132 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



activities, which again implied others, and so on in 

 definitely. Thus it is that the complexity of functioning 

 of the higher organisms goes on to infinity. The study 

 of one of these organisms therefore takes us round in 

 a circle, as if everything was a means to everything 

 else. But the circle has a centre, none the less, and that 

 is the system of nervous elements stretching between 

 the sensory organs and the motor apparatus. 



We will not dwell here on a point we have treated 

 at length in a former work. Let us merely recall that 

 the progress of the nervous system has been effected 

 both in the direction of a more precise adaptation of 

 movements and in that of a greater latitude left to the 

 living being to choose between them. These two 

 tendencies may appear antagonistic, and indeed they 

 are so ; but a nervous chain, even in its most rudi 

 mentary form, successfully reconciles them. On the 

 one hand, it marks a well-defined track between one 

 point of the periphery and another, the one sensory, 

 the other motor. It has therefore canalized an activity 

 which was originally diffused in the protoplasmic mass. 

 But, on the other hand, the elements that compose it 

 are probably discontinuous ; at any rate, even supposing 

 they anastomose, they exhibit a functional discontinuity, 

 for each of them ends in a kind of cross-road where 

 probably the nervous current may choose its course. 

 From the humblest Monera to the best endowed insects, 

 and up to the most intelligent vertebrates, the progress 

 realized has been above all a progress of the nervous 

 system, coupled at every stage with all the new con 

 structions and complications of mechanism that this 

 progress required. As we foreshadowed in the be 

 ginning of this work, the role of life is to insert 

 some indetermination into matter. Indeterminate, i.e. 



