x CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



movement. Created by life, in definite circumstances, 

 to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which 

 it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by the 

 evolutionary movement in the course of its way, how can 

 it be applied to the evolutionary movement itself? As 

 well contend that the part is equal to the whole, that the 

 effect can reabsorb its cause, or that the pebble left on the 

 beach displays the form of the wave that brought it there. 

 In fact, we do indeed feel that not one of the categories of 

 our thought — unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, 

 intelligent finality, etc. — applies exactly to the things of 

 life: who can say where individuality begins and ends, 

 whether the living being is one or many, whether it is 

 the cells which associate themselves into the organism 

 or the organism which dissociates itself into cells? In 

 vain we force the living into this or that one of our molds. 

 All the molds crack. They are too narrow, above all too 

 rigid, for what we try to put into them. Our reasoning, 

 so sure of itself among things inert, feels ill at ease on this 

 new ground. It would be difficult to cite a biological 

 discovery due to pure reasoning. And most often, when 

 experience has finally shown us how life goes to work to 

 obtain a certain result, we find its way of working is just 

 that of which we should never have thought. 



Yet evolutionist philosophy does not hesitate to extend 

 to the things of life the same methods of explanation which 

 have succeeded in the case of unorganized matter. It 

 begins by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evo- 

 lution, a flame, perhaps accidental, which lights up the 

 coming and going of living beings in the narrow passage 

 open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it has just 

 told us, it makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a 

 Sun which can illuminate the world. Boldly it proceeds, 

 with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal 



