
of the action that generates form could constitute
matter (are not the original lines drawn by the artist
HI IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 253
themselves already the fixation and, as it were,
congealment of a movement ?), a creation of matter
would be neither incomprehensible nor inadmissible.
For we seize from within, we live at every instant, a
creation of form, and it is just in those cases in which
the form is pure, and in which the creative current is
momentarily interrupted, that there is a creation of
matter. Consider the letters of the alphabet that enter
into the composition of everything that has ever been
written : we do not conceive that new letters spring
up and come to join themselves to the others in order
to make a new poem. But that the poet creates the
poem and that human thought is thereby made richer,
we understand very well : this creation is a simple act
of the mind, and action has only to make a pause,
instead of continuing into a new creation, in order that,
of itself, it may break up into words which dissociate
themselves into letters which are added to all the letters
there are already in the world. Thus, that the number
of atoms composing the material universe at a given
moment should increase, runs counter to our habits of
mind, contradicts the whole of our experience ; but
that a reality of quite another order, which con
trasts with the atom as the thought of the poet with
the letters of the alphabet, should increase by sudden
additions, is not inadmissible ; and the reverse of each
addition might indeed be a world, which we then
represent to ourselves, symbolically, as an assemblage
of atoms.
The mystery that spreads over the existence of the
universe comes in great part from this, that we want the
genesis of it to have been accomplished at one stroke or
the whole of matter to be eternal. Whether we speak of
creation or posit an uncreated matter, it is the totality
254 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
of the universe that we are considering at once. At the
root of this habit of mind lies the prejudice which we
will analyse in our next chapter, the idea, common to
materialists and to their opponents, that there is no
really acting duration, and that the absolute matter or
mind can have no place in concrete time, in the time
which we feel to be the very stuff of our life. From
which it follows that everything is given once for all,
and that it is necessary to posit from all eternity either
material multiplicity itself, or the act creating this
multiplicity, given in block in the divine essence.
Once this prejudice is eradicated, the idea of creation
becomes more clear, for it is merged in that of growth.
But it is no longer then of the universe in its totality
that we must speak.
Why should we speak of it ? The universe is an
assemblage of solar systems which we have every
reason to believe analogous to our own. No doubt
they are not absolutely independent of one another.
Our sun radiates heat and light beyond the farthest
planet, and, on the other hand, our entire solar system
is moving in a definite direction as if it were drawn.
There is, then, a bond between the worlds. But this
bond may be regarded as infinitely loose in comparison
with the mutual dependence which unites the parts of
the same world among themselves ; so that it is not
artificially, for reasons of mere convenience, that we
isolate our solar system : nature itself invites us to
isolate it. As living beings, we depend on the planet
on which we are, and on the sun that provides for it,
but on nothing else. As thinking beings, we may
apply the laws of our physics to our own world, and
extend them to each of the worlds taken separately ;
but nothing tells us that they apply to the entire
in IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 255
universe, nor even that such an affirmation has any
meaning ; for the universe is not made, but is being
made continually. It is growing, perhaps indefinitely,
by the addition of new worlds.
Let us extend, then, to the whole of our solar
system the two most general laws of our science,
the principle of conservation of energy and that of its
degradation, limiting them, however, to this relatively
closed system and to other systems relatively closed.
Let us see what will follow. We must remark, first
of all, that these two principles have not the same
metaphysical scope. The first is a quantitative law,
and consequently relative, in part, to our methods of
measurement. It says that, in a system presumed to
be closed, the total energy, that is to say the sum of its
kinetic and potential energy, remains constant. Now, if
there were only kinetic energy in the world, or even if
there were, besides kinetic energy, only one single kind
of potential energy, but no more, the artifice of measure
ment would not make the law artificial. The law of
the conservation of energy would express indeed that
something is preserved in constant quantity. But there
are, in fact, energies of various kinds, 1 and the measure
ment of each of them has evidently been so chosen as
to justify the principle of conservation of energy. Con
vention, therefore, plays a large part in this principle,
although there is undoubtedly, between the variations
of the different energies composing one and the same
system, a mutual dependence which is just what has
made the extension of the principle possible by measure
ments suitably chosen. If, therefore, the philosopher
applies this principle to the solar system complete, he
1 On these differences of quality see the work of Duhem, L Evolution de
la m&anique, Paris, 1905, pp. 197 ff.
