CONTINUITY OF BERGSON's THOUGHT 1 77 



The whole organism corresponds to the whole effort of Nature, but the 

 parts which we see in an organism do not correspond to parts of that 

 effort: just as the movements of certain muscles and nerves do not 

 correspond to parts of my effort in raising my arm. The materiality 

 of this (Nature's) machine does not represent a sum of means employed, 

 but a sum of obstacles avoided. Thus vision should attain by right 

 an infinity of things, but most of them are in fact not accessible to our 

 eyes. The vision of a living being is limited to objects (vibrations) 

 upon which that being can act. Distant objects are small, others 

 invisible. Thus seeing in general is canalized; and the apparatus of 

 seeing is the canal which limits the vision in general of the elan vital, 

 or life impulse. A river rushing along its bed is not accounted for by 

 the earth of the banks nor by a drawing of its course, though both are 

 important aspects of its real reason for existence. Suppose you 

 thrust your hand into a heap of iron filings; now suppose the hand to be 

 invisible. Some will account for the arrangement by studying the 

 arrangement of the filings themselves and the forces that are acting among 

 them. Others will suppose that some definite design and designer was 

 needed to arrange the separate atoms; but in reality the whole thing came 

 from a simple impulse which threw off the mechanism and the design as 

 mere by-products. Such is the action of the life impulse in its effort 

 to act upon inert matter. The greater the effort of the hand, the 

 farther it will enter the heap of filings, but at every stage there will be 

 a complete and co-ordinated arrangement and design. There cannot be 

 a partial co-ordination because the act is simple and whole at every 

 stage. Thus in the case of the eye, the form of the organ represents the 

 depth to which the visual process has attained and accordingly the eye 

 is the same in the most differing species if the progress toward vision 

 has gone equally far in both. Not that the elan vital has a clear idea 

 of any progress toward vision. Life is a tendency to act on inert matter, 

 and vision or visual perception proves to be precisely one of the possible 

 modes of such action. 



The Life-Force Divides and We Get Plants and Animals 

 The elan vital encounters inert matter and bends to physical 

 forces. 



