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

transformation. But life can progress only by means of the living, which are its depositaries. Innumerable living beings, almost alike, have to repeat each other in space and in time for the novelty they are working out to grow and mature. It is like a book that advances towards a new edition by going through thousands of reprints with thousands of copies. There is, however, this difference between the two cases, that the successive impressions are identical, as well as the simultaneous copies of the SEime impression, whereas representatives of one and the same species are never entirely the same, either in different points of space or at different moments of tune. Heredity does not only transmit characters; it transmits also the impetus in virtue of which the characters are modified, and this impetus is vitality itself. That is why we say that the repetition which serves as the base of our generalizations is essential in the physical order, accidental in the vital order. The physical order is "automatic;" the vital order is, I will not say voluntary, but analogous to the order "willed."

Now, as soon as we have clearly distinguished be-
tween the order that is "willed" and the order that is
"automatic," the ambiguity that underlies the idea of
disorder is dissipated, and, with it, one of the principal
difficulties of the problem of knowledge.

The main problem of the theory of knowledge is to know how science is possible, that is to say, in effect, why there is order and not disorder in things. That order exists is a fact. But, on the other hand, disorder, which appears to us to be less than order, is, it seems, of right. The existence of order is then a mystery to be cleared up, at any rate a problem to be solved. More simply, when we undertake to found order, we regard it ae contingent, if not in things, at least as viewed by

lOHAP,

the mind: of a thing that we do not judge to be contingent we do not require an explanation. If order did not appear to U8 as a conquest over something, or as an addition to something (which something is thought to be the "ab- sence of order"), ancient realism would not have spoken of a "matter" to which the Idea superadded itself, nor would modem idealism have supposed a "sensuous mani- fold" that the understanding organizes into nature. Now, it is unquestionable that all order is contingent, and conceived as such. But contingent in relation to what? The reply, to our thinking, is not doubtful. An order is contingent, and seems so, in relation to the inverse order, as verse is contingent in relation to prose and prose in relation to verse. But, just as all speech which is not prose is verse and necessarily conceived as verse, just as all speech which is not verse is prose and necessarily con- ceived as prose, so any state of things that is not one of the two orders is the other and is necessarily conceived as the other. But it may happen that we do not realize what we are actually thinking of, and perceive the idea really present to our mind only through a mist of affective states. Any one can be convinced of this by considering the use we make of the idea of disorder in daily life. When I enter a room and pronounce it to be "in disorder," what do I mean? The position of each object is explained by the automatic movements of the person who has slept in the room, or by the efficient causes, whatever they may be, that have caused each article of furniture, clothing, etc., to be where it is: the order, in the second sense of the word, is perfect. But it is order of the first kind that I am expecting, the order that a methodical person con- Bciously puts into his life, the willed order and not the automatic: so I call the absence of this order "disorder." At bottom, all there is that is real, perceived and even

The Two Kinds of Order

cOQCKved, in this absence of one of the two kinds of order, is the presence of the other. But the second is indifferent to me, / am interested only in the first, and I express the presence of the second as a function of the first, instead of expressing it, so to speak, as a function of itself, by saying it is disorder. Inversely, when we affirm that we are imagining a chaos, that is to say a state of tilings in which the physical world no longer obej3 laws, what are we thinking of? We imagine facts that appear and disappear capriciously. First we think of the physical universe as we know it, with effects and causes well proportioned to each other; then, by a series of arbitrary decrees, we aug- ment, diminish, suppress, so as to obtain what we call disorder. In reality we have substituted mil for the mechanism of nature; we have replaced the "automatic order" by a multitude of elementary wills, just to the extent that we imagine the apparition or vanishing of phenomena. No doubt, for all these little wills to constitute a "willed order," they must have accepted the direction of a higher will. But, on looking closely at them, we see that that is just what they do: our own will 'is there, which objectifies itself in each of these capricious wills in tmn, and takes good care not to connect the same with the same, nor to permit the effect to be proportional to the cause — in fact makes one simple intention hover over the whole of the elementary vohtions. Thus, here again, the absence of one of the two orders consists in the presence of the other. In analyzing the idea of chance, which is closely akin to the idea of disorder, we find the same elements. When the wholly mechanical play of the causes which stop the wheel on a number makes nne win, and consequently acts like a good genius, careful of my interests, or when the wholly mechanical force of the wind tears a tile off the roof and throws it on to my head, that is to say acts like

