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Creative Evolution — Henri Bergson (trans. Arthur Mitchell, 1911)

Creative Evolution (1911), ch. I, trans. Arthur Mitchell

Preserved in the archive of the housea source of Henri Bergson

The passage held in the archive
“Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.”— Creative Evolution (1911), ch. I, trans. Arthur Mitchell

The complete text — part 38 of 65

seem to us to take living genera as models. Thus the vital order, such as it is offered to us piecemeal in experi- ence, presents the same character and performs the same function as the physical order: both cause experience to repeat itself, both enable our mind to generalise. In reality, this character has entirely different origins in the two cases, and ovea opposite meanings. In the second case, the type of this character, its ideal limit, as also its founda- tion, is the geometrical necessity in virtue of which the same components give the same resultant. In the first case, this character involves, on the contrary, the interven- tion of something which manages to obtain the same total effect although the infinitely complex elementary causes may be quite different. We insisted on this last point in our first chapter, when we showed how identical structures are to be met with on independent lines of evo- lution. But, without looking so far, we may presume that the reproduction only of the type of the ancestor by his descendants is an entirely different thing from the repetition of the same composition of forces which yields an identical resultant. When we think of the infinity of infinitesimal elements and of infinitesimal causes that concur in the genesis of a living being, when we reflect that the alasence or the deviation of one of them would spoil everj-lhing, the first impulse of the mind is to consider this army of little workers as watched over by a skilled foreman, the "vital principle," which is ever repairing faults, correcting effects of neglect or absentmindedness, putting things back in place : this is how we try to express the difference between the physical and the vital order, the former making the same combination of causes give the same combined effect, the latter securing the con- itancy of the effect even when there is some wavering

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in the causes. But that is only a comparison; on re- flection, we find that there can i>e no foreman, for the very simple reason that there are no workers. The causes and elements that physico-chemical analysis discovers are real causes and elements, no doubt, as far as the facts of organic destruction are concerned; they are then limited in number. But vital phenomena, properly so called, or facts of organic creation open up to us, when we analyze them, the perspective of an analysis passing away to infinity: whence it may be inferred that the manifold causes and elements are here only views of the mind, at- tempting an ever closer and closer imitation of the operation of nature, white the operation imitated is an indivisible act. The hkeness between individuals of the same species has thus an entirely different meaning, an entirely difTerent origin, to that of the hkeness iwtwecn complex effects ob- tained by the same composition of the same causes. But in the one case as in the other, there is likeness, and consequently possible generalization. And as that is all that interests us in practice, since our daily life is and must be an expectation of the same things and the same situations, it is natural that this common character, essential from the point of view of our action, should bring the two orders together, in spite of a merely internal diversity between them which interests speculation only. Hence the idea of a general order of nature, everywhere the same, hovering over hfe and over matter abke. Hence our habit of designating by the same word and represent- ing in the same way the existence of laws in the domain of inert matter and that of genera in the domain of life.

Now, it will be found that this confusion is the origin
of most of the difficulties raised by the problem of know-
ledge, among the ancients as well as among the modems.
The generality of laws and that of genera having been

V designati

designated by the same word and subsumed under the Bame idea, the geometrical order and the vital order are accord- ingly confused together. According to the point of view, the generality of laws is explained by that of genera, or that of genera by that of laws. The first view is character- istic of ancient thought; the second belongs to modem philosophy. But in both ancient and modem philosophy the idea of "generality" is an equivocal idea, uniting in its denotation and in its connotation incompatible objects and elements. In both there are grouped under the same concept two kinds of order which are alite only in the facihty they give to our action on things. We bring together the two terms in virtue of a quite external like- ness, which justifies no doubt their designation by the same word for practice, but which does not authorize us at all, in the speculative domain, to confuse them in the same definition.

The ancients, indeed, did not ask why nature submits to laws, but why it is ordered according to genera. The idea of genus corresponds more especially to an objective reality in the domain of life, where it expresses an un- questionable fact, heredity. Indeed, there can only be genera where there are individual objects; now, while the organized being is cut out from the general mass of matter by his very organization, that is to say naturally, it is our perception which cuts inert matter into distinct bodies. It is guided in this by the interests of action, by the nascent reactions that our body indicates — that is, aa we have shown elsewhere," by the potential genera that are trying to gain existence. In this, then, genera and individuals determine one another by a semi-artificial operation entirely relative to our future action on things. Nevertheless the ancients did not hesitate to put all genera I Matiire et niimoire, cbapt«rB iii. aad iv.

