30 GREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



and irreversible in the successive moments of a history- 

 eludes science. To get a notion of this irreducibility and 

 irreversibility, we must break with scientific habits which 

 are adapted to the fundamental requirements of thought, 

 we must do violence to the mind, go counter to the natural 

 bent of the intellect. But that is just the function of 

 philosophy. 



In vain, therefore, does life evolve before our eyes as a 

 continuous creation of unforeseeable form : the idea always 

 persists that form, unforeseeability and continuity are 

 mere appearance — the outward reflection of our own ig- 

 norance. What is presented to the senses as a continuous 

 history would break up, we are told, into a series of suc- 

 cessive states. "What gives you the impression of an 

 original state resolves, upon analysis, into elementary 

 facts, each of which is the repetition of a fact already 

 known. What you call an unforeseeable form is only a 

 new arrangement of old elements. The elementary causes, 

 which in their totality have determined this arrangement, 

 are themselves old causes repeated in a new order. Know- 

 ledge of the elements and of the elementary causes would 

 have made it possible to foretell the living form which is 

 their sum and their resultant. When we have resolved 

 the biological aspect of phenomena into physico-chemical 

 factors, we will leap, if necessary, over physics and chemis- 

 try themselves; we will go from masses to molecules, from 

 molecules to atoms, from atoms to corpuscles: we must 

 indeed at last come to something that can be treated as a 

 kind of solar system, astronomically. If you deny it, 

 you oppose the very principle of scientific mechanism, and 

 you arbitrarily affirm that living matter is not made of 

 the same elements as other matter." — We reply that we 

 do not question the fundamental identity of inert matter 

 and organized matter. The only question is whether the 



