io6 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



with human societies. The former are admirably 

 ordered and united, but stereotyped ; the latter are 

 open to every sort of progress, but divided, and 

 incessantly at strife with themselves. The ideal would 

 be a society always in progress and always in equilibrium, 

 but this ideal is perhaps unrealizable : the two char 

 acteristics that would fain complete each other, which 

 do complete each other in their embryonic state, can 

 no longer abide together when they grow stronger. 

 If one could speak, otherwise than metaphorically, of 

 an impulse toward social life, it might be said that 

 the brunt of the impulse was borne along the line of 

 evolution ending at man, and that the rest of it was 

 collected on the road leading to the hymcnoptera : the 

 societies of ants and bees would thus present the aspect 

 complementary to ours. But this would be only a 

 manner of expression. There has been no particular 

 impulse towards social life ; there is simply the 

 general movement of life, which on divergent lines is 

 creating forms ever new. If societies should appear 

 on two of these lines, they ought to show divergence 

 of paths at the same time as community of impetus. 

 They will thus develop two classes of characteristics 

 which we shall find vaguely complementary of each 

 other. 



So our study of the evolution movement will 

 have to unravel a certain number of divergent direc 

 tions, and to appreciate the importance of what has 

 happened along each of them in a word, to determine 

 the nature of the dissociated tendencies and estimate 

 their relative proportion. Combining these tendencies, 

 then, we shall get an approximation, or rather an 

 imitation, of the indivisible motor principle whence 

 their impetus proceeds. Evolution will thus prove to 



