H|be r&il it is endeavoring to leave. Of phenomena in ^Hhe simplest forms of life, it is hard to say whether they are still physical and chemical or whether they are already vital. Life had to enter thus into the habits of inert matter, in order to draw it little by little, magnetized, as it were, to another track. The animate forms that first appeared were therefore of extreme simplicity. Tliey were probably tiny masses of scarcely differentiated jirotoplaam, out- wardly resembling the amoeba observable to-day, but possessed of the tremendous internal push that was to rwse them even to the highest forms of life. That in virtue of this push the first organisms sought to grow as HiDuch as possible, seems hkely. But organized matter ■Qias a limit of expansion that is very quickly reached; ^pbeyond a certain point it divides instead of growing. Ages of effort, and prodigies of subtlety were probably necessary for life to get past this new obstacle. It suc- ceeded in inducing an increasing number of elements, ready to divide, to remain united. By the division of labor it knotted between them an indissoluble bond. The complex and quasi-discontinuous organism is thus made to function as would a continuous living mass which had simply grown bigger.
But the real and profound causes of division were those which life bore within its bosom. For hfe is tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a Bheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which its impetus is divided. This we observe in ourselves, in the evolution of that special tendency which we call our character. Each of us, glancing back over his history, will find that his child-p«rsonality, though in- divisible, united in itself divers persona, which could re- main blended just because they were in their nascent state: this indecision, so charged with promise, is one of the
greatest charms of childhood. But these interwoven personalities become incompatible in course of growth, and, as each of us can live but one life, a choice must perforce be made. We choose in reality without ceasing; without ceasing, also, we abandon many things. The route we pursue in time is strewn with the remains of all that we began to be, of all that we might have become. But nature, which has at command an incalculable number of lives, is in no wise bound to make such sacrifices. She preserves the different tendencies that have bifurcated with their growth. She creates with them diverging series of species that will evolve separately.
These series may, moreover, be of unequal imports ance. The author who begins a novel puts into his hero many things which he is obliged to discard as he goes on. Perhaps he will take them up later in other books, and make new characters with them, who will seem Uke extracts from, or rather like complements of, the first; but they will al- most always appear somewhat poor and limited in compari- son with the original character. So with regard to the evolution of life. The bifurcations on the way have been numerous, but there have been many blind alleys beside the two or three highways; and of these highways them- selves, only one, that which leads through the vertebrates up to man, has been wide enough to allow free passage to the full breath of life. We get this impression when we compare the societies of bees and ants, for instance, with human societies. The former are admirably ordered and united, but stereotyped ; the latter are open to every sort of progress, but divided, and incessantly at strife with themselves. The ideal would be a society always in progress and always in equilibrium, but this ideal is perhaps unrealizable: the two characteristics that would fain com- plete each other, which do complete each other in their
embryonic state, can no longer abide together Jprftcn they grow Btronger. If one could speak, otherwise than-toeta- phorically, of an impulse toward social life, it might "be-^aid tiiat the brunt of the impulse was borne along the lifte'of evolution ending at man, and that the rest of it was col- . lected on the road leading to the hymenoptera: the 80=^, cieties of ants and bees would thus present the aspect complementary to ours. But this would be only a manner of expression. There has been no particular impulse towards social hfe; there is simply the general movement of life, which on divergent hnes is creating forms ever new. If societies should appear on two of these lines, they ought to show divergence of paths at the same time as community of impetus. They will thus develop two classes of char- acteristics which we shall find vaguely complementary of each other.
So our study of the evolution movement will have to unravel a certain number of divergent directions, and to appreciate the importance of what has happened along each of them — in a word, to determine the nature of the dissociated tendencies and estimate their relative pro- portion. Combining these tendencies, then, we shall get an approximation, or rather an imitation, of the indivisible motor principle whence their impetus proceeds. Evo- lution will thus prove to be something entirely different from a series of adaptations to circumstances, as mechan- ism claims; entirely different also from the realization of a plan of the whole, as maintained by the doctrine of finality.
That adaptation to environment is the necessary con- dition of evolution we do not question for a moment. It is quite evident that a species would disappear, should it fwl to bend to the conditions of existence which are im- posed on it. But it is one thing to recognize that outer
102 . '•:;.- CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap"
circumstalitcee are forces evolution roust reckon with, another to claim that they are the directing causes of evqjHilon. This latter theory is that of mechanism. It es;eli[des absolutely the hypothesis of an original impetus, . I mean an internal push that has carried life, by more and more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies. Yet this impetus is evident, and a mere glance at fossil species shows us that life need not have evolved at all, or might have evolved only in very restricted limits, if it had chosen the alternative, much more convenient to itself, of be- coming anchylosed in its primitive forms. Certain Fora- minifera have not varied since the Silurian epoch. Un- moved witnesses of the innumerable revolutions that have upheaved our planet, the Lingulae are to-day what they were at the remotest times of the paleozoic era.
