32 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



impression of an original state resolves, upon analysis, 

 into elementary facts, each of which is the repetition 

 of a fact already known. What you call an unfore 

 seeable form is only a new arrangement of old ele 

 ments. The elementary causes, which in their totality 

 have determined this arrangement, are themselves old 

 causes repeated in a new order. Knowledge of the 

 elements and of the elementary causes would have 

 made it possible to foretell the living form which is 

 their sum and their resultant. When we have 

 resolved the biological aspect of phenomena into 

 physico-chemical factors, we will leap, if necessary, over 

 physics and chemistry themselves ; we will go from 

 masses to molecules, from molecules to atoms, from 

 atoms to corpuscles : we must indeed at last come to 

 something that can be treated as a kind of solar 

 system, astronomically. If you deny it, you oppose 

 the very principle of scientific mechanism, and you 

 arbitrarily affirm that living matter is not made of the 

 same elements as other matter.&quot;- We reply that we 

 do not question the fundamental identity of inert 

 matter and organized matter. The only question is 

 whether the natural systems which we call living 

 beings must be assimilated to the artificial systems that 

 science cuts out within inert matter, or whether they 

 must not rather be compared to that natural system 

 which is the whole of the universe. That life is a kind 

 of mechanism I cordially agree. But is it the mechanism 

 of parts artificially isolated within the whole of the 

 universe, or is it the mechanism of the real whole ? 

 The real whole might well be, we conceive, an in 

 divisible continuity. The systems we cut out within it 

 would, properly speaking, not then be parts at all ; 

 they would be partial views of the whole. And, with 



