ii.] DIVERGENT TENDENCIES 99 



the rail it is endeavoring to leave. Of phenomena in 

 the simplest forms of life, it is hard to say whether they are 

 still physical and chemical or whether they are already 

 vital. Life had to enter thus into the habits of inert matter, 

 in order to draw it little by little, magnetized, as it were, 

 to another track. The animate forms that first appeared 

 were therefore of extreme simplicity. They were probably 

 tiny masses of scarcely differentiated protoplasm, out- 

 wardly resembling the amoeba observable to-day, but 

 possessed of the tremendous internal push that was to 

 raise them even to the highest forms of life. That in 

 virtue of this push the first organisms sought to grow as 

 much as possible, seems likely. But organized matter 

 has a limit of expansion that is very quickly reached; 

 beyond a certain point it divides instead of growing. 

 Ages of effort and prodigies of subtlety were probably 

 necessary for life to get past this new obstacle. It suc- 

 ceeded in inducing an increasing number of elements, 

 ready to divide, to remain united. By the division of 

 labor it knotted between them an indissoluble bond. The 

 complex and quasi-discontinuous organism is thus made 

 to function as would a continuous living mass which 

 had simply grown bigger. 



But the real and profound causes of division were those 

 which life bore within its bosom. For life is tendency, 

 and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a 

 sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions 

 among which its impetus is divided. This we observe in 

 ourselves, in the evolution of that special tendency which we 

 call our character. Each of us, glancing back over his 

 history, will find that his child-personality, though in- 

 divisible, united in itself divers persons, which could re- 

 main blended just because they were in their nascent state: 

 this indecision, so charged with promise, is one of the 