256 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
must at least soften its outlines. The law of the con
servation of energy cannot here express the objective
permanence of a certain quantity of a certain thing,
but rather the necessity for every change that is brought
about to be counterbalanced in some way by a change
in an opposite direction. That is to say, even if it
governs the whole of our solar system, the law of the
conservation of energy is concerned with the relation
ship of a fragment of this world to another fragment
rather than with the nature of the whole.
It is otherwise with the second principle of thermo
dynamics. The law of the degradation of energy
does not bear essentially on magnitudes. No doubt
the first idea of it arose, in the thought of Carnot,
out of certain quantitative considerations on the yield
of thermic machines. Unquestionably, too, the terms
in which Clausius generalized it were mathematical,
and a calculable magnitude, "entropy," was, in fact,
the final conception to which he was led. Such pre
cision is necessary for practical applications. But the
law might have been vaguely conceived, and, if
absolutely necessary, it might have been roughly
formulated, even though no one had ever thought
of measuring the different energies of the physical
world, even though the concept of energy had not
been created. Essentially, it expresses the fact that
all physical changes have a tendency to be degraded
into heat, and that heat tends to be distributed among
O
bodies in a uniform manner. In this less precise
form, it becomes independent of any convention ; it
is the most metaphysical of the laws of physics,
since it points out without interposed symbols, without
artificial devices of measurement, the direction in
which the world is going. It tells us that changes that
in IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 257
are visible and heterogeneous will be more and more
diluted into changes that are invisible and homogeneous,
and that the instability to which we owe the richness
and variety of the changes taking place in our solar
system will gradually give way to the relative stability
of elementary vibrations continually and perpetually
repeated. Just so with a man who keeps up his
strength as he grows old, but spends it less and less
in actions, and comes, in the end, to employ it entirely
in making his lungs breathe and his heart beat.
From this point of view, a world like our solar
system is seen to be ever exhausting something of the
mutability it contains. In the beginning, it had the
maximum of possible utilization of energy : this
mutability has gone on diminishing unceasingly.
Whence does it come ? We might at first suppose
that it has come from some other point of space, but
the difficulty is only set back, and for this external
source of mutability the same question springs up.
True, it might be added that the number of worlds
capable of passing mutability to each other is unlimited,
that the sum of mutability contained in the universe is
infinite, and that there is therefore no ground on which
to seek its origin or to foresee its end. A hypothesis
of this kind is as irrefutable as it is indemonstrable ;
but to speak of an infinite universe is to admit a
perfect coincidence of matter with abstract space, and
consequently an absolute externality of all the parts of
matter in relation to one another. We have seen above
what we must think of this theory, and how difficult
it is to reconcile with the idea of a reciprocal influence
of all the parts of matter on one another, an influence
to which indeed it itself makes appeal. Again it might
be supposed that the general instability has arisen
258 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
from a general state of stability ; that the period in
which we now are, and in which the utilizable energy is
diminishing, has been preceded by a period in which
the mutability was increasing, and that the alternations
of increase and diminution succeed each other for ever.
This hypothesis is theoretically conceivable, as has
been demonstrated quite recently ; but, according to
the calculations of Boltzmann, the mathematical im
probability of it passes all imagination and practically
amounts to absolute impossibility. 1 In reality, the
problem remains insoluble as long as we keep on the
ground of physics, for the physicist is obliged to attach
energy to extended particles, and, even if he regards the
particles only as reservoirs of energy, he remains in
space : he would belie his role if he sought the origin
of these energies in an extra-spatial process. It is
there, however, in our opinion, that it must be sought.
Is it extension in general that we are considering in
abstracto ? Extension, we said, appears only as a tension
which is interrupted. Or, are we considering the con
crete reality that fills this extension ? The order which
reigns there, and which is manifested by the laws of
nature, is an order which must be born of itself when
the inverse order is suppressed ; a detension of the will
would produce precisely this suppression. Lastly, we
find that the direction, which this reality takes, suggests
to us the idea of a thing unmaking itself ; such, no doubt,
is one of the essential characters of materiality. What
conclusion are we to draw from all this, if not that the
process by which this thing makes itself is directed in a
contrary way to that of physical processes, and that it
is therefore, by its very definition, immaterial ? The
vision we have of the material world is that of a weight
* Boltzmann, Vorlesungcn nber Gastheorie, Leipzig, 1898, pp. 253 ff.
in IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 259
which falls : no image drawn from matter, properly
so called, will ever give us the idea of the weight
rising. But this conclusion will come home to us with
still greater force if we press nearer to the concrete
reality, and if we consider, no longer only matter in
general, but, within this matter, living bodies.
