126 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



and effective action. But the vegetable, condemned to 

 fixity and insensibility, exhibits the same tendency only 

 because it received at the outset the same impulsion. 

 Recent experiments show that it varies at random when 

 the period of &quot; mutation &quot; arrives ; whereas the animal 

 must have evolved, we believe, in much more definite 

 directions. But we will not dwell further on this original 

 doubling of the modes of life. Let us come to the 

 evolution of animals, in which we are more particularly 

 interested. 



What constitutes animality, we said, is the faculty 

 of utilizing a releasing mechanism for the conversion 

 of as much stored-up potential energy as possible into 

 &quot; explosive &quot; actions. In the beginning the explosion 

 is haphazard, and does not choose its direction. Thus 

 the amoeba thrusts out its pseudopodic prolongations 

 in all directions at once. But, as we rise in the 

 animal scale, the form of the body itself is observed to 

 indicate a certain number of very definite directions 

 along which the energy travels. These directions are 

 marked by so many chains of nervous elements. Now, 

 the nervous element has gradually emerged from 

 the barely differentiated mass of organized tissue. 

 It may, therefore, be surmised that in the nervous 

 element, as soon as it appears, and also in its append 

 ages, the faculty of suddenly freeing the gradually 

 stored-up energy is concentrated. No doubt, every 

 living cell expends energy without ceasing, in order 

 to maintain its equilibrium. The vegetable cell, torpid 

 from the start, is entirely absorbed in this work of 

 maintenance alone, as if it took for end what must at 

 first have been only a means. But, in the animal, all 

 points to action, that is, to the utilization of energy for 



