Produced by Rick Niles, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
CREATIVE EVOLUTION
BY HENRI BERGSON
MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY ARTHUR MITCHELL, PH.D.
NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1911
COPYRIGHT, 1911,
by
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
CAMELOT PRESS, 18-20 OAK STREET, NEW YORK
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 Pluralistic
Universe_. It was his intention, had he lived to see the completion of
this translation, himself to introduce it to English readers in a
prefatory note.
I wish to thank my friend, Dr. George Clarke Cox, for many valuable
suggestions.
I have endeavored 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 translation phrase by phrase, weighing each word, and
her revision has resulted in many improvements.
But above all we must express our acknowledgment to Mr. H. Wildon Carr,
the Honorary Secretary of the Aristotelian Society of London, and the
writer of several studies of "Evolution Creatrice."[1] 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
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
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 1
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 23
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
orthogenesis--Neo-Lamarckism and the hereditability of
acquired characters 59
Result of the inquiry--The _vital impetus_ 87
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 98
The relation of the animal to the plant--General tendency of
animal life--The development of animal life 105
The main directions of the evolution of life: torpor, intelligence,
instinct 135
The nature of the intellect 151
The nature of instinct 165
Life and consciousness--The apparent place of man in nature 176
CHAPTER III
ON THE MEANING OF LIFE--THE ORDER OF NATURE
AND THE FORM OF INTELLIGENCE
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 186
Simultaneous genesis of matter and intelligence--Geometry
inherent in matter--Geometrical tendency of the intellect--Geometry
and deduction--Geometry and induction--Physical laws 199
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 _laws_--The idea of
"disorder" an oscillation of the intellect between the two
kinds of order 220
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 236
CHAPTER IV
THE CINEMATOGRAPHICAL 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 systems, 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 272
Form and Becoming 298
The philosophy of Forms and its conception of Becoming--Plato
and Aristotle--The natural trend of the intellect 304
Becoming in modern science: two views of Time 329
The metaphysical interpretation of modern science: Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibniz 345
The Criticism of Kant 356
The evolutionism of Spencer 363
INDEX 371
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 consciousness of living beings to the
conditions of existence 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 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 evolutionary movement. Created by life, in definite
circumstances, 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 of our molds. All the molds 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
unorganized 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 reconstruction 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 modeled on the
reciprocal actions and reactions of certain bodies and their material
environment, 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 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 difficulties 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 molds 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 amalgamated with intellect: would not
the result be a consciousness as wide as life? And such a consciousness,
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 ourselves, 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 knowledge 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 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 progressive
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 puts at our disposal, mechanism and finality;[2] we show
that they do not fit, neither the one nor the other, but that one of
them might be recut and resewn, and in this new form fit less badly than
the other. In order to transcend the point of view of the understanding,
we try, in our second chapter, to reconstruct the main lines of
evolution along which life has traveled by the side of that which has
led to the human intellect. The intellect is thus brought back to its
generating cause, which we then have to grasp in itself and follow in
its movement. It is an effort of this kind that we attempt--incompletely
indeed--in our third chapter. A fourth and last part is meant to show
how our understanding itself, by submitting to a certain discipline,
might prepare a philosophy which transcends it. For that, a glance over
the history of systems became necessary, together with an analysis of
the two great illusions to which, as soon as it speculates on reality in
general, the human understanding is exposed.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society_, vols. ix. and
x., and _Hibbert Journal_ for July, 1910.]
[Footnote 2: The idea of regarding life as transcending teleology as
well as mechanism is far from being a new idea. Notably in three
articles by Ch. Dunan on "Le problème de la vie" (_Revue philosophique_,
1892) it is profoundly treated. In the development of this idea, we
agree with Ch. Dunan on more than one point. But the views we are
presenting on this matter, as on the questions attaching to it, are
those that we expressed long ago in our _Essai sur les données
immédiates de la conscience_ (Paris, 1889). One of the principal objects
of that essay was, in fact, to show that the psychical life is neither
unity nor multiplicity, that it transcends both the _mechanical_ and the
_intellectual_, mechanism and finalism having meaning only where there
is "distinct multiplicity," "spatiality," and consequently assemblage of
pre-existing parts: "real duration" signifies both undivided continuity
and creation. In the present work we apply these same ideas to life in
general, regarded, moreover, itself from the psychological point of
view.]
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 considered 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. I am warm or
cold, I am merry or sad, I work or I do 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
color 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 is no feeling, no idea, no volition which
is not undergoing 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
something 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 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. Discontinuous though they appear, however, in point of
fact they stand out against the continuity of a background 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 _ego_, indifferent and unchangeable, on which it
threads the psychic states which it has set up as independent entities.
Instead of a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other, it
perceives distinct and, so to speak, _solid_ colors, 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 colorless
substratum is perpetually colored by that which covers it, it is for us,
in its indeterminateness, as if it did not exist, since we only perceive
what is colored, or, in other words, psychic states. As a matter of
fact, this substratum 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 perceive 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 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,[3] 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 consciousness 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
recollections 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 past, 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 without ceasing. Each of
its moments is something new added to what was before. We may go
further: it is not 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 analyzing 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 organization. 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 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 colors spread out on the palette; but, even
with the knowledge 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 ourselves 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 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 consciousness 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 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 matter. What the group
will be is already present in what it is, provided "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 configuration.
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 _t_ attributed
by science to a material object or to an isolated system consists only
in a certain number of simultaneities or more generally of
correspondences, 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. Therefore the flow
of time might assume an infinite rapidity, 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 _t_ 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 something _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
impossible 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 to this 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 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 corresponds 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 attributed 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 reabsorbed 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
real 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 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 reproduction, but
the building up of a new organism with a detached fragment of the old?
