CO 
Professor Henri Bergson’s Biology. 1 
a day? Or itis like a whirlpool in the river, always changing, yet always 
the same. And it shows what Huxley called “ cyclical development,” always 
re-creating itself. Does development ever stop, even when it turns upon 
itself in old age? Whether we study the rudiments of behaviour in an 
Infusorian or the formation of habit in a dog, we see that the organism 
trades with time. 
Whether organisms began as insurgent fragments segregating themselves 
off from a primeval mass of colloidal carbonaceous slime (activated by 
ferments), or very much otherwise, as is also possible, must it not have been 
one of their fundamental insignia that they could somehow enregister within 
themselves their experience? Bergson’s view, at any rate, is that with 
conscious living beings there emerged “a force essentially free and essentially 
memory, a force whose very character is to pile up the past on the past, like 
a rolling snowball, and at every instant of duration to organise with this past 
something new which is a real creation.” 
In a popular sort of way we may speak of a stone having a history, and 
with genial imagination the geologist often treats it very effectively as if 
wt were an organism. Of a truth, one often feels that stones, like opals and 
beryls and agates, are guardians of unreadable experiences. Yet on the 
whole, it seems clear that a stone does not trade with time, as every organism 
does. The stone that falls ever back on toiling Sisyphus Jeans nothing 
through the dread eternity. Time does not bite into a thing, but only into 
flesh and blood. Its bite is most marked in higher organisms where there 
is a good deal to bite at. “The more duration marks the living being with 
its imprint, the more obviously the organism differs from a mere mechanism, 
over which duration glides without penetrating.” 
Bergson, like every good vitalist, is of course quite clear that the organism 
is bound up with the rest of extension, and “subject to the same physical 
and chemical laws that govern any and every portion of matter.” But the 
organism transcends this order of interpretation, it is ‘‘a closed-off system,” 
heterogeneous and yet one, more or less of an individual that endures. “Its 
past, in its entirety, is prolonged into its present, and abides there, actual and 
acting... . Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in 
which time is being inscribed.” Time counts. In the mechanistic outlook 
_ “Time is assumed to have just as much reality for a living being as for an 
hour-glass, in which the top part empties while the lower fills, and all goes 
where it was before when you turn the glass upside down.” But the 
development of an organism implies a continual recording of experience, a 
persistence of the past in the present. “The present moment of a living 
body does not find its explanation in the moment immediately before ; a/l the 
VOL. XIX. EF 