a bad genius, conspiring against my person: in both cases I find a mechanism where I should have looked for, where, indeed, it seems as if I ought to have found, an intention. That is what I express in speaking of chance. And of an anarchical world, in which phenomena succeed each other capriciously, I should say again that it is a realm of chance, meaning that I find before me wills, or rather decrees, when what I am expecting is mechanism. Thus is ex- plained the singular vaciUation of the mind when it tries to define chance. Neither efficient cause nor final cause can furnish the definition sought. The mind swings to and fro, unable to rest, between the idea of an absence of final cause and that of an absence of efficient cause, each of these definitions sending it back to the other. The problem remains insoluble, in fact, so long as the idea of chance is regarded as a pure idea, without mixture of feeJ- ing. But, in reality, chance merely objectifies the state of mind of one who, expecting one of the two kinds of order, finds himself confronted with the other. Chance and disorder are therefore necessarily conceived as relative. So if we wish to represent them to ourselves as absolute, we perceive that we are going to and fro like a shuttle between the two kinds of order, passing into the one just at the moment at which we might catch ourself in the other, and that the supposed absence of all order is really the presence of both, with, besides, the swaying of a mind that cannot rest finally in either. Neither in things nor in our idea of things can there be any question of presenting this disorder as the substratum of order, since it implies the two kinds of order and is made of their combination.

But our intelhgence is not stopped by this. By a simple aic ju6€0 it posits a disorder which is an "absence of order." In so doing it thinks a word or a set of words,

Of Order

nothing more. If it seeks to attach an idea to the word, it finds that disorder may indeed be the negation of order, but that this negation is then the implicit affirmation of the presence of the opposite order, which we shut our eyes to because it does not interest us, or which we evade by deny- ing the second order in its turn — that is, at bottom, by re-establishing the first. How can we speaii, then, of an incoherent diversity which an understanding organizes? It is no use for us to say that no one supposes this inco- herence to be reaUzed or realizable: when we speak of it, we believe we are thinking of it; now, in analyzing the idea actually present, we find, as we said before, only the disappointment of the mind confronted with an order that does not interest it, or a swaying of the mind between two kinds of order, or, finally, the idea pure and simple of the empty word that we have created by joining a negative prefix to a word which itself signifies some- thing. But it IB this analysis that we neglect to make. We omit it, precisely because it does not occur to ua to distinguish two kinds of order that are irreducible to one another.

We said, indeed, that all order necessarily appears as contingent. If there are two kinds of order, this con- tingency of order is explained: one of the forms is con- tingent in relation to the other. Where I find the geo- metrical order, the vital was possible; where the order is vital, it might have been geometrical. But suppose that the order is everywhere of the same kind, and simply admits of degrees which go from the geometrical to the vital: if a determinate order still appears to me to be contingent, and can no longer be so by relation to an order of another kind, I shall necessarily believe that the order is contingent by relation to an absence of itself, that is to say by relation to a state of things "in which there is no order at all."

And this state of things I shall believe that I am think- ing of, because it is implied, it seems, in the very con- tingency of order, which is an unquestionable fact. I sliall therefore place at the summit of the hierarchy the vita! order; then, as a diminution or lower complication of it, the geometrical order; and finally, at the bottom of all, an absence of order, incoherence itself, on which order ia superposed. This is why incoherence has the effect on me of a word behind which there must be something real, if not in things, at least in thought. But if I observe that the state of things implied by the contingency of a determinate order is simply the presence of the contrary order, and if by this very fact I posit two kinds of order, each the inverse of the other, I perceive that no inter- mediate degrees can be imagined between the two orders, and that there is no going down from the two orders to the "incoherent." Either the incoherent is only a word, devoid of meaning, or, if I give it a meaning, it is on con- dition of putting incoherence midway between the two orders, and not below both of them. There is not first the incoherent, then the geometrical, then the vital; there is only the geometrical and the vital, and then, by a swaying of the mind between them, the idea of the in- coherent. To speak of an uncoordinated diversity to which order is superadded is therefore to commit a veritable petitio prindpii; for in imagining the uncoordinated we really posit an order, or rather two.

This long analysis was necessary to show how the real can pass from tension to extension and from freedom to mechanical necessity by way of inversion. It was not enough to prove that this relation between the two terms is suggested to us, at once, by consciousness and by sensible experience. It was necessary to prove that the geometrical