I if they are considered, it is in order to count therein fresh oorrespondences, between which again we shall not care nrhai happens. Common sense, which ia occupied with detached objects, and also science, which considers isolated systems, are concerned only with the ends of the intervals and not with the intervals themselves. Therefore the flow of time might assume an infinite rapidity, the entire past, present, and future of material objects or of isolated i^stems might be spread out all at once in space, without there being anything to change either in the formulae of the scientist or even in the language of common sense. The number ( would always stand for the same thing; it would still count the same number of correspondences between the states of the objects or systems and the points of the line, ready drawn, which would be then the "course of time. "
Yet succession Is an undeniable fact, even in the material world. Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that their "history, past, present, and future, might be instantaneously unfurled hke a fan, this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself grsidually, as if it occupied a duration hke our own. If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, witly nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not that mathematical time wliich would «pply equally well to the entire history of the material 'orld, even' if that liistory were spread out instantaneously
(QHAF.
in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived. It Is no longer a relation, it is an absolute. What else can this mean than that the glass of water, the sugar, and the process of the sugar'3 melting in the water are abstractions, and that the Whole within which they have been cut out by my senses and un- derstanding progre^es, it may be in the manner of a consciousness?
Certainly, the operation by which science isolates and closes a system is not altogether artificial. If it had no objective foundation, we could not explain why it is clearly indicated in some cases and impossible in others. We shall see that matter has a tendency to constitute isdable systems, that can be treated geometrically. In fact, we shall define matter by just this tendency But it is only a tendency. Matter does not go to the end, and the isolation is never complete. If science does go to the end and isolate completely, it is for convenience of study; it is understood that the so-called isolated system remains subject to certain external influences. Science merely leaves these alone, either because it finds them sli^t enough to be negligible, or t>ecauae it intends to take them into account later on. It is none the less true that these influences are so many threads which bind up the system to another more extensive, and to this a third which in- cludes both, and so on to the system most objectively isolated and most independent of all, the solar system com- plete. But, even here, the isolation is not absolute. Our sun radiates heat and light beyond the farthest planet. And, on the other hand, it moves in a certain fixed direction, drawing with it the planets and their satellites. The thread attaching it to the rest of the universe is doubtless
Unorganized Bodies
^Hvery tenuous. Nevertheless it is along this thread that is transmitted down to the sniallest particle of the world in which we live the duration immanent to the whole of the universe.
The universe endures. The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new. The systems marked off by scieoce endure only because they are bound up inseparably with the rest of the universe. It is true that in the universe itself two opposite movements are to be disttDguisbed, as we shall see later on, "descent" and "ascent." The first only unwinds a roll ready prepared. In principle, it might be accomplished almost instantaneously, like releasing a spring. But the ascending movement, which corresponds to an inner work of ripening or creating, endures essentially, and imposes its rhythm on the first, which is inseparable from it.
There is no reason, therefore, why a duration, and so a fonn of existence like our own, should not be attributed to the systems that science isolates, provided such sys- tems are reintegrated into the Whole. But they must be 80 reintegrated. The same is even more obviously _ true of the objects cut out by our perception. The dis- ^■tinct outlines which we see in an object, and which ^ve Bit its individuality, are only the design of a certain kind of injluence that we might exert on a certain point of space: it is the plan of our eventual actions that is sent back to our eyes, as though by a mirror, when we see the surfaces and edges of things. Suppress this action, and with it consequently those main directions which by perception are traced out for it in the entanglement of the real, and the individuality of the body is re-absorbed in the universal interaction which, without doubt, is reality itself.
CREATIVE EVOLXmON
Now, we have considered material objects generally. Are there not some objects privileged? The bodies we perceive are, so to speak, cut out of the stuff of nature by our perceplion, and the scissors follow, in some way, the marking of lines along which action might be taken. But the body which is to perform this action, the body which marks out upon matter the design of its eventual actions even before they are actual, the body that has only to point its sensory organs on the flow of the real in order to make that flow crystallize into definite forms and thus to create all the other bodies — in short, the living body — is this a body as others are?
