20 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



in which time (in the sense in which the mathematician 

 takes this word) would play the role of independent variable. 

 Is it so with the laws of life? Does the state of a living 

 body find its complete explanation in the state immediately 

 before? Yes, if it is agreed a priori to liken the living body 

 to other bodies, and to identify it, for the sake of the argu- 

 ment, with the artificial systems on which the chemist, 

 physicist, and astronomer operate. But in astronomy, 

 physics, and chemistry the proposition has a perfectly 

 definite meaning: it signifies that certain aspects of the 

 present, important for science, are calculable as functions 

 of the immediate past. Nothing of the sort in the domain 

 of life. Here calculation touches, at most, certain phe- 

 nomena of organic destruction. Organic creation, on the 

 contrary, the evolutionary phenomena which properly 

 constitute life, we cannot in any way subject to a mathe- 

 matical treatment. It will be said that this impotence 

 is due only to our ignorance. But it may equally well 

 express the fact that the present moment of a living body 

 does not find its explanation in the moment immediately 

 before, that all the past of the organism must be added to 

 that moment, its heredity — in fact, the whole of a very 

 long history. In the second of these two hypotheses, 

 not in the first, is really expressed the present state of 

 the biological sciences, as well as their direction. As for 

 the idea that the living body might be treated by some 

 superhuman calculator in the same mathematical way as 

 our solar system, this has gradually arisen from a meta- 

 physic which has taken a more precise form since the 

 physical discoveries of Galileo, but which, as we shall 

 show, was always the natural metaphysic of the human 

 mind. Its apparent clearness, our impatient desire to 

 find it true, the enthusiasm with wnich so many excellent 

 minds accept it without proof — all the seductions, in short, 



