14 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



now, it does not follow that there was not a single in- 

 dividual just before. No doubt, when I have seen several 

 drawers fall from a chest, I have no longer the right to 

 say that the article was all of one piece. But the fact is 

 that there can be nothing more in the present of the chest 

 of drawers than there was in its past, and if it is made up 

 of several different pieces now, it was so from the date of 

 its manufacture. Generally speaking, unorganized bodies, 

 which are what we have need of in order that we may act, 

 and on which we have modelled our fashion of thinking, 

 are regulated by this simple law : the present contains noth- 

 ing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was 

 already in the cause. But suppose that the distinctive 

 feature of the organized body is that it grows and changes 

 without ceasing, as indeed the most superficial observation 

 testifies, there would be nothing astonishing in the fact 

 that it was one in the first instance, and afterwards many. 

 The reproduction of unicellular organisms consists in 

 just this — the living being divides into two halves, of which 

 each is a complete individual. True, in the more complex 

 animals, nature localizes in the almost independent sexual 

 cells the power of producing the whole anew. But some- 

 thing of this power may remain diffused in the rest of the 

 organism, as the facts of regeneration prove, and it is 

 conceivable that in certain privileged cases the faculty 

 may persist integrally in a latent condition and manifest 

 itself on the first opportunity. In truth, that I may have 

 the right to speak of individuality, it is not necessary that 

 the organism should be without the power to divide into 

 fragments that are able to live. It is sufficient that it 

 should have presented a certain systematization of parts 

 before the division, and that the same systematization 

 tend to be reproduced in each separate portion afterwards. 

 Now, that is precisely what we observe in the organic 



