162 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



turns to the living and is confronted with organization. 

 It does what it can, it resolves the organized into the un- 

 organized, for it cannot, without reversing its natural 

 direction and twisting about on itself, think true continuity, 

 real mobility, reciprocal penetration — in a word, that 

 creative evolution which is life. 



Consider continuity. The aspect of life that is accessible 

 to our intellect — as indeed to our senses, of which our 

 intellect is the extension — is that which offers a hold to 

 our action. Now, to modify an object, we have to perceive 

 it as divisible and discontinuous. From the point of view 

 of positive science, an incomparable progress was realized 

 when the organized tissues were resolved into cells. The 

 study of the cell, in its turn, has shown it to be an organism 

 whose complexity seems to grow, the more thoroughly 

 it is examined. The more science advances, the more 

 it sees the number grow of heterogeneous elements which 

 are placed together, outside each other, to make up a 

 living being. Does science thus get any nearer to life? 

 Does it not, on the contrary, find that what is really life 

 in the living seems to recede with every step by which 

 it pushes further the detail of the parts combined? There 

 is indeed already among scientists a tendency to regard 

 the substance of the organism as continuous, and the cell 

 as an artificial entity. 1 But, supposing this view were 

 finally to prevail, it could only lead, on deeper study, to 

 some other mode of analyzing of the living being, and so to 

 a new discontinuity — although less removed, perhaps, 

 from the real continuity of life. The truth is that this 

 continuity cannot be thought by the intellect while it 

 follows its natural movement. It implies at once the 

 multiplicity of elements and the interpenetration of 

 all by all, two conditions that can hardly be reconciled 



1 We shall return to this point in chapter iii., p. 259. 



