THE CARP AND THE STICKLEBACK 



ality then ceases to exist. He is a link in the continual 

 chain of the line of generations from which he depends. 

 When his time comes he presents himself, takes his 

 place as he must, then yields it up, and the web goes on 

 being woven as long as is possible without breaking. 

 The Ego is only a metaphysical abstraction created by 

 our mind; in Nature, real and complete, the Ego has 

 no existence. 



In this way, individuals show what they amount to 

 in the whole of living Nature, and they do not amount to 

 very much. When we see them gathered in the world, 

 peopling the air and the waters, considering them in the 

 environments with which they fill up space, we are in- 

 clined to envisage them as alone, and thought generally 

 stops there and goes no farther. But if, yielding to the 

 very condition of life which animates and maintains its 

 creatures in time and space alike, the mind evokes the 

 successive spectacles of Nature according to their ap- 

 pearance and their replacement, it must give to time 

 and the succession which it brings into being, the pre- 

 ponderance which is their due. Individuals assume 

 their proper rank as temporary links in the chain of 

 their generations. And their dissemblances, their in- 

 equalities, the astounding diversity of their forms and 

 functions, seem less strongly contrasted and combine 

 to give to each the place it can fill. 



If individuals, the visible factors in the spectacle of 

 Nature, lose thereby a part of their apparent importance, 

 the lineage, on the other hand, the succession of individ- 

 uals issuing one from the other in the course of time, 

 acquires an importance which is so much the greater 

 as it shows itself less. Our sensations are hardly aware 

 of them; they only see the points of the web. Only 

 our intellect can reconstruct them, and give them their 

 proper place, which is the first place. They are fictitious 

 in relation to our senses, for the senses can only appre- 

 ciate things in space and for short moments, but they 

 recover their fundamental reality through reason, which 



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