in THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 275 



is enough that a thread should be maintained or cut in 

 order that life should affect the social or the individual 

 form. Thus, in rudimentary organisms consisting of a 

 single cell, we already find that the apparent individuality 

 of the whole is the composition of an undefined number 

 of potential individualities potentially associated. But, 

 from top to bottom of the series of living beings, the 

 same law is manifested. And it is this that we express 

 when we say that unity and multiplicity are categories 

 of inert matter, that the vital impetus is neither pure 

 unity nor pure multiplicity, and that if the matter to 

 which it communicates itself compels it to choose one 

 of the two, its choice will never be definitive : it will 

 leap from one to the other indefinitely. The evolution 

 of life in the double direction of individuality and 

 association has therefore nothing accidental about it : it 

 is due to the very nature of life. 



Essential also is the progress to reflexion. If our 

 analysis is correct, it is consciousness, or rather supra- 

 consciousness, that is at the origin of life. Conscious 

 ness, or supra-consciousness, is the name for the rocket 

 whose extinguished fragments fall back as matter ; con 

 sciousness, again, is the name for that which subsists of the 

 rocket itself, passing through the fragments and lighting 

 them up into organisms. But this consciousness, which 

 is a need of creation^ is made manifest to itself only where 

 creation is possible. It lies dormant when life is con 

 demned to automatism ; it wakens as soon as the possi 

 bility of a choice is restored. That is why, in organisms 

 unprovided with a nervous system, it varies according 

 to the power of locomotion and of deformation of which 

 the organism disposes. And in animals with a nervous 

 system, it is proportional to the complexity of the 

 switchboard on which the paths called sensory and the 



