From the Unconscious to the Conscious 



unknown cause of life developing its effects as if 

 one did actually engender another. Evolution 

 would then only have been transposed. It would 

 have passed from the visible to the invisible. Nearly 

 everything that transformism asserts to-day would 

 remain intact, only it would be interpreted in a 

 different manner. 



* Is it not well then to keep to the letter of 

 transformism, as understood almost unanimously by 

 men of science ? . . . For this reason we consider 

 that the language of transformism is necessary in 

 all philosophy, as its positive teaching is necessary 

 in science.' 



Evolution being definitely established with all the 

 weight of sure fact, it is incumbent upon us to seek to 

 understand how it is effected. For M. Bergson evolution 



O 



is due to none of the factors to which it is ascribed by 

 naturalists; these are all secondary. 



'We in no way dispute that adaptation to 

 environment may be a necessary cause of evolution 

 . . . but it is one thing to acknowledge that external 

 circumstances are forces of which evolution must 

 take account, and another thing to maintain that they 

 are its directing forces. . . . The truth is that 

 adaptation explains the minor windings of evolu- 

 tionary progress but not the general direction of the 

 movement, still less the movement itself. The road 

 which leads to a town is certainly compelled to go 

 up hills and down slopes, it adapts itself to the 

 ground, but the accidents of the ground are not 

 the causes of the road, nor do they assign its general 

 direction.' 



What, then, is the essential factor ? 

 This essential factor is a kind of interior impulse, 

 an original and undefined * vital surge ' (elan 'vital}. 



163 



