1 8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



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. 1 More probable and more 

 profound is the theory according to which the diminution 



1 Sedgwick Minot, &quot; On Certain Phenomena of Growing Old &quot; (Proc. 

 Amer. Assoc. for the Advancement of Science, 39th Meeting, Salem, 1891, 

 pp. 271-288). 