Individuality therefore harbors its enemy at home. Its very need of
perpetuating 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 thence-forward
as an independent individual; a hydra whose pieces become so many fresh
hydras; a sea-urchin's egg whose fragments develop complete 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 the date of its manufacture. Generally speaking,
unorganized 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 unicellular 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 localizes 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 systematization of parts before the division, and that the same
systematization tend to be reproduced in each separate portion
afterwards. Now, that is precisely what we observe in the organic
world. We may conclude, 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.
* * * * *
By this is a living being distinguished from all that our perception or
our science isolates or closes artificially. 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? 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 modifying the environment, to put off the moment when a rejuvenation
by conjugation becomes necessary, this cannot be indefinitely
postponed.[4] It is true that between these two extreme cases, in which
the organism is completely individualized, 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
biological 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 separately, 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 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.[5] More probable and more profound is
the theory according to which the diminution bears on the quantity of
nutritive substance contained in that "inner environment" in which the
organism is being renewed, and the increase on the quantity of unexcreted
residual substances which, accumulating in the body, finally "crust it
over."[6] Must we however--with an eminent bacteriologist--declare any
explanation of growing old insufficient that does not take account of
phagocytosis?[7] 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 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 individual 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 duration, 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 exclusively 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
immediately before. In other words, the laws that govern 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 rôle 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 treatment. 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 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? 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
immediately before? There is no instant immediately before another
instant; there could not be, any more than there could be one
mathematical point touching another. 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 _ds_|_dt_, _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 _t_, there is nothing to
prevent him from supposing that the universe vanishes from this moment
till that, and suddenly reappears. It is the _t_-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 mathematician 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 _t'_; with the interval up to _T'_ he is not concerned. If
he divides the interval into infinitely small parts by considering the
differential _dt_, 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 flowing time. In short, _the world the
mathematician deals with is a world that dies and is reborn at every
instant--the world which 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 classification 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 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 transformations comparable to
those through which, according to the theory of evolution, one species
passes into another. A single cell, the result of the combination 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 evolution. Now, has it
arisen so, as a matter of fact? Paleontology, 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 embryogeny 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 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 discontinuous 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
correspondence 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 wherever 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 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. 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.[8] 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 endeavoring to continue itself in a new germ. The
essential thing is the _continuous progress_ indefinitely pursued, an
invisible 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 continuity 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 upspringing of a new form of consciousness, incommensurable 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 produced; foreseeing the form is out of
the question.[9] 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, 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?[10] 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
production 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.[11]
But against this idea of the absolute originality and unforeseeability
of forms our whole intellect rises in revolt. 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, favorable or unfavorable,
which may follow thereupon. Intellect therefore instinctively 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 precision, 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 analyze it into elements or aspects which
are approximately 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 irreversible 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 continuity 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 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 unforeseeable form
is only a new arrangement of old elements. 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 indivisible 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
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 endeavor 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 intervals 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 strictness, 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 mathematics 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
movement (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 projection 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 in part--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
realized. We are only trying, by carrying a certain comparison as far as
possible, to show up to what point our theory 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 involving
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 constructed 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.[12] 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.[13] Even the external motions of a unicellular
organism--of an amoeba, at any rate--are sometimes explained
mechanically. The displacements 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 everchanging 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.[14] 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 rôle 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 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.[15] 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 behavior of the Infusoria, seems
impossible to many of those who have closely observed these rudimentary
organisms. Even in these humblest manifestations of life they discover
traces of an effective psychological activity.[16] 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 widen
rather than to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest
forms of life from the inorganic world.[17]"
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.[18] 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 physiology. On the contrary, those whose
attention is concentrated on the minute structure of living tissues, on
their genesis and evolution, histologists and embryogenists 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 constitute 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 experiment.
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 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 useless, and even unreal. The essence of
mechanical explanation, in fact, is to regard the future and the past as
calculable functions of the present, and thus 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."[19]
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."[20]
Huxley has expressed the same idea in a more concrete 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 lay, potentially, in the cosmic
vapor, and that a sufficient intellect could, from a knowledge of the
properties of the molecules of that vapor, 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 vapor of the breath in 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 metaphysic in which the totality of the real 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 prospect 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, implies that things and beings merely realize a programme
previously arranged. But if there is nothing unforeseen, 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 from the same
postulate, with this sole difference, that in the movement of our finite
intellects along successive 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 standpoint, 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 definitively refuted. If one form of it be put
aside, it will take another. Its principle, which is essentially
psychological, 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 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 demonstrated 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, retrogression 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 labor, a marvellous
solidarity 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. 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 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 recognize
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,[21] while 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 protoplasmic 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 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
undoubtedly presents many gaps and incoherences, and again it is not so
mathematically _one_ that it cannot allow each being to become
individualized to a certain 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 mold 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 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 combined 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 calculation, 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 reluctant 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 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 speculation. 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 when 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 everything is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the
same concrete reality never recurs. Repetition is therefore 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 everything it touches. We do not _think_ real time. But
we _live_ it, because life transcends intellect. The feeling we have of
our evolution and of the 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 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
condensation, 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 philosophy 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
condensation, 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 exclusively 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 realization of an intention. In
this sense mechanism is everywhere, and finality everywhere, in the
evolution 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 antecedents 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, unreasonable 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 indefinitely into
intelligible elements without ever reaching 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 conquest, 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-honored
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 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, 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 pretense 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 as in theories of
life. If, in evolving in the direction of the vertebrates in general, of
man and intellect in particular, 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 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 complementary. 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 not
be amiss to dwell on this point, and show more precisely how far this
philosophy of life resembles finalism and wherein it is different.