Doubtless it, also, consists in a portion of extension bound up with the rest of extension, an intimate part of the Whole, subject to the same physical and chemical laws that govern any and every portion of matter. But, while the subdivision of matter into separate bodies is relative to our perception, while the building up of closed- off systems of material points is relative to our science, the living body has been separated and closed off by nature herself. It is composed of unlike parts that complete each other. It performs diverse functions that involve each other. It is an individual, and of no other object, not even of the crystal, can this be said, for a crystal has neither difference of parts nor diversity of functions. No doubt, it is hard to decide, even in the organized world, what is individual and what is not. The difficulty is great, even in the animal kingdom; with plants it is almost insurmountable. This difficulty is, moreover, due to profound causes, on which we shall dwell later. We shall see that individuality admits of any number of degrees, and that it is not fully realized anj-where, even in man. But that is no reason for thinking it is not a character- istic property of life. The biologist who proceeds as a
Organized Bodies
Jgeometridan is too ready to take advantage here of our "inability to give a precise and general definition of in- dividuality. A perfect definition applies only to a com- pleted reality; now, vital properties are never entirely t realized, though always on the way to become so; they are not so much stales as tendencies. And a tendency achieves all that it aims at only if it is not thwarted by another tendency. How, then, could this occur in the domain of life, where, as we shall show, the interaction of antagonistic tendencies is always implied? In particu- lar, it may be said of individuality that, while the ten- dency to individuate is everywhere present in the organized world, it is everywhere opposed by the tendency towards reproduction. For the individuality to be perfect, it would be necessary that no detached part of the organism
(could live separately. But then reproduction would be impossible. For what is reproduction, but the building up of a new organism with a detached fragment of the old? Individuality therefore harbors its enemy at home. Its very need of perpetuating itself in time condemns it never to be complete in space. The biologist must take due account of both tendenciee in every instance, and it is therefore useless to ask him for a definition of individuality that shaU fit all cases and work automatically, & But too often one reasons about the things of life in Htbe same way as about the conditions of crude matter. " Nowhere is the confusion so evident as in discussions about individuality. We are shown the stumps of a Lum- briculus, each regenerating its head and living thence- forward as an independent individual; a hydra whoee pieces become so many fresh hydras; a searurchin's egg whose fragments develop complete embryos: where then, are asked, was the individuality of the egg, the hydra, worm?— But, because there are several individuals
14 Creative Evolution
now, it does not follow that there was not a single in- dividual just before. No doubt, when I have seen several drawers fall from a chest, I have no longer the right to say that the article was all of one piece. But the fact is that there can be nothing more in the present of the chest of drawers than there was in its past, and if it is made up of several different pieces now, it was so from the date of its manufacture. Generally speaking, unorganized bodies, which are what we have need of in order that we may act, and on which we have modelled our fashion of thinking, are regulated by this simple law: the present contains noth- ing more than the past, and what is found in the effect vxia already in the cause. But suppose that the distinctive feature of the organized body is that it grows and changes without ceasing, as indeed the most superficial observation testifies, there would be nothing astonishing in the fact that it was one in the first instance, and afterwards many. The reproduction of unicellular organisms consists in just this — the hving being divides into two halves, of which each is a complete individual. True, in the more complex animals, nature localizes in the almost independent sexual cells the power of producing the whole anew. But some- thing of this power may remain diffused in the rest of the organism, as the facts of regeneration prove, and it is concMvable that in certain privileged cases the faculty may persist integrally in a latent condition and manifest itself on the first opportunity. In truth, that I may have the right to speak of individuality, it is not necessary that the organism should be without the power to divide into fragments that are able to live. It is sufficient that it shoiUd have presented a certain systematization of parts before the di%'i5ion, and that the same systematization tend to be reproduced in each separate portion afterwards. Now, that is precisely what we observe in the organic
E Organized Bodies 15
may conclude, then, that individuality is never penect, and that it is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell what is an individual, and what is not, but that life nevertheless manifests a search for indi- viduality, as if it strove to constitute systems naturally isolated, naturaUy closed.