All our analyses show us, in life, an effort to remount
the incline that matter descends. In that, they reveal
to us the possibility, the necessity even of a process
the inverse of materiality, creative of matter by its in
terruption alone. The life that evolves on the surface
of our planet is indeed attached to matter. If it were
pure consciousness, a fortiori if it were supraconscious-
ness, it would be pure creative activity. In fact, it is
riveted to an organism that subjects it to the general
laws of inert matter. But everything happens as if it
were doing its utmost to set itself free from these laws.
It has not the power to reverse the direction of physical
changes, such as the principle of Carnot determines it.
It does, however, behave absolutely as a force would
behave which, left to itself, would work in the inverse
direction. Incapable of stopping the course of material
changes downwards, it succeeds in retarding it. The
evolution of life really continues, as we have shown,
an initial impulsion : this impulsion, which has deter
mined the development of the chlorophyllian function
in the plant and of the sensori-motor system in the
animal, brings life to more and more efficient acts by
the fabrication and use of more and more powerful
explosives. Now, what do these explosives represent
if not a storing-up of the solar energy, the degradation
of which energy is thus provisionally suspended on
some of the points where it was being poured forth ?
The usable energy which the explosive conceals will be
26o CREATIVE EVOLUTION
expended, of course, at the moment of the explosion ;
but it would have been expended sooner if an organism
had not happened to be there to arrest its dissipation,
in order to retain it and save it up. As we see it to-day,
at the point to which it was brought by a scission of
the mutually complementary tendencies which it con
tained within itself, life is entirely dependent on the
chlorophyllian function of the plant. This means that,
looked at in its initial impulsion, before any scission,
life was a tendency to accumulate in a reservoir, as do
especially the green parts of vegetables, with a view
to an instantaneous effective discharge, like that which
an animal brings about, something that would have
otherwise flowed away. It is like an effort to raise the
weight which falls. True, it succeeds only in retarding
the fall. But at least it can give us an idea of what the
raising of the weight was. 1
Let us imagine a vessel full of steam at a high
pressure, and here and there in its sides a crack
through which the steam is escaping in a jet. The
steam thrown into the air is nearly all condensed into
little drops which fall back, and this condensation and
this fall represent simply the loss of something, an
interruption, a deficit. But a small part of the jet of
1 In a book rich in facts and in ideas (La Dissolution oppos/c h revolution,
Paris, 1899), M. Andre Lalande shows us everything going towards death,
in spite of the momentary resistance which organisms seem to oppose. But,
even from the side of unorganized matter, have we the right to extend to
the entire universe considerations drawn from the present state of our solar
system ? Beside the worlds which are dying, there are without doubt worlds
that are being born. On the other hand, in the organized world, the death
of individuals does not seem at all like a diminution of "life in general,"
or like a necessity which life submits to reluctantly. As has been more than
once remarked, life has never made an effort to prolong indefinitely the
existence of the individual, although on so many other points it has made
so many successful efforts. Everything is as // this death had been willed,
or at least accepted, for the greater progress of life in general
Hi IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 261
steam subsists, uncondensed, for some seconds ; it is
making an effort to raise the drops which are falling ;
it succeeds at most in retarding their fall. So, from an
immense reservoir of life, jets must be gushing out
unceasingly, of which each, falling back, is a world.
The evolution of living species within this world repre
sents what subsists of the primitive direction of the
original jet, and of an impulsion which continues itself
in a direction the inverse of materiality. But let us
not carry too far this comparison. It gives us but a
feeble and even deceptive image of reality, for the crack,
the jet of steam, the forming of the drops, are deter
mined necessarily, whereas the creation of a world is
a free act, and the life within the material world
participates in this liberty. Let us think rather of an
action like that of raising the arm ; then let us suppose
that the arm, left to itself, falls back, and yet that
there subsists in it, striving to raise it up again, some
thing of the will that animates it. In this image of
a creative action which unmakes itself we have already a
more exact representation of matter. In vital activity
we see, then, that which subsists of the direct movement
in the inverted movement, a reality which is making
itself in a reality which is unmaking itself.
