II

We have just attempted to grasp what being is in ourselves; and we have found that it is becoming, progress, and growth, that it is a creative process which never ceases to labour incessantly; in a word, that it is duration. Must we come to the same conclusion about external being, about existence in general?

Let us consider that external reality which is nearest us, our body. It is known to us both externally by our perceptions and internally by our affections. It is then a privileged case for our inquiry. In addition, and by analogy, we shall at the same time study the other living bodies which everyday induction shows us to be more or less like our own. What are the distinctive characteristics of these new realities? Each of them possesses a genuine individuality to a far greater degree than inorganic objects; whilst the latter are hardly limited at all except in relation to the needs of the former, and so do not constitute beings in themselves, the former evidence a powerful internal unity which is only further emphasised by their prodigious complication, and form wholes with are naturally complete. These wholes are not collections of juxtaposed parts: they are organisms; that is to say, systems of connected functions, in which each detail implies the whole, and where the various elements interpenetrate. These organisms change and modify continually; we say of them not only that they are, but that they live; and their life is mutability itself, a flight, a perpetual flux. This uninterrupted flight cannot in any way be compared to a geometrical movement; it is a rhythmic succession of phases, each of which contains the resonance of all those which come before; each state lives on in the state following; the life of the body is memory; the living being accumulates its past, makes a snowball of itself, serves as an open register for time, ripens, and grows old. Despite all resemblances, the living body always remains, in some measure, an absolutely original and unique invention, for there are not two specimens exactly alike; and, among inert objects, it appears as the reservoir of indetermination, the centre of spontaneity, contingence, and genuine action, as if in the course of phenomena nothing really new could be produced except by its agency.

Such are the characteristic tendencies of life, such the aspects which it presents to immediate observation. Whether spiritual activity unconsciously presides over biological evolution, or whether it simply prolongs it, we always find here and there the essential features of duration.

But I spoke just now of "individuality." Is it really one of the distinctive marks of life? We know how difficult it is to define it accurately. Nowhere, not even in man, is it fully realised; and there are beings in existence in which it seems a complete illusion, though every part of them reproduces their complete unity.

True, but we are now dealing with biology, in which geometrical precision is inadmissible, where reality is defined not so much by the possession of certain characteristics as by its tendency to accentuate them. It is as a tendency that individuality is more particularly manifested; and if we look at it in this light, no one can deny that it does constitute one of the fundamental tendencies of life. Only the truth is that the tendency to individuality remains always and everywhere counterbalanced, and therefore limited, by an opposing tendency, the tendency to association, and above all to reproduction. This necessitates a correction in our analysis. Nature, in many respects, seems to take no interest in individuals. "Life appears to be a current passing from one germ to another through the medium of a developed organism." ("Creative Evolution", page 29.)

It seems as if the organism played the part of a thoroughfare. What is important is rather the continuity of progress of which the individuals are only transitory phases. Between these phases again there are no sharp severances; each phase resolves and melts imperceptibly into that which follows. Is not the real problem of heredity to know how, and up to what point, a new individual breaks away from the individuals which produced it? Is not the real mystery of heredity the difference, not the resemblance, occurring between one term and another?

Whatever be its solution, all the individual phases mutually extend and interpenetrate one another. There is a racial memory by which the past is continually accumulated and preserved. Life's history is embodied in its present. And that is really the ultimate reason of the perpetual novelty which surprised us just now. The characteristics of biological evolution are thus the same as those of human progress. Once again we find the very stuff of reality in duration. "We must not then speak any longer of life in general as an abstraction, or a mere heading under which we write down all living beings." ("Creative Evolution", page 28.) On the contrary, to it belongs the primordial function of reality. It is a very real current transmitted from generation to generation, organising and passing through bodies, without failing or becoming exhausted in any one of them.

We may, already, then, draw one conclusion: Reality, at bottom, is becoming. But such a thesis runs counter to all our familiar ideas. It is imperative that we should submit it to the test of critical examination and positive verification.

