166 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 



Inversely, in the course of embryonic life itself (especially 

 when the embryo lives freely in the form of a larva), many 

 of the acts accomplished must be referred to instinct. 

 The most essential of the primary instincts are really, 

 therefore, vital processes. The potential consciousness 

 that accompanies them is generally actualized only at the 

 outset of the act, and leaves the rest of the process to go on 

 by itself. It would only have to expand more widely, 

 and then dive into its own depth completely, to be one 

 with the generative force of life. 



When we see in a living body thousands of cells work- 

 ing together to a common end, dividing the task between 

 them, living each for itself at the same time as for the others, 

 preserving itself, feeding itself, reproducing itself, respond- 

 ing to the menace of danger by appropriate defensive 

 reactions, how can we help thinking of so many instincts? 

 And yet these are the natural functions of the cell, the 

 constitutive elements of its vitality. On the other hand, 

 when we see the bees of a hive forming a system so strictly 

 organized that no individual can live apart from the others 

 beyond a certain time, even though furnished with food 

 and shelter, how can we help recognizing that the hive 

 is really, and not metaphorically, a single organism, of 

 which each bee is a cell united to the others by invisible 

 bonds? The instinct that animates the bee is indistinguish- 

 able, then, from the force that animates the cell, or is only 

 a prolongation of that force. In extreme cases like this, 

 instinct coincides with the work of organization. 



Of course there are degrees of perfection in the same 

 instinct. Between the humble-bee, and the honey-bee, 

 for instance, the distance is great; and we pass from 

 one to the other through a great number of intermediaries, 

 which correspond to so many complications of the social 

 life. But the same diversity is found in the functioning 



