254 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the 

 end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds 

 of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through 

 matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, 

 no doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforce- 

 ment could come to it from without. But the impetus 

 is finite, and it has been given once for all. It cannot 

 overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts is some- 

 times turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; 

 and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling 

 of this conflict. The first great scission that had to be 

 effected was that of the two kingdoms, vegetable and 

 animal, which thus happen to be mutually complementary, 

 without, however, any agreement having been made 

 between them. It is not for the animal that the plant 

 accumulates energy, it is for its own consumption; but 

 its expenditure on itself is less discontinuous, and less 

 concentrated, and therefore less efficacious, than was 

 required by the initial impetus of life, essentially directed 

 toward free actions: the same organism could not with 

 equal force sustain the two functions at once, of gradual 

 storage and sudden use. Of themselves, therefore, and 

 without any external intervention, simply by the effect 

 of the duality of the tendency involved in the original 

 impetus and of the resistance opposed by matter to this 

 impetus, the organisms leaned some in the first direction, 

 others in the second. To this scission there succeeded 

 many others. Hence the diverging lines of evolution, 

 at least what is essential in them. But we must take into 

 account retrogressions, arrests, accidents of every kind. 

 And we must remember, above all, that each species 

 behaves as if the general movement of life stopped at it 

 instead of passing through it. It thinks only of itself, 

 it lives only for itself. Hence the numberless struggles 



