in THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 273 



simple inspiration which is the whole poem. So, among 

 the dissociated individuals, one life goes on moving : 

 everywhere the tendency to individualize is opposed 

 and at the same time completed by an antagonistic and 

 complementary tendency to associate, as if the manifold 

 unity of life, drawn in the direction of multiplicity, 

 made so much the more effort to withdraw itself on to 

 itself. A part is no sooner detached than it tends to 

 reunite itself, if not to all the rest, at least to what is 

 nearest to it. Hence, throughout the whole realm of 

 life, a balancing between individuation and association. 

 Individuals join together into a society ; but the 

 society, as soon as formed, tends to melt the associated 

 individuals into a new organism, so as to become itself 

 an individual, able in its turn to be part and parcel 

 of a new association. At the lowest depree of the 



O 



scale of organisms we already find veritable associa 

 tions, microbial colonies, and in these associations, 

 according to a recent work, a tendency to individuate 

 by the constitution of a nucleus. 1 The same tendency 

 is met with again at a higher stage, in the protophytes, 

 which, once having quitted the parent cell by way of 

 division, remain united to each other by the gelatinous 

 substance that surrounds them, also in those protozoa 

 which begin by mingling their pseudopodia and end by 

 welding themselves together. The &quot; colonial &quot; theory 

 of the genesis of higher organisms is well known. 

 The protozoa, consisting of one single cell, are supposed 

 to have formed, by assemblage, aggregates which, 

 relating themselves together in their turn, have given 

 rise to aggregates of aggregates ; so organisms more and 

 more complicated, and also more and more differentiated, 



1 Cf. a paper written (in Russian) by Serkovski, and reviewed in the 

 Annte biologize, 1898, p. 317. 



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