LI BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 49 



versal knowledge. But this belief is natural to the human 

 intellect, always engaged as it is in determining under what 

 former heading it shall catalogue any new object; and it 

 may be said that, in a certain sense, we are all born 

 Platonists. 



Nowhere is the inadequacy of this method so obvious 

 as in theories of life. If, in evolving in the direction of 

 the vertebrates in general, of man and intellect in par- 

 ticular, life has had to abandon by the way many elements 

 incompatible with this particular mode of organization 

 and consign them, as we shall show, to other lines of 

 development, it is the totality of these elements that we 

 must find again and rejoin to the intellect proper, in 

 order to grasp the true nature of vital activity. And we 

 shall probably be aided in this by the fringe of vague in- 

 tuition that surrounds our distinct — that is, intellectual 

 — representation. For what can this useless fringe be, 

 if not that part of the evolving principle which has not 

 shrunk to the peculiar form of our organization, but has 

 settled around it unasked for, unwanted? It is there, 

 accordingly, that we must look for hints to expand the 

 intellectual form of our thought ; from there shall we derive 

 the impetus necessary to lift us above ourselves. To 

 form an idea of the whole of life cannot consist in combin- 

 ing simple ideas that have been left behind in us by life 

 itself in the course of its evolution. How could the part 

 be equivalent to the whole, the content to the container, 

 a by-product of the vital operation to the operation itself? 

 Such, however, is our illusion when we define the evolution 

 of life as a " passage from the homogeneous to the hetero- 

 geneous," or by any other concept obtained by putting 

 fragments of intellect side by side. We place ourselves 

 in one of the points where evolution comes to a head — 

 the principal one, no doubt, but not the only one; and 



