Creative Evolution

CHAPTER I

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE—MECHANISM AND TELEOLOGY

Of duration in general—Unorganized bodies and abstract time—Organized bodies and real duration—Individuality and the process of growing old 1

Of transformism and the different ways of interpreting it—Radical mechanism and real duration: the relation of biology to physics and chemistry—Radical finalism and real duration: the relation of biology to philosophy 23

The quest of a criterion—Examination of the various theories with regard to a particular example—Darwin and insensible variation—De Vries and sudden variation—Eimer and orthogenesis—Neo-Lamarckism and the hereditability of acquired characters 59

Result of the inquiry—The vital impetus 87

CHAPTER II

THE DIVERGENT DIRECTIONS OF THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE—TORPOR, INTELLIGENCE, INSTINCT

General idea of the evolutionary process—Growth—Divergent and complementary tendencies—The meaning of progress and of adaptation 98

The relation of the animal to the plant—General tendency of animal life—The development of animal life 105

The main directions of the evolution of life: torpor, intelligence, instinct 135

The nature of the intellect 151

The nature of instinct 165

Life and consciousness—The apparent place of man in nature 176

CHAPTER III

ON THE MEANING OF LIFE—THE ORDER OF NATURE AND THE FORM OF INTELLIGENCE

Relation of the problem of life to the problem of knowledge—The method of philosophy—Apparent vicious circle of the method proposed—Real vicious circle of the opposite method 186

Simultaneous genesis of matter and intelligence—Geometry inherent in matter—Geometrical tendency of the intellect—Geometry and deduction—Geometry and induction—Physical laws 199

Sketch of a theory of knowledge based on the analysis of the idea of Disorder—Two opposed forms of order: the problem of genera and the problem of laws—The idea of "disorder" an oscillation of the intellect between the two kinds of order 220

Creation and evolution—Ideal genesis of matter—The origin and function of life—The essential and the accidental in the vital process and in the evolutionary movement—Mankind—The life of the body and the life of the spirit 236

CHAPTER IV

THE CINEMATOGRAPHICAL MECHANISM OF THOUGHT AND THE MECHANISTIC ILLUSION—A GLANCE AT THE HISTORY OF SYSTEMS—REAL BECOMING AND FALSE EVOLUTIONISM

Sketch of a criticism of philosophical systems, based on the analysis of the idea of Immutability and of the idea of "Nothing"--Relation of metaphysical problems to the idea of "Nothing"--Real meaning of this idea 272

Form and Becoming 298

The philosophy of Forms and its conception of Becoming—Plato and Aristotle—The natural trend of the intellect 304

Becoming in modern science: two views of Time 329

The metaphysical interpretation of modern science: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz 345

The Criticism of Kant 356

The evolutionism of Spencer 363

INDEX 371

INTRODUCTION

The history of the evolution of life, incomplete as it yet is, already reveals to us how the intellect has been formed, by an uninterrupted progress, along a line which ascends through the vertebrate series up to man. It shows us in the faculty of understanding an appendage of the faculty of acting, a more and more precise, more and more complex and supple adaptation of the consciousness of living beings to the conditions of existence that are made for them. Hence should result this consequence that our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent the relations of external things among themselves—in short, to think matter. Such will indeed be one of the conclusions of the present essay. We shall see that the human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our action finds its fulcrum and our industry its tools; that our concepts have been formed on the model of solids; that our logic is, pre-eminently, the logic of solids; that, consequently, our intellect triumphs in geometry, wherein is revealed the kinship of logical thought with unorganized matter, and where the intellect has only to follow its natural movement, after the lightest possible contact with experience, in order to go from discovery to discovery, sure that experience is following behind it and will justify it invariably.

But from this it must also follow that our thought, in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary movement. Created by life, in definite circumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by the evolutionary movement in the course of its way, how can it be applied to the evolutionary movement itself? As well contend that the part is equal to the whole, that the effect can reabsorb its cause, or that the pebble left on the beach displays the form of the wave that brought it there. In fact, we do indeed feel that not one of the categories of our thought—unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, intelligent finality, etc.--applies exactly to the things of life: who can say where individuality begins and ends, whether the living being is one or many, whether it is the cells which associate themselves into the organism or the organism which dissociates itself into cells? In vain we force the living into this or that one of our molds. All the molds crack. They are too narrow, above all too rigid, for what we try to put into them. Our reasoning, so sure of itself among things inert, feels ill at ease on this new ground. It would be difficult to cite a biological discovery due to pure reasoning. And most often, when experience has finally shown us how life goes to work to obtain a certain result, we find its way of working is just that of which we should never have thought.

Yet evolutionist philosophy does not hesitate to extend to the things of life the same methods of explanation which have succeeded in the case of unorganized matter. It begins by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame, perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living beings in the narrow passage open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it has just told us, it makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun which can illuminate the world. Boldly it proceeds, with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of all things, even of life. True, it hurtles in its course against such formidable difficulties, it sees its logic end in such strange contradictions, that it very speedily renounces its first ambition. "It is no longer reality itself," it says, "that it will reconstruct, but only an imitation of the real, or rather a symbolical image; the essence of things escapes us, and will escape us always; we move among relations; the absolute is not in our province; we are brought to a stand before the Unknowable."--But for the human intellect, after too much pride, this is really an excess of humility.

If the intellectual form of the living being has been gradually modeled on the reciprocal actions and reactions of certain bodies and their material environment, how should it not reveal to us something of the very essence of which these bodies are made? Action cannot move in the unreal. A mind born to speculate or to dream, I admit, might remain outside reality, might deform or transform the real, perhaps even create it—as we create the figures of men and animals that our imagination cuts out of the passing cloud. But an intellect bent upon the act to be performed and the reaction to follow, feeling its object so as to get its mobile impression at every instant, is an intellect that touches something of the absolute. Would the idea ever have occurred to us to doubt this absolute value of our knowledge if philosophy had not shown us what contradictions our speculation meets, what dead-locks it ends in? But these difficulties and contradictions all arise from trying to apply the usual forms of our thought to objects with which our industry has nothing to do, and for which, therefore, our molds are not made.

Intellectual knowledge, in so far as it relates to a certain aspect of inert matter, ought, on the contrary, to give us a faithful imprint of it, having been stereotyped on this particular object. It becomes relative only if it claims, such as it is, to present to us life—that is to say, the maker of the stereotype-plate.

Must we then give up fathoming the depths of life? Must we keep to that mechanistic idea of it which the understanding will always give us—an idea necessarily artificial and symbolical, since it makes the total activity of life shrink to the form of a certain human activity which is only a partial and local manifestation of life, a result or by-product of the vital process? We should have to do so, indeed, if life had employed all the psychical potentialities it possesses in producing pure understandings—that is to say, in making geometricians. But the line of evolution that ends in man is not the only one. On other paths, divergent from it, other forms of consciousness have been developed, which have not been able to free themselves from external constraints or to regain control over themselves, as the human intellect has done, but which, none the less, also express something that is immanent and essential in the evolutionary movement. Suppose these other forms of consciousness brought together and amalgamated with intellect: would not the result be a consciousness as wide as life? And such a consciousness, turning around suddenly against the push of life which it feels behind, would have a vision of life complete—would it not?--even though the vision were fleeting.