100 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



greatest charms of childhood. But these interwoven 

 personalities become incompatible in course of growth, 

 and, as each of us can live but one life, a choice must 

 perforce be made. We choose in reality without ceasing; 

 without ceasing, also, we abandon many things. The 

 route we pursue in time is strewn with the remains of all 

 that we began to be, of all that we might have become. 

 But nature, which has at command an incalculable number 

 of lives, is in no wise bound to make such sacrifices. She 

 preserves the different tendencies that have bifurcated 

 with their growth. She creates with them diverging 

 series of species that will evolve separately. 



These series may, moreover, be of unequal import- 

 ance. The author who begins a novel puts into his hero 

 many things which he is obliged to discard as he goes on. 

 Perhaps he will take them up later in other books, and make 

 new characters with them, who will seem like extracts from, 

 or rather like complements of, the first; but they will al- 

 most always appear somewhat poor and limited in compari- 

 son with the original character. So with regard to the 

 evolution of life. The bifurcations on the way have been 

 numerous, but there have been many blind alleys beside 

 the two or three highways ; and of these highways them- 

 selves, only one, that which leads through the vertebrates 

 up to man, has been wide enough to allow free passage 

 to the full breath of life. We get this impression when 

 we compare the societies of bees and ants, for instance, 

 with human societies. The former are admirably ordered 

 and united, but stereotyped; the latter are open to every 

 sort of progress, but divided, and incessantly at strife 

 with themselves. The ideal would be a society always in 

 progress and always in equilibrium, but this ideal is perhaps 

 unrealizable: the two characteristics that would fain com- 

 plete each other, which do complete each other in their 