The truth is that adaptation explains the sinuosities of the movement of evolution, but not its general directions, still less the movement itself.' The road that leads to the town is obliged to follow the tips and downs of the hills; it adapts itself to the accidents of the ground ; but the accidents of the ground are not the cause of the road, nor have they given it its direction. At every moment they furnish it with what is indispensable, namely, the soil on which it lies; but if we consider the whole of the road, in- stead of each of its parts, the accidents of the ground appear only as impediments or causes of delay, for the road aims simply at the town and would fain be a straight line. Just BO as regartls the evolution of life and the circimistances through which it passes — with this difference, that evo- lution does not mark out a solitary route, that it takes directions without aiming at ends, and that it remains inventive even in its adaptations.
This view of adaptAlion has been DOted by M. F. M&rin in & re- nurkable article on the origin of spectes, "L'Origine dea espAoea" ilievut tdtntifiqut, Nov. ISOl, p. 580).
.1 Adaptation and Progress 103
But, if the evolution of life is something other than a series of adaptations to accidental circumstances, so also it is not the realization of a plan. A plan is given in advance. It is represented, or at least representable, before its realization. The complete axecution of it may be put off to a distant future, or even indefinitely; but the idea is none the less formulable at the present time, in terms actually given. If, on the contrary, evo- lution is a creation unceasingly renewed, it creates, as it goes on, not only the forms of life, but the ideas that will enable the intellect to understand it, the terras which will serve to express it. That is to say that its future overflows its present, and can not be sketched out therein in an idea.
There is the first error of finatism. It involves another, yet more serious.
If life realizes a plan, it ought to manifest a greater harmony the further it advances, just as the house shows better and better the idea of the architect as stone is set upon stone. If, on the contrary, the unity of life is to be found solely in the impetus that pushes it along the road of time, the harmony is not in front, but behind. The unity is derived from a vis a lergo: it is given at the start, as an impulsion, not placed at the end as an attraction. In communicating itself, the impetus splits up more and more. Life, in proportion to its progress, is scattered in mani Testations which undoubtedly owe to their coramon origi the fact that they are complementary to each other certain aspects, but which are none the less mutually incompatible and antagonistic. So the discord between species will go on increasing. Indeed, we have as yet only indicated the essential cause of it. We have sui>- posed, for the sake of simplicity, that each species received on to others, and that,
104 Creative Evolution
in every direction in which bfe evolves, the propagation is in a straight line. But, as a matter of fact, there are species which are arrested; there are some that retrogress. Evolution is not only a movement forward; in many cases we observe a marking-time, and still more often a deviation or turning back. It must be so, as we shall show further on, and the same causes that divide the evolution move- ment often cause life to be diverted from itself, hypnotized by the form it has just brought forth. Thence results an increasing disorder. No doubt there is progress, if pro- gress mean a continual advance in the general direction determined by a first impulsion; but this progress is ac- complished only on the two or three great lines of evolution on which forms ever more and more complex, ever more and more high, appear; between these Unes run a crowd of minor paths in which, on the contrary, deviations, arrests, and set-backs, are multiplied. The philosopher, who begins by laying down as a principle that each detail is connected with some general plan of the whole, goes from one disappointment to another as s?on as he comes to examine the facts; and, as he had put everything in the same rank, he finds that, as the result of not allowing for accident, he must regard everything as accidental. For accident, then, an allowance must first be made, and a very liberal allowance. We must recognize that all is not coherent in nature. By so doing, we shall be led to ascertain the centres around which the incoherence crystal- lizes. This crystallization itself will clarify the rest; the main directions will appear, in which life is moving whilst developing the original impulse. True, we shall not r/itness the detailed accomplishment of a plan. Nature is more and better than a plan in course of realization. A plan is a term assigned to a labor: it closes the future whoee form it indicates. Before the evolution of life, on
n.i
THE PLANT ;
the contrary, the portals of the future remain wide open. It is a creation that goes on for ever in virtue of an initial movement. This movement constitutes the unity of the organized world — a prolific unity, of an infinite rich- ness, superior to any that the intellect could dream of, for the intellect is only one of its aspects or products.