One system of metaphysics, I said some time ago, underlies common-sense, animating and informing it. According to this system, which is the inverse of that which we have just intimated, reality in its very depths is fixity and permanence. This is the completely static conception which sees in being exactly the opposite of becoming: we cannot become, it seems to say, except in so far as we are not. It does not, however, mean to deny movement. But it represents it as fluctuation round invariable types, as a whirling but captive eddy. Every phenomenon appears to it as a transformation which ends where it began, and the result is that the world takes the form of an eternal equilibrium in which "nothing is created, nothing destroyed." The idea does not need much forcing to end in the old supposition of a cyclic return which restores everything to its original conditions. Everything is thus conceived in astronomical periods. All that is left of the universe henceforward is a whirl of atoms in which nothing counts but certain fixed quantities translated by our systems of equations; the rest has vanished "in algebraical smoke." There is therefore nothing more or less in the effect than in the group of causes; and the causal relation moves towards identity as towards its asymptote.

Such a view of nature is open to many objections, even if it were only a question of inorganised matter. Simple physics already betoken the insufficiency of a purely mechanic conception. The stream of phenomena flows in an irreversible direction and obeys a determined rhythm. "If I wish to prepare myself a glass of sugar and water, I may do what I like, but I must wait for my sugar to melt." ("Creative Evolution", page 10.) Here are facts which pure mechanism does not take into account, regarding as it does only statically conceived relations, and making time into a measure only, something like a common denominator of concrete successions, a certain number of coincidences from which all true duration remains absent, which would remain unchanged even if the world's history, instead of opening out in consecutive phases, were to be unfolded before our eyes all at once like a fan. Do we not indeed speak today of aging and atomic separation. If the quantity of energy is preserved, at least its quality is continually deteriorating. By the side of something which remains constant, the world also contains something which is being used up, dissipated, exhausted, decomposed.

Further still, a specimen of metal, in its molecular structure, preserves an indelible trace of the treatment it has undergone; natural philosophers tell us that there is a "memory of solids." These are all very positive facts which pure mechanism passes over. In addition, must we not first of all postulate what will afterwards be preserved or deteriorated? Whence we get another aspect of things: that of genesis and creation; and in reality we register the ascending effort of life as a reality no less startling than mechanic inertia.

Finally, we have a double movement of ascent and descent: such is what life and matter appear to immediate observation. These two currents meet each other, and grapple. It is the drama of evolution, of which Mr Bergson once gave a masterly explanation, in stating the high place which man fills in nature:

"I cannot regard the general evolution and progress of life in the whole of the organised world, the co-ordination and subordination of vital functions to one another in the same living being, the relations which psychology and physiology combined seem bound to establish between brain activity and thought in man, without arriving at this conclusion, that life is an immense effort attempted by thought to obtain of matter something which matter does not wish to give it. Matter is inert; it is the seat of necessity; it proceeds mechanically. It seems as if thought seeks to profit by this mechanical inclination in matter to utilise it for actions, and thus to convert all the creative energy it contains, at least all that this energy possesses which admits of play and external extraction, into contingent movements in space and events in time which cannot be foreseen. With laborious research it piles up complications to make liberty out of necessity, to compose for itself a matter so subtile, and so mobile, that liberty, by a veritable physical paradox, and thanks to an effort which cannot last long, succeeds in maintaining its equilibrium on this very mobility.

