Professor Henri Bergson’s Biology. 83 
Perhaps it is not going too far to say that this view of the larger variations 
or mutations, as experiments in organismal self-expression, is one which many 
a biologist will accept. Is it very different from Galton’s conception of the 
germ getting into a new position of organic equilibrium? Is it very different 
from Weismann’s conception of the hereditary biophors passing through 
struggle into harmony, constituting themselves a new unity at the start of 
each life? We have got away—much farther away than Bergson thinks— from 
the idea of variations as random freaks cropping up in all directions anyhow. 
There’s a method in the changes of Proteus even when he seems most. mad. 
THE GENERAL ASCENT OF LIFE. 
With bold strokes Bergson sketches the significant steps in the ascent of 
life. How vividly he makes us see the primeval parting of the ways, the 
first and ever-recurrent choice, the fundamental dichotomy of variation— 
between swimming and drifting, between activity and passivity, between 
thrust and parry, between relatively preponderant katabolism and relatively 
preponderant anabolism. Let us image the primitive Protist—a corpuscle 
-of protoplasm that can experience. “Two courses are open to it. Hither 
it may follow the path leading towards movement, action—action growing 
more and more complex, more and more deliberate and free as time goes on: 
this means adventure and risk, but means also a consciousness more and 
more wide awake and luminous. Or, on the contrary, giving up the faculty 
of movement and choice that it possesses, even though of course in a very 
feeble degree, it may decide to fix itself just where it finds suitable conditions 
of life which will do away with the necessity of going to seek the materials 
if requires: that means an assured and tranquil life, a humdrum sort of 
existence, but it involves the drowsiness which dogs our inactivity, it involves 
the slumber of consciousness.” 
The first line is in the main that of animal evolution, the second in the 
main that of plant evolution—in the main since some animals sink into 
vegetative torpor, and some plants have begun to stretch themselves half- 
awakening. 
“In proportion as plants and animals differentiated, life split up into 
two kingdoms, of which one, the less concerned with movement, was more 
concerned with making the explosive, whilst the other confined itself to 
making use of it.’ The plant, being able to feed at a low chemical level 
does not need to retain much movement or feeling. Of course we must 
not exaggerate the contrast. For just as some animals are only half awake, 
so some plants are not quite soundly asleep. They have their movements 
and an exquisite sensitiveness. The impressionability of chlorophyll is 
