110 The Bible of Nature 



There seems a great deal to be said for the view 

 that many of the activities in animals which we 

 call mere reflexes, are, as it were, the degraded 

 stages of activities which were to begin with self- 

 determined or purposive — profitably degraded, for 

 the agent thus becomes freer to solve new prob- 

 lems. In so saying, however, we need not re- 

 turn to the old and probably quite erroneous 

 theory that "instincts" arose from "lapsed in- 

 telligence," which is a separate question. In any 

 case we may agree that even simple actions of 

 simple creatures illustrate what we must call uni- 

 fied behavior, which is effective and adaptive, di- 

 rected by the creature itself. Even spermatozoa 

 always swim against the stream. A self-acting, 

 self-regulating, self-adjusting, self-preserving ma- 

 chine is no longer a machine. As a unity the or- 

 ganism lives, as a unity it develops, as a unity it 

 evolves. 



We may refer here to the important discussion 

 of the whole subject of organisms and their evo- 

 lution, which is given by Professor Bergson in his 

 illuminating book, "UEvolution Creatrice." He 

 points out that one of the reasons why we boggle 

 so much over the puzzle of life is that our infelh- 

 gence is most at home among mechanical things — 

 solids and their movements. It was trained in this 

 school long before there was any philosophical 

 biology. The organism bursts the categories of 