228 Creative Evolution

in the same rank, to attribute the same absolute existence to all of them. Reality thus being a system of genera, it is to the generality of the genera (that is, in effect, to the generality expressive of the vital order) that the generality of laws itself had to be brought. It is interest- ing, in this respect, to compare the Aristotehan theory of the fall of bodies with the explanation famished by Galileo. Aristotle is concerned solely with the concepts "high" and "low," "oi^ti proper place" as distinguished from "place occupied," "natural movement" and "forced movement;"' the physical law in virtue of which the stone falls expresses for him that the stone regains the " natural place" of all stones, to wit, the earth. The stone, in his view, is not quite stone so long as it is not in its normal place; in faUing back into this place it aims at complet- ing itself, like a Hving being that grows, thus realizing fully the essence of the genua stone.' If this concep- tion of the physical law were exact, the law would no longer be a mere relation established by the mmd; the Bubdivision of matter into bodies would no longer be relative to our faculty of perceiving; all bodies would have the same individuality as living bodies, and the laws of the physical universe would express relations of real kinship between real genera. We know what kind of physics grew out of this, and how, for having believed in a science unique and final, embracing the totality of the real and at one with the absolute, the ancients were confined, in fact, to a more or less clumsy interpretation of the physical in terms of the vital.

But there is the same confusion in the modems, with this difference, however, that the relation between the

Sea in porticuUr, Phyg.. iv. 2i;i a 2; v. 230 b 12; viii. 255 a 2; and De Catio, iv. 1-5; ii. 206 b 27; iv. 308 a 34.

• D« Caelo, iv. 310 a 34 rd d'th Tbv ainou nwrov ffipidai ckoozov r6 lit id ourou udoa can ipipsaOaj.

LAWS .

i GENERA

two terms is inverted : laws are no longer reduced to genera, but genera to laws; and science, still supposed to be uniquely one, becomes altogether relative, instead of being, as the ancients wished, altogether at one with the absolute. A noteworthy fact is the eclipse of the problem of genera in modem philosophy. Our theory of knowledge turns ahnost entirely on the question of laws: genera are left to make shift with laws sb best they can. The reason is, that modem philosophy has its point of departure in the great astronomical and physical discoveries of modem times. The laws of Kepler and of Galileo have remained for it the ideal and unique type of all knowledge. Now, a law is a relation between things or between facts. More precisely, a law of mathematical form expresses the fact that a certain magnitude is a function of one or several other variables appropriately chosen. Now, the choice of the variable magnitudes, the distribution of nature into objects and into facts, has already something of the contingent and the conventional. But, admitting that the choice is hinted at, if not prescribed, by experience, the law remains none the less a relation, and a relation is essentially a comparison; it has objective reality only for an intelligence that represents to itself several terms at the same time. This intelligence may be neither mine nor yours: a science which bears on laws may therefore be an objective science, which experience con- tains in advance and which we simply make it disgorge; but it is none the less tme that a comparison of some kind must be eflfected here, impersonally if not by any one in particular, and that an experience made of laws, that is, of terms related to other terms, is an experience made of comparisons, which, before we receive it, has already had to pass through an atmosphere of intellectuality. The idea of a science and of an experience entirely relative to the

230 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iokap.

human understanding was therefore implicitly contuned in the conception of a science one and integral, composed of laws: Kant only brought it to light. But this con- ception is the result of an arbitrary confusion between the generality of laws and that of genera. Though an in- telligence be necessary to condition terms by relation to each other, we may conceive that in certain cases the terms themselves may exist independently. And if, beside relations of tenn to term, experience also presents to us independent terms, the living genera being something quite different from systems of laws, one half, at least, of our knowledge bears on the " thing-in-itself," the very reality. This knowledge may be very difficult, just be- cause it no longer builds up its own object and is obliged, on the contrary, to submit to it ; but, however little it cuts into its object, it is into the absolute itself that it bites. We may go further: the other half of knowledge is no longer so radically, so definitely relative as certain philoso- phers say, if we can establish that it bears on a reahty of inverse order, a reality which we always express in mathematical laws, that is to say in relations that imply comparisons, but which lends itself to this work only because it is weighted with spatiahty and consequently with geometry. Be that as it may, it is the confusion of two kinds of order that lies behind the relativism of the modems, as it lay behind the dogmatism of the ancients. We have said enough to mark the origin of this con- fusion. It is due to the fact that the "vital" order, which is essentially creation, is manifested to us less in its essence than in some of its accidents, those which imitate the physical and geometrical order; hke it, they present to ua repetitions that make generalization possible, and in that we have all that interests us. There is no doubt that life as a whole is an evolution, that is, an unceasing