170 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



aim at real independence, and to resemble the whole universe in being 

 creative and in enduring. Aging is memory organized ; the body is a 

 record of experiences endured: aging cannot be explained by merely 

 mechanical causes, as some have attempted to explain it. Organic 

 growth is absolutely incalculable because it is impossible to gather 

 the data before the growth has actually occurred. Physics and 

 chemistry never touch life and movement. May we not say that 

 life is just continuous creation ? 



Evolution Theory in General Is Considered as Accepted 



Bergson accepts transformism as the most probable account of 

 biological development. He thinks the facts of embryology, paleon- 

 tology and comparative anatomy establish this hypothesis. But even 

 if species were proved to be discontinuous creations, the classifications 

 of biology would remain, and paleontology would prove that the acts 

 of special creation occurred in the transformed order. Philosophy 

 needs no more for its purposes than this logical or ideal kinship of 

 species. In this sense, evolution certainly occurred somehow: either 

 in creative design, or in immanent vitalism or in some other hidden 

 manner which still acted as if by the rules of transformism. Life 

 arose at a certain moment in certain points of space: it was a real 

 visible current: it has a continuous progress through the germ-cells of 

 living organisms. Organic evolution is thus in strict analogy with 

 consciousness itself, its past always creating its present, and biting 

 into its future. Physicists and physiologists are sometimes inclined 

 toward mechanism, Bergson says, but histologists, embryogenists and 

 naturalists are slower to believe in vital action as explicable without 

 some psychic factor. Of course, the amoeba is quite mechanical, but 

 then it is not advanced on the phylogenetic scale, and represents the 

 point at which life is just breaking in to the material world: besides, 

 the amoeba itself presents some curious problems to pure mechanism. 

 La Place, DuBois-Reymond and Huxley hold that a sufficient 

 intellect could describe any future state of the world, if he had the 

 facts about atoms, forces, etc., at any one moment. From this point 

 of view, duration really does not exist; time is a name, not a reality. 



