26 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. ♦ 



to pass from the visible to the invisible. Almost all that 

 transformism tells us to-day would be preserved, open to 

 interpretation in another way. Will it not, therefore, 

 be better to stick to the letter of transformism as almost 

 all scientists profess it? Apart from the question to what 

 extent the theory of evolution describes the facts and to 

 what extent it symbolizes them, there is nothing in it 

 that is irreconcilable with the doctrines it has claimed to 

 replace, even with that of special creations, to which it is 

 usually opposed. For this reason we think the language 

 of transformism forces itself now upon all philosophy, as 

 the dogmatic affirmation of transformism forces itself upon 

 science. 



But then, we must no longer speak of life in general 

 as an abstraction, or as a mere heading under which all 

 living beings are inscribed. At a certain moment, in 

 certain points of space, a visible current has taken rise; 

 this current of life, traversing the bodies it has organized 

 one after another, passing from generation to generation, 

 has become divided amongst species and distributed 

 amongst individuals without losing anything of its force, 

 rather intensifying in proportion to its advance. It is 

 well known that, on the theory of the "continuity of the 

 germ-plasm," maintained by Weismann, the sexual ele- 

 ments of the generating organism pass on their properties 

 directly to the sexual elements of the organism engendered. 

 In this extreme form, the theory has seemed debatable, 

 for it is only in exceptional cases that there are any signs 

 of sexual glands at the time of segmentation of the ferti- 

 lized egg. But, though the cells that engender the sexual 

 elements do not generally appear at the beginning of the 

 embryonic life, it is none the less true that they are always 

 formed out of those tissues of the embryo which have not 

 undergone any particular functional differentiation, and 



