x CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



discovery to discovery, sure that experience is following 

 behind it and will justify it invariably. 



But from this it must also follow that our thought, 

 in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting 

 the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolu 

 tionary movement. Created by life, in definite circum 

 stances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace 

 life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect ? 

 Deposited by the evolutionary movement in the course 

 of its way, how can it be applied to the evolutionary 

 movement itself? As well contend that the part is 

 equal to the whole, that the effect can reabsorb its 

 cause, or that the pebble left on the beach displays 

 the form of the wave that brought it there. In fact, 

 we do indeed feel that not one of the categories of 

 our thought unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, 

 intelligent finality, etc. applies exactly to the things of 

 life : who can say where individuality begins and ends, 

 whether the living being is one or many, whether it 

 is the cells which associate themselves into the 

 organism or the organism which dissociates itself into 

 cells ? In vain we force the living into this or that one 



O 



of our moulds. All the moulds crack. They are 

 too narrow, above all too rigid, for what we try to put 

 into them. Our reasoning, so sure of itself among 

 things inert, feels ill at ease on this new ground. It 

 would be difficult to cite a biological discovery due 

 to pure reasoning. And most often, when experience 

 has finally shown us how life goes to work to obtain a 

 certain result, we find its way of working is just that 

 of which we should never have thought. 



Yet evolutionist philosophy does not hesitate to 

 extend to the things of life the same methods of 

 explanation which have succeeded in the case of un- 



