xiv CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



with these fragments, thus positing in advance everything 

 that is to be explained — a true evolutionism, in which 

 reality would be followed in its generation and its growth. 



But a philosophy of this kind will not be made in a 

 day. Unlike the philosophical systems properly so called, 

 each of which was the individual work of a man of genius 

 and sprang up as a whole, to be taken or left, it will only 

 be built up by the collective and progressive effort of many 

 thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting 

 and improving one another. So the present essay does not 

 aim at resolving at once the greatest problems. It simply 

 desires to define the method and to permit a glimpse, on 

 some essential points, of the possibility of its application. 



Its plan is traced by the subject itself. In the first 

 chapter, we try on the evolutionary progress the two 

 ready-made garments that our understanding puts at our 

 disposal, mechanism and finality; 1 we show that they do 

 not fit, neither the one nor the other, but that one of them 

 might be recut and resewn, and in this new form fit less 

 badly than the other. In order to transcend the point 

 of view of the understanding, we try, in our second chapter, 

 to reconstruct the main lines of evolution along which life 



1 The idea of regarding life as transcending teleology as well as 

 mechanism is far from being a new idea. Notably in three articles by 

 Ch. Dunan on "Le probleme de la vie" (Revue philosophique, 1892) it 

 is profoundly treated. In the development of this idea, we agree with 

 Ch. Dunan on more than one point. But the views we are presenting 

 on this matter, as on the questions attaching to it, are those that we 

 expressed long ago in our Essai sur les donnies imrrddiates de la con- 

 science (Paris, 1889). One of the principal objects of that essay was, 

 in fact, to show that the psychical life is neither unity nor multiplicity, 

 that it transcends both the mechanical and the intellectual, mechanism 

 and finalism having meaning only where there is "distinct multiplicity," 

 "spatiality," and consequently assemblage of pre-existing parts: 

 "real duration" signifies both undivided continuity and creation. In 

 the present work we apply these same ideas to life in general, regarded, 

 moreover, itself from the psychological point of view. 



