THE EVOLUTIONARY RHYTHM 53 



at the same time completed by an antagonistic and com- 

 plementary tendency to associate, as if the manifold 

 unity of life, drawn in the direction of multiplicity, made 

 so much the more effort to withdraw itself on to itself. 

 A part is no sooner detached than it tends to reunite it- 

 self, if not to all the rest, at least to what is nearest to 

 it. Hence, throughout the whole realm of life, a balanc- 

 ing between individuation and association. Individuals 

 join together into a society; but the society, as soon as 

 formed, tends to melt the associated individuals into a 

 new organism, so as to become itself an individual, able 

 in its turn to be part and parcel of a new association. 

 . . . Thus, in rudimentary organisms consisting of a 

 single cell, we already find that the apparent individu- 

 ality of the whole is the composition of an undefined 

 number of potential individualities potentially associated. 

 But, from top to bottom of the series of living beings, 

 the same law is manifested. And it is this that we ex- 

 press when we say that unity and multiplicity are cate- 

 gories of inert matter, that the vital impetus is neither 

 pure unity nor pure multiplicity, and that if the matter 

 to which it communicates itself compels it to choose one 

 of the two, its choice will never be definitive : it will leap 

 from one to the other indefinitely. The evolution of life 

 in the double direction of individuality and association 

 has therefore nothing accidental about it: it is due to the 

 very nature of life." 



BERGSON: Creative Evolution, pp. 258-61. 



" A conscious society or a society is constituted, 

 then, by the fact that each of a number of individuals 

 holds a point of view which includes and is at the same 

 time perfectly distinct from the point of view of each 

 other. In other words, society is constituted by mutual 



