120 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



What constitutes animality, we said, is the faculty 

 of utilizing a releasing mechanism for the conversion 

 of as much stored-up potential energy as possible into 

 "explosive" actions. In the beginning the explosion 

 is haphazard, and does not choose its direction. Thus 

 the amoeba thrusts out its pseudopodic prolongations 

 in all directions at once. But, as we rise in the animal 

 scale, the form of the body itself is observed to indicate 

 a certain number of very definite directions along which 

 the energy travels. These directions are marked by so 

 many chains of nervous elements. Now, the nervous 

 element has gradually emerged from the barely differentiat- 

 ed mass of organized tissue. It may, therefore, be sur- 

 mised that in the nervous element, as soon as it appears, 

 and also in its appendages, the faculty of suddenly freeing 

 the gradually stored-up energy is concentrated. No doubt, 

 every living cell expends energy without ceasing, in order 

 to maintain its equilibrium. The vegetable cell, torpid 

 from the start, is entirely absorbed in this work of main- 

 tenance alone, as if it took for end what must at first have 

 been only a means. But, in the animal, all points to action, 

 that is, to the utilization of energy for movements from 

 place to place. True, every animal cell expends a good 

 deal — often the whole — of the energy at its disposal in 

 keeping itself alive; but the organism as a whole tries 

 to attract as much energy as possible to those points where 

 the locomotive movements are effected. So that where a 

 nervous system exists, with its complementary sense- 

 organs and motor apparatus, everything should happen 

 as if the rest of the body had, as its essential function, to 

 prepare for these and pass on to them, at the moment 

 required, that force which they are to liberate by a sort 

 of explosion. , 



The part played by food amongst the higher animals 



