bergson's philosophy of the organism. 21 



these have been expressly characterised by Sir E. Ray 

 Lankester as " worthless and unprofitable matter," and 

 of interest only to the student of the aberrations and 

 monstrosities of the human mind. The biology of the 

 latter half of the nineteenth century was character- 

 istically mechanistic (or materialistic). How powerful 

 then must have been the impress left upon the minds of 

 those educated during" this period, when all the far more 

 significant developments of the first decade of our own 

 century have failed to remove this impression ! 



Let us assume now that the functioning of the 

 organism in .general consists in the relatively slow 

 accumulation of energy, and in the relatively rapid 

 liberation of this energy in controlled movements, and 

 that while these processes are purely mechanistic ones, 

 there is some tendency in the organism which gives them! 

 a direction different from that which we study in 

 inorganic processes. We have now to consider what is 

 the meaning of evolution. Why has life developed along 

 a multitude of diverging lines rather than in one 

 unilinear series ? If we think of the total mass of 

 organisms in comparison with the mass of the earth, we 

 are almost startled by its incredible paucity. The 

 surface of the land is covered by a film of vegetation of 

 the most extreme tenuity, but which is, nevertheless, of 

 greater mass than that of the animal life associated with 

 it. The sea, when compared with the land, probably 

 contains a greater quantity of life beneath each unit of 

 surface, but even here the volume of the organisms is 

 surprisingly small when compared with that of the water 

 in which they live. The range of temperature of which 

 we have experience covers several thousands of degrees, 

 but the manifestations of life are only completely 

 displayed within a range of less than 100 of these degrees. 



