1 6 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



CHAF. 



By this is a living being distinguished from all that 

 our perception or our science isolates or closes artifici 

 ally. It would therefore be wrong to compare it to an 

 object. Should we wish to find a term of comparison in 

 the inorganic world, it is not to a determinate material 

 object, but much rather to the totality of the material 

 universe that we ought to compare the living organism. 

 It is true that the comparison would not be worth 

 much, for a living being is observable, whilst the whole 

 of the universe is constructed or reconstructed by 

 thought. But at least our attention would thus have 

 been called to the essential character of organization. 

 Like the universe as a whole, like each conscious being 

 taken separately, the organism which lives is a thing 

 that endures. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged into 

 its present, and abides there, actual and acting. How 

 otherwise could we understand that it passes through 

 distinct and well-marked phases, that it changes its age 

 in short, that it has a history r If I consider my 

 body in particular, I find that, like my consciousness, 

 it matures little by little from infancy to old age ; like 

 myself, it grows old. Indeed, maturity and old age 

 are, properly speaking, attributes only of my body ; it 

 is only metaphorically that I apply the same names to 

 the corresponding changes of my conscious self. Now, 

 if I pass from the top to the bottom of the scale of 

 living beings, from one of the most to one of the least 

 differentiated, from the multicellular organism of man to 

 the unicellular organism of the Infusorian, I find, even 

 in this simple cell, the same process of growing old. The 

 Infusorian is exhausted at the end of a certain number 

 of divisions, and though it may be possible, by modify 

 ing the environment, to put off the moment when a 

 rejuvenation by conjugation becomes necessary, this 



