366 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



of the second. We must begin by mixing the reflex and 

 the voluntary. We must then go in quest of the fluid 

 reality which has been precipitated in this twofold form, 

 and which probably shares in both without being either. 

 At the lowest degree of the animal scale, in living beings 

 that are but an undifferentiated protoplasmic mass, the 

 reaction to stimulus does not yet call into play one definite 

 mechanism, as in the reflex; it has not yet choice among 

 several definite mechanisms, as in the voluntary act ; it is, 

 then, neither voluntary nor reflex, though it heralds both. 

 We experience in ourselves something of this true original 

 activity when we perform semi- voluntary and semi-auto- 

 matic movements to escape a pressing danger. And yet 

 this is but a very imperfect imitation of the primitive char- 

 acter, for we are concerned here with a mixture of two 

 activities already formed-, already localized in a brain 

 and in a spinal cord, whereas the original activity was a 

 simple thing, which became diversified through the very 

 construction of mechanisms like those of the spinal cord 

 and brain. But to all this Spencer shuts his eyes, because 

 it is of the essence of his method to recompose the con- 

 solidated with the consolidated, instead of going back 

 to the gradual process of consolidation, which is evolution 

 itself. 



Is it, finally, the question of the correspondence between 

 mind and matter? Spencer is right in defining the in- 

 tellect by this correspondence. He is right in regarding 

 it as the end of an evolution. But when he comes to re- 

 trace this evolution, again he integrates the evolved with 

 the evolved — failing to see that he is thus taking useless 

 trouble, and that in positing the slightest fragment of 

 the actually evolved he posits the whole — so that it is 

 vain for him, then, to pretend to make the genesis of it. 



For, according to him, the phenomena that succeed 



