92 CREATIVE EVOLUTION , [chap. 



we cannot help conceiving organization as manufacturing. 

 But it is one thing to manufacture, and quite another to 

 organize. Manufacturing is peculiar to man. It consists 

 in assembling parts of matter which we have cut out in 

 such manner that we can fit them together and obtain 

 from them a common action. The parts are arranged, so 

 to speak, around the action as an ideal centre. To manu- 

 facture, therefore, is to work from the periphery to the 

 centre, or, as the philosophers say, from the many to the 

 one. Organization, on the contrary, works from the centre 

 to the periphery. It begins in a point that is almost a 

 mathematical point, and spreads around this point by 

 concentric waves which go on enlarging. The work of 

 manufacturing is the more effective, the greater the quant- 

 ity of matter dealt with. It proceeds by concentration 

 and compression. The organizing act, on the contrary, 

 has something explosive about it: it needs at the begin- 

 ning the smallest possible place, a minimum of matter, 

 as if the organizing forces only entered space reluctantly. 

 The spermatozoon, which sets in motion the evolutionary 

 process of the embryonic life, is one of the smallest cells 

 of the organism; and it is only a small part of the sperma- 

 tozoon which really takes part in the operation. 



But these are only superficial differences. Digging 

 beneath them, we think, a deeper difference would be found. 



A manufactured thing delineates exactly the form of 

 the work of manufacturing it. I mean that the manu- 

 facturer finds in his product exactly what he has put 

 into it. If he is going to make a machine, he cuts out 

 its pieces one by one and then puts them together: the 

 machine, when made, will show both the pieces and their 

 assemblage. The whole of the result represents the whole 

 of the work; and to each part of the work corresponds 

 a part of the result. 