Everything is obscure in the idea of creation if we
think of things which are created and a thing which
creates, as we habitually do, as the understanding cannot
help doing. We shall show the origin of this illusion
in our next chapter. It is natural to our intellect, whose
function is essentially practical, made to present to us
things and states rather than changes and acts. But
things and states are only views, taken by our mind,
of becoming. There are no things, there are only
actions. More particularly, if I consider the world in
262 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
which we live, I find that the automatic and strictly
determined evolution of this well-knit whole is action
which is unmaking itself, and that the unforeseen forms
which life cuts out in it, forms capable of being them
selves prolonged into unforeseen movements, represent
the action that is making itself. Now, I have every
reason to believe that the other worlds are analogous to
ours, that things happen there in the same way. And
I know they were not all constructed at the same time,
since observation shows me, even to-day, nebulae in
course of concentration. Now, if the same kind of
action is going on everywhere, whether it is that which
is unmaking itself or whether it is that which is striving
to remake itself, I simply express this probable simili
tude when I speak of a centre from which worlds shoot
out like rockets in a fire-works display provided,
however, that I do not present this centre as a thing^
but as a continuity of shooting out. God, thus defined,
has nothing of the already made ; He is unceasing
life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a
mystery ; we experience it in ourselves when we act
freely. That new things can join things already existing
is absurd, no doubt, since the thing results from a solidi
fication performed by our understanding, and there are
never any things other than those that the understand
ing has thus constituted. To speak of things creating
themselves would therefore amount to saying that the
understanding presents to itself more than it presents to
itself a self-contradictory affirmation, an empty and
vain idea. But that action increases as it goes on, that
it creates in the measure of its advance, is what each of
us finds when he watches himself act. Things are
constituted by the instantaneous cut which the under
standing practises, at a given moment, on a flux of this
in IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 263
kind, and what is mysterious when we compare the cuts
together becomes clear when we relate them to the flux.
Indeed, the modalities of creative action, in so far as it
is still going on in the organization of living forms,
are much simplified when they are taken in this way.
Before the complexity of an organism and the practically
infinite multitude of interwoven analyses and syntheses
it presupposes, our understanding recoils disconcerted.
That the simple play of physical and chemical forces,
left to themselves, should have worked this marvel,
we find hard to believe. And if it is a profound
science which is at work, how are we to understand
the influence exercised on this matter without form
by this form without matter ? But the difficulty arises
from this, that we represent statically ready - made
material particles juxtaposed to one another, and, also
statically, an external cause which plasters upon them
a skilfully contrived organization. In reality, life is a
movement, materiality is the inverse movement, and
each of these two movements is simple, the matter
which forms a world being an undivided flux, and
undivided also the life that runs through it, cutting out
in it living beings all along its track. Of these two
currents the second runs counter to the first, but the
first obtains, all the same, something from the second.
There results between them a modus vivendi, which is
organization. This organization takes, for our senses
and for our intellect, the form of parts entirely external
to other parts in space and in time. Not only do we
shut our eyes to the unity of the impulse which, passing
through generations, links individuals with individuals,
species with species, and makes of the whole series of
the living one single immense wave flowing over matter,
but each individual itself seems to us as an aggregate,
264 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP.
aggregate of molecules and aggregate of facts. The
reason of this lies in the structure of our intellect, which
is formed to act on matter from without, and which
succeeds by making, in the flux of the real, instantaneous
cuts, each of which becomes, in its fixity, endlessly
decomposable. Perceiving, in an organism, only parts
external to parts, the understanding has the choice
between two systems of explanation only : either to
regard the infinitely complex (and thereby infinitely
well-contrived) organization as a fortuitous concatena
tion of atoms, or to relate it to the incomprehensible
influence of an external force that has grouped its
elements together. But this complexity is the work of
the understanding ; this incomprehensibility is also its
work. Let us try to see, no longer with the eyes of
the intellect alone, which grasps only the already made
and which looks from the outside, but with the spirit,
I mean with that faculty of seeing which is immanent
in the faculty of acting and which springs up, somehow,
by the twisting of the will on itself, when action is turned
into knowledge, like heat, so to say, into light. To
movement, then, everything will be restored, and into
movement everything will be resolved. Where the
understanding, working on the image supposed to be
fixed ot the progressing action, shows us parts infinitely
manifold and an order infinitely well contrived, we catch
a glimpse of a simple process, an action which is making
itself across an action of the same kind which is
unmaking itself, like the fiery path torn by the last
rocket of a fireworks display through the black cinders
of the spent rockets that are falling dead.
From this point of view, the general considerations
we have presented concerning the evolution of life will
in THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 265
be cleared up and completed. We will distinguish
more sharply what is accidental from what is essential
in this evolution.
