, INDIVIDUALITY AND AGE 17 



cannot be indefinitely postponed. 1 It is true that 

 between these two extreme cases, in which the organism 

 is completely individualised, there might be found a 

 multitude of others in which the individuality is less 

 well marked, and in which, although there is doubtless 

 an ageing somewhere, one cannot say exactly what it is 

 that grows old. Once more, there is no universal bio 

 logical law which applies precisely and automatically to 

 every living thing. There are only directions in which 

 life throws out species in general. Each particular 

 species, in the very act by which it is constituted, 

 affirms its independence, follows its caprice, deviates 

 more or less from the straight line, sometimes even 

 remounts the slope and seems to turn its back on its 

 original direction. It is easy enough to argue that a 

 tree never grows old, since the tips of its branches 

 are always equally young, always equally capable of 

 engendering new trees by budding. But in such an 

 organism which is, after all, a society rather than an 

 individual something ages, if only the leaves and the 

 interior of the trunk. And each cell, considered separ 

 ately, evolves in a specific way. Wherever anything 

 lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time 

 is being inscribed. 



This, it will be said, is only a metaphor. It is of 

 the very essence of mechanism, in fact, to consider as 

 metaphorical every expression which attributes to time 

 an effective action and a reality of its own. In vain 

 does immediate experience show us that the very basis 

 of our conscious existence is memory, that is to say, the 

 prolongation of the past into the present, or, in a word, 

 duration, acting and irreversible. In vain does reason 



1 Calkins, &quot; Studies on the Life History of Protozoa &quot; (Archiv f, 

 Ent&amp;lt;wicklungsmechanik y vol. xv., 1903, pp. 139-186). 



C 