"But it is caught in the snare. The eddy on which it was poised seizes and drags it down. It becomes prisoner of the mechanism it has set up. Automatism lays hold of it, and life, inevitably forgetting the end which it had determined, which was only to be a means in view of a superior end, is entirely used up in an effort to preserve itself by itself. From the humblest of organised beings to the higher vertebrates which come immediately before man, we witness an attempt which is always foiled and always resumed with more and more art. Man has triumphed; with difficulty, it is true, and so incompletely that a moment's lapse and inattention on his part surrender him to automatism again. But he has triumphed..." ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)

And Mr Bergson adds in another place: ("Creative Evolution", pages 286-287.) "With man consciousness breaks the chain. In man and in man only it obtains its freedom. The whole history of life, till man, had been the history of an effort of consciousness to lift matter, and of the more or less complete crushing of consciousness by matter falling upon it again. The enterprise was paradoxical; if indeed we can speak here, except paradoxically, of enterprise and effort. The task was to take matter, which is necessity itself, and create an instrument of liberty, construct a mechanical system to triumph over mechanism, to employ the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net it had spread. But everywhere, except in man, consciousness let itself be caught in the net of which it sought to traverse the meshes. It remained taken in the mechanisms it had set up. The automatism which it claimed to be drawing towards liberty enfolds it and drags it down. It has not the strength to get away, because the energy with which it had supplied itself for action is almost entirely employed in maintaining the exceedingly subtile and essentially unstable equilibrium into which it has brought matter. But man does not merely keep his machine going, he succeeds in using it as it pleases him.

"He owes it without doubt to the superiority of his brain, which allows him to construct an unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to oppose new habits to old time after time, and to master automatism by dividing it against itself. He owes it to his language, which furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in which to become incarnate, thus dispensing it from depending exclusively upon material bodies, the flux of which would drag it down and soon engulf it. He owes it to social life, which stores and preserves efforts as language stores thought, thereby fixing a mean level to which individuals will rise with ease, and which, by means of this initial impulse, prevents average individuals from going to sleep and urges better people to rise higher. But our brain, our society, and our language are only the varied outer signs of one and the same internal superiority. Each after its fashion, they tell us the unique and exceptional success which life has won at a given moment of its evolution. They translate the difference in nature, and not in degree only, which separates man from the rest of the animal world. They let us see that if, at the end of the broad springboard from which life took off, all others came down, finding the cord stretched too high, man alone has leapt the obstacle."

But man is not on that account isolated in nature: "As the smallest grain of dust forms part of our entire solar system, and is involved along with it in this undivided downward movement which is materiality itself, so all organised beings from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the times in which we live, and in all places as at all times, do but demonstrate to our eyes a unique impulse contrary to the movement of matter, and, in itself, indivisible. All living beings are connected, and all yield to the same formidable thrust. The animal is supported by the plant, man rides the animal, and the whole of humanity in space and time is an immense army galloping by the side of each of us, before and behind us, in a spirited charge which can upset all resistance, and leap many obstacles, perhaps even death." ("Creative Evolution", pages 293-294.)

We see with what broad and far-reaching conclusions the new philosophy closes. In the forcible poetry of the pages just quoted its original accent rings deep and pure. Some of its leading theses, moreover, are noted here. But now we must discover the solid foundation of underlying fact.

Let us take first the fact of biological evolution. Why has it been selected as the basis of the system? Is it really a fact, or is it only a more or less conjectural and plausible theory?

Notice in the first instance that the argument from evolution appears at least as a weapon of co-ordination and research admitted in our day by all philosophers, rejected only on the inspiration of preconceived ideas which are completely unscientific; and that it succeeds in the task allotted to it is doubtless already the proof that it responds to some part of reality. And besides, we can go further. "The idea of transformism is already contained in germ in the natural classification of organised beings. The naturalist brings resembling organisms together, divides the group into sub-groups, within which the resemblance is still greater, and so on; throughout the operation, the characteristics of the group appear as general themes upon which each of the sub-groups executes its particular variations.

"Now this is precisely the relation we find in the animal world and in the vegetable world between that which produces and what is produced; on the canvas bequeathed by the ancestor to his posterity, and possessed in common by them, each broiders his original pattern." ("Creative Evolution", pages 24-25.)