The impetus of life, of which we are speaking,
consists in a need of creation. It cannot create
absolutely, because it is confronted with matter, that is
to say with the movement that is the inverse of its
own. But it seizes upon this matter, which is necessity
itself, and strives to introduce into it the largest possible
amount of indetermination and liberty. How does it
go to work ?
An animal high in the scale may be represented in
a general way, we said, as a sensori-motor nervous
system imposed on digestive, respiratory, circulatory
systems, etc. The function of these latter is to cleanse,
repair and protect the nervous system, to make it as
independent as possible of external circumstances, but,
above all, to furnish it with energy to be expended in
movements. The increasing complexity of the organism
is therefore due theoretically (in spite of innumerable
exceptions due to accidents of evolution) to the
necessity of complexity in the nervous system. No
doubt, each complication of any part of the organism
involves many others in addition, because this part
itself must live, and every change in one point of
the body reverberates, as it were, throughout. The
complication may therefore go on to infinity in all
directions ; but it is the complication of the nervous
system which conditions the others in right, if not
always in fact. Now, in what does the progress of the
nervous system itself consist ? In a simultaneous
development of automatic activity and of voluntary
activity, the first furnishing the second with an appro
priate instrument. Thus, in an organism such as ours,
266 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
a considerable number of motor mechanisms are set
up in the medulla and in the spinal cord, awaiting only
a signal to release the corresponding act : the will is
employed, in some cases, in setting up the mechanism
itself, and in the others in choosing the mechanisms
to be released, the manner of combining them and
the moment of releasing them. The will of an animal
is the more effective and the more intense, the greater
the number of the mechanisms it can choose from, the
more complicated the switchboard on which all the
motor paths cross, or, in other words, the more developed
its brain. Thus, the progress of the nervous system
assures to the act increasing precision, increasing variety,
increasing efficiency and independence. The organism
behaves more and more like a machine for action, which
reconstructs itself entirely for every new act, as if it
were made of india-rubber and could, at any moment,
change the shape of all its parts. But, prior to the
nervous system, prior even to the organism properly
so called, already in the undifferentiated mass of the
amoeba, this essential property of animal life is found.
The amoeba deforms itself in varying directions ; its
entire mass does what the differentiation of parts will
localize in a sensori-motor system in the developed
animal. Doing it only in a rudimentary manner, it is
dispensed from the complexity of the higher organisms ;
there is no need here of the auxiliary elements that pass
on to motor elements the energy to expend ; the animal
moves as a whole, and, as a whole also, procures energy
by means of the organic substances it assimilates. Thus,
whether low or high in the animal scale, we always find
that animal life consists (i) in procuring a provision of
energy ; (2) in expending it, by means of a matter as
supple as possible, in directions variable and unforeseen.
HI THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 267
Now, whence comes the energy ? From the ingested
food, for food is a kind of explosive, which needs only
the spark to discharge the energy it stores. Who has
made this explosive ? The food may be the flesh of
an animal nourished on animals and so on ; but, in
the end it is to the vegetable we always come back.
Vegetables alone gather in the solar energy, and the
animals do but borrow it from them, either directly or
by some passing it on to others. How then has the plant
stored up this energy ? Chiefly by the chlorophyllian
function, a chemicism sui generis of which we do not
possess the key, and which is probably unlike that of
our laboratories. The process consists in using solar
energy to fix the carbon of carbonic acid, and thereby
to store this energy as we should store that of a water-
carrier by employing him to fill an elevated reservoir :
the water, once brought up, can set in motion a mill or
a turbine, as we will and when we will. Each atom of
carbon fixed represents something like the elevation
of the weight of water, or like the stretching of an
elastic thread uniting the carbon to the oxygen in the
carbonic acid. The elastic is relaxed, the weight falls
back again, in short the energy held in reserve is
restored, when, by a simple release, the carbon is per
mitted to rejoin its oxygen.
So that all life, animal and vegetable, seems in its
essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to
let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at
the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied
kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus,
passing through matter, would fain do all at once.
It would succeed, no doubt, if its power were un
limited, or if some reinforcement could come to it from
without. But the impetus is finite, and it has been
268 CREATIVE EVOLUTION
CHAP.
given once for all. It cannot overcome all obstacles.
The movement it starts is sometimes turned aside,
sometimes divided, always opposed ; and the evolution
of the organized world is the unrolling of this con
flict. The first great scission that had to be effected
was that of the two kingdoms, vegetable and ani 
