FOREWORD 



IN the foregoing chapters the insufficiency of the classical 

 concept of evolution as a whole has been clearly brought 

 out. We shall now endeavour to show the insufficiency 

 of the classical concept of the individual. 



This concept rests on two principal notions : Unicism, 1 

 and the negation of the unity of the Self. 



Unicism rejects the ancient spiritualist, animist, and 

 vitalist theories which advanced the claim that there are 

 in the individual dynamic or psychic principles different 

 in essence from the organism. 



It bases its conclusion on the chemical and morpho- 

 logical unity of living forms; on the absence of any 

 positive discontinuity between living and inert matter; 

 on the laws of biological energy, as clear and precise 

 as those of physical energy and in agreement with them. 



The negation of the unity of the Self is similarly 

 based on the negation of the spiritualist, animist, and 

 vitalist principles, which, in the old psycho-physiological 

 concepts separated human from animal life, and that 

 from the mineral. These notions being put aside, 

 the conclusion is that the Self is but the synthesis or 

 the complex of the elements constituting the organism. 



Fundamental to a living being, says Dastre, 2 we 

 find ' the activity proper to each cell elementary or 

 cellular life ; above that, the forms of activity resulting 

 from the association of cells, the collective life, the sum, 

 or rather the complex, of the partial lives of its elements.* 



But these two notions naturalistic unicism and 

 negation of the unity of the Self are only connected 

 by a philosophical misunderstanding or by a mere error 



1 Unicism = the doctrine of the uniformity of all matter. 

 * Dastre : La Vie et la Mart. 



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