i.j ORGANIZED BODIES 15 



world. We may conclude, then, that individuality is 

 never perfect, and that it is often difficult, sometimes 

 impossible, to tell what is an individual, and what is not, 

 but that life nevertheless manifests a search for indi- 

 viduality, as if it strove to constitute systems naturally 

 isolated, naturally closed. 



By this is a living being distinguished from all that 

 our perception or our science isolates or closes artifici- 

 ally. It would therefore be wrong to compare it to an 

 object. Should we wish to find a term of comparison in 

 the inorganic world, it is not to a determinate material 

 object, but much rather to the totality of the material 

 universe that we ought to compare the living organism. 

 It is true that the comparison would not be worth much, 

 for a living being is observable, whilst the whole of the 

 universe is constructed or reconstructed by thought. But 

 at least our attention would thus have been called to the 

 essential character of organization. Like the universe as a 

 whole, like each conscious being taken separately, the 

 organism which lives is a thing that endures. Its past, 

 in its entirety, is prolonged into its present, and abides 

 there, actual and acting. How otherwise could we under- 

 stand that it passes through distinct and well-marked 

 phases, that it changes its age — in short, that it has a 

 history? If I consider my body in particular, I find that, 

 like my consciousness, it matures little by little from infancy 

 to old age; like myself, it grows old. Indeed, maturity 

 and old age are, properly speaking, attributes only of my 

 body ; it is only metaphorically that I apply the same names 

 to the corresponding changes of my conscious self. Now, 

 if I pass from the top to the bottom of the scale of living 

 beings, from one of the most to one of the least differentia- 

 ted, from the multicellular organism of man to the unicellu- 



