122 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



is utilized. In this case, the same organism that 

 had directly stored the energy of the solar radiation 

 would have expended it in free movements in space. 

 And for that reason we must presume that the first living 

 beings sought on the one hand to accumulate, without 

 ceasing, energy borrowed from the sun, and on the 

 other hand to expend it, in a discontinuous and ex 

 plosive way, in movements of locomotion. Even 

 to-day, perhaps, a chlorophyl-bearing Infusorian such as 

 the Euglena may symbolize this primordial tendency of 

 life, though in a mean form, incapable of evolving. Is 

 the divergent development of the two kingdoms related 

 to what one may call the oblivion of each kingdom as 

 regards one of the two halves of the programme ? Or 

 rather, which is more likely, was the very nature of 

 the matter, that life found confronting it on our planet, 

 opposed to the possibility of the two tendencies evolving 

 very far together in the same organism ? What is 

 certain is that the vegetable has trended principally in 

 the first direction and the animal in the second. But 

 if, from the very first, in making the explosive, nature 

 had for object the explosion, then it is the evolution of 

 the animal, rather than that of the vegetable, that in 

 dicates, on the whole, the fundamental direction of life. 

 The &quot;harmony&quot; of the two kingdoms, the com 

 plementary characters they display, might then be 

 due to the fact that they develop two tendencies 

 which at first were fused in one. The more the 

 single original tendency grows, the harder it finds it to 

 keep united in the same living being those two elements 

 which in the rudimentary state implied each other. 

 Hence a parting in two, hence two divergent evolutions ; 

 hence also two series of characters opposed in certain 

 points, complementary in others, but, whether opposed 



