24 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



Descartes was thinking of when he spoke of continued creation. 

 But, in time thus conceived, how could evolution, 

 which is the very essence of life, ever take place ? 

 Evolution implies a real persistence of the past in the 

 present, a duration which is, as it were, a hyphen, a 

 connecting link. In other words, to know a living 

 being or natural system is to get at the very interval 

 of duration, while the knowledge of an artificial or 

 mathematical system applies only to the extremity. 



Continuity of change, preservation of the past in 

 the present, real duration the living being seems, 

 then, to share these attributes with consciousness. 

 Can we go further and say that life, like conscious 

 activity, is invention, is unceasing creation ? 



It does not enter into our plan to set down here 

 the proofs of transformism. We wish only to 

 explain in a word or two why we shall accept it, in 

 the present work, as a sufficiently exact and precise 

 expression of the facts actually known. The idea of 

 transformism is already in germ in the natural classi 

 fication of organized beings. The naturalist, in fact, 

 brings together the organisms that are like each other, 

 then divides the group into sub-groups within which 

 the likeness is still greater, and so on : all through the 

 operation, the characters of the group appear as general 

 themes on which each of the sub-groups performs its 

 particular variation. Now, such is just the relation 

 we find, in the animal and in the vegetable world, 

 between the generator and the generated : on the 

 canvas which the ancestor passes on, and which his 

 descendants possess in common, each puts his own 

 original embroidery. True, the differences between 

 the descendant and the ancestor are slight, and it may 