We may, it is true, ask ourselves whether the genealogical method permits results so far divergent as those presented to us by variety of species. But embryology answers by showing us the highest and most complex forms of life attained every day from very elementary forms; and palaeontology, as it develops, allows us to witness the same spectacle in the universal history of life, as if the succession of phases through which the embryo passes were only a recollection and an epitome of the complete past whence it has come. In addition, the phenomena of sudden changes, recently observed, help us to understand more easily the conception which obtrudes itself under so many heads, by diminishing the importance of the apparent lacunae in genealogical continuity. Thus the trend of all our experience is the same.

Now there are some certainties which are only centres of concurrent probabilities; there are some truths determined only by succession of facts, but yet, by their intersection and convergence, sufficiently determined.

"That is how we measure the distance from an inaccessible point, by regarding it time after time from the points to which we have access." ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)

Is not that the case here? The affirmative seems all the more inevitable inasmuch as the language of transformism is the only language known to the biology of today. Evolution can, it is true, be transposed, but not suppressed, since in any actual state there would always remain this striking fact that the living forms met with as remains in geological layers are ranged by the natural affinity of their characteristics in an order of succession parallel to the succession of the ages. We are not really then inventing a hypothesis in beginning with the affirmation of evolution. But what we have to do is to appreciate its object.

Evolution! We meet the word everywhere today. But how rare is the true idea! Let us ask the astronomers who originate cosmogonical hypotheses, and invent a primitive nebula, the natural philosophers who dream that by the deterioration of energy and the dissipation of movement the material world will obtain final rest in the inertia of a homogeneous equilibrium, let us ask the biologists and psychologists who are enemies of fixed species and inquisitive about ancestral history. What they are anxious to discern in evolution is the persistent influence of an initial cause once given, the attraction of a fixed end, a collection of laws before the eternity of which change becomes negligible like an appearance. Now he who thinks of the universe as a construction of unchangeable relations denies by his method the evolution of which he speaks, since he transforms it into a calculable effect necessarily produced by a regulated play of generating conditions, since he implicitly admits the illusive character of a becoming which adds nothing to what is given.

Finality itself, if he keeps the name, does not save him from his error, for finality in his eyes is nothing but an efficient cause projected into the future. So we see him fixing stages, marking periods, inserting means, putting in milestones, continually destroying movement by halting it before his gaze. And we all do the same by instinctive inclination. Our concept of law, in its classical form, is not general: it represents only the law of co-existence and of mechanism, the static relation between two numerically disconnected terms; and in order to grasp evolution we shall doubtless have to invent a new type of law: law in duration, dynamic relation. For we can, and we must, conceive that there is an evolution of natural laws; that these laws never define anything but a momentary state of things; that they are in reality like streaks determined in the flux of becoming by the meeting of contrary currents. "Laws," says Monsieur Boutroux, "are the bed down which passes the torrent of facts; they have dug it, though they follow it." Yet we see the common theories of evolution appealing to the concepts of the present to describe the past, forcing them back to prehistoric times, and beyond the reasoning of today, placing at the beginning what is only conceivable in the mind of the contemporary thinker; in a word, imagining the same laws as always existing and always observed. This is the method which Mr Bergson so justly criticises in Spencer: that of reconstructing evolution with fragments of its product.

If we wish thoroughly to grasp the reality of things, we must think otherwise. Neither of these ready-made concepts, mechanism and finality, is in place, because both of them imply the same postulate, viz. that "everything is given," either at the beginning or at the end, whilst evolution is nothing if it is not, on the contrary, "that which gives." Let us take care not to confound evolution and development. There is the stumbling-block of the usual transformist theories, and Mr Bergson devotes to it a closely argued and singularly penetrating criticism, by an example which he analyses in detail. ("Creative Evolution", chapter i.) These theories either do not explain the birth of variation, and limit themselves to an attempt to make us understand how, once born, it becomes fixed, or else through need of adaptation they look for a conception of its birth. But in both cases they fail.

"The truth is that adaptation explains the windings of the movement of evolution, but not the general directions of the movement, still less the movement itself. The road which leads to the town is certainly obliged to climb the hills and go down the slopes; it adapts itself to the accidents of the ground; but the accidents of the ground are not the cause of the road, any more than they have imparted its direction." ("Creative Evolution", pages 111-112.)

