i.1 BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 53 



tellect has a right to consider the future abstractly from 

 its habitual point of view, being itself an abstract view 

 of the cause of its own being. 



It is true that the cause may then seem beyond our 

 grasp. Already the finalist theory of life eludes all pre- 

 cise verification. What if we go beyond it in one of its 

 directions? Here, in fact, after a necessary digression, 

 we are back at the question which we regard as essential: 

 can the insufficiency of mechanism be proved by facts? 

 We said that if this demonstration is possible, it is on con- 

 dition of frankly accepting the evolutionist hypothesis. 

 We must now show that if mechanism is insufficient to 

 account for evolution, the way of proving this insufficiency 

 is not to stop at the classic conception of finality, still 

 less to contract or attenuate it, but, on the contrary, to 

 go further. 



Let us indicate at once the principle of our demonstration. 

 We said of life that, from its origin, it is the continuation 

 of one and the same impetus, divided into divergent lines 

 of evolution. Something has grown, something has de- 

 veloped by a series of additions which have been so many 

 creations. This very development has brought about a 

 dissociation of tendencies which were unable to grow be- 

 yond a certain point without becoming mutually incom- 

 patible. Strictly speaking, there is nothing to prevent 

 our imagining that the evolution of life might have taken 

 place in one single individual by means of a series of trans- 

 formations spread over thousands of ages. Or, instead 

 of a single individual, any number might be supposed, 

 succeeding each other in a unilinear series. In both cases 

 evolution would have had, so to speak, one dimension only. 

 But evolution has actually taken place through millions 

 of individuals, on divergent lines, each ending at a crossing 

 from which new paths radiate, and so on indefinitely. If 



