266 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



pre-figured in the evolutionary movement. It cannot 

 even be said to be the outcome of the whole of evolution, 

 for evolution has been accomplished on several divergent 

 lines, and while the human species is at the end of one of 

 them, other lines have been followed with other species 

 at their end. It is in a quite different sense that we hold 

 humanity to be the ground of evolution. 



From our point of view, life appears in its entirety 

 as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, spreads 

 outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circum- 

 ference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one 

 single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion 

 has passed freely. It is this freedom that the human 

 form registers. Everywhere but in man, consciousness 

 has had to come to a stand; in man alone it has kept on 

 its way. Man, then, continues the vital movement in- 

 definitely, although he does not draw along with him all 

 that life carries in itself. On other lines of evolution there 

 have traveled other tendencies which life implied, and of 

 which, since everything interpenetrates, man has, doubt- 

 less, kept something, but of which he has kept only very 

 little. It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may 

 call, as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize 

 himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of 

 himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest 

 of the animal world, and even by the vegetable world, 

 at least in what these have that is positive and above the 

 accidents of evolution. 



From this point of view, the discordances of which 

 nature offers us the spectacle are singularly weakened. 

 The organized world as a whole becomes as the soil on 

 which was to grow either man himself or a being who 

 morally must resemble him. The animals, however 

 distant they may be from our species, however hostile 



