BERGSON' S ORGANIC EVOLUTION 163 



BERGSON'S VIEW OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION 



By De. HERVEY W. SHIMER 



MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 



THE French philosopher Henri Bergson has most appropriately 

 chosen as the title of his book on development the name " Cre- 

 ative Evolution." As the name implies, to the inevitableness, the in- 

 variability of evolution as developed through physico-chemical laws, this 

 philosophy adds the spontaneity, the indetermination of creation. The 

 English translation of this book by Arthur Mitchell is a masterpiece of 

 such work, and he is to be highly commended for the sympathetic 

 manner in which the translation has been carried through. 



All views of evolution divide naturally into two groups, the mech- 

 anistic — that all life can be accounted for through the application of 

 the laws of physics and chemistry — and the vitalistic — that while the 

 laws of physics and chemistry explain much, they do not explain all. 



The principal radical views of these two groups are the following: 



Mechanistic 

 Vitalistic 



Neo-Lamarckian. 

 Neo-Darwinian. 



( Creative Evolution (Bergson). 

 1 Teleology. 



The Neo-Lamarckians hold that characters acquired during the 

 lifetime of an individual are transmitted to its offspring. The Neo- 

 Darwinians deny this utterly, holding that the germ cell, the reproduc- 

 tive tissue, is set apart for its generative work while the animal is in 

 its embryonic state, that is, the reproductive tissue is not the product of 

 the animal's own soma cells, but of its parents' germ cells. This school 

 of Neo-Darwinians explains evolution by the theory that the germ cells 

 are continually changing in every possible direction permitted by their 

 stage of development and that those of these changes shown forth in 

 the adult animal or plant which are beneficial to the organism are 

 selected by nature for preservation. To the adherents of the former 

 school, environment gives rise to variations; to the adherents of the 

 latter it merely selects. To the former the long neck of the giraffe is 

 due to the necessity that successive generations get their food from 

 higher and higher bushes, a process of stretching illustrated by the ani- 

 mals in Kipling's " Just So Stories " ; to the latter, those changes in the 

 germ cell leading to neck elongation in the adult were selected by nature 

 in times of drought. 



Teleology in its most radical form holds that life is carrying out a 