At the bottom of all these errors there are only prejudices of practical action. That is of course why every work appears to be an outside construction beginning with previous elements; a phase of anticipation followed by a phase of execution, calculation, and art, an effective projecting cause, and a concerted goal, a mechanism which hurls to a finality which aims. But the genuine explanation must be sought elsewhere. And Mr Bergson makes this plain by two admirable analyses in which he takes to pieces the common ideas of disorder and nothingness in order to explain their meaning relative to our proceedings in industry or language.

Let us come back to facts, to immediate experience, and try to translate its pure data simply. What are the characteristics of vital evolution? First of all it is a dynamic continuity, a continuity of qualitative progress; next, it is essentially a duration, an irreversible rhythm, a work of inner maturation. By the memory inherent in it, the whole of its past lives on and accumulates, the whole of its past remains for ever present to it; which is tantamount to saying that it is experience.

It is also an effort of perpetual invention, a generation of continual novelty, indeducible and capable of defying all anticipation, as it defies all repetition. We see it at its task of research in the groping attempts exhibited by the long-sought genesis of species; we see it triumphant in the originality of the least state of consciousness, of the least body, of the tiniest cell, of which the infinity of times and spaces does not offer two identical specimens.

But the reef which lies in its way, and on which too often it founders, is habit; habit would be a better and more powerful means of action if it remained free, but in so far as it congeals and becomes materialised, is a hindrance and an obstacle. First of all we have the average types round which fluctuates an action which is decreasing and becoming reduced in breadth. Then we have the residual organs, the proofs of dead life, the encrustations from which the stream of consciousness gradually ebbs; and finally we have the inert gear from which all real life has disappeared, the masses of shipwrecked "things" rearing their spectral outlines where once rolled the open sea of mind. The concept of mechanism suits the phenomena which occur within the zone of wreckage, on this shore of fixities and corpses. But life itself is rather finality, if not in the anthropomorphic sense of premeditated design, plan, or programme, at least in this sense, that it is a continually renewed effort of growth and liberation. And it is from here we get Mr Bergson's formulae: vital impetus and creative evolution.

In this conception of being consciousness is everywhere, as original and fundamental reality, always present in a myriad degrees of tension or sleep, and under infinitely various rhythms.

The vital impulse consists in a "demand for creation"; life in its humblest stage already constitutes a spiritual activity; and its effort sends out a current of ascending realisation which again determines the counter-current of matter. Thus all reality is contained in a double movement of ascent and descent. The first only, which translates an inner work of creative maturation, is essentially durable; the second might, in strictness, be almost instantaneous, like that of an escaping spring; but the one imposes its rhythm on the other. From this point of view mind and matter appear not as two things opposed to each other, as static terms in fixed antithesis, but rather as two inverse directions of movement; and, in certain respects, we must therefore speak not so much of matter or mind as of spiritualisation and materialisation, the latter resulting automatically from a simple interruption of the former. "Consciousness or superconsciousness is the rocket, the extinguished remains of which fall into matter." ("Creative Evolution", page 283.)

What image of universal evolution is then suggested? Not a cascade of deduction, nor a system of stationary pulsations, but a fountain which spreads like a sheaf of corn and is partially arrested, or at least hindered and delayed, by the falling spray. The fountain itself, the reality which is created, is vital activity, of which spiritual activity represents the highest form; and the spray which falls is the creative act which falls, it is reality which is undone, it is matter and inertia. In a word, the supreme law of genesis and fall, the double play of which constitutes the universe, comprises a psychological formula.

Everything begins in the manner of an invention, as the fruit of duration and creative genius, by liberty, by pure mind; then comes habit, a kind of body, as the body is already a group of habits; and habit, taking root, being a work of consciousness which escapes it and turns against it, is little by little degraded into mechanism in which the soul is buried.