Association Increases Vital Intensity 309 



forgetting entirely the former. Since the groups 

 capable of association are at least as numerous as 

 those which cannot associate, the basic error of the 

 philosophy of force is one-sided reasoning. It sees 

 Nature only from one point of view and there- 

 fore sees it falsely. As soon as we consider that 

 association includes all living beings from the most 

 invisible infusoria up to man, we can imagine what 

 an enormous mass of facts it has completely ignored. 

 The philosophy of force describes dramatically 

 the innumerable battles which have been fought 

 since remotest antiquity and concludes, as a result 

 of these conflicts, that superior types have been 

 developed. But not the slightest allusion is made 

 to the fact of association. The question is never 

 raised. Why are certain types superior; why is 

 man superior to the amoeba? The superiority 

 comes, of course, from the fact that man is an 

 extremely complex association of trillions of 

 cellules, while the amoeba is a mono-cellular 

 being. The philosophy of force, however, does 

 not consider it necessary to dwell for an instant 

 on the effect which association could have upon 

 the perfection of the species. It is evident that 

 even if mono-cellular beings had massacred each 

 other with a hundred times the rapidity that we 

 observe in Nature, they would not have made the 

 slightest progress if they had not been associated. 

 If the philosophers of force had not pretended to 

 raise a scientific structure upon such a unilateral 

 foundation, they would not have forgotten the 



