we cannot help conceiving organization as manufacturing. But it is one thing to manufacture, and quite another to organize. Manufacturing is pecuhar to man. It consists in assembling parts of matter which we have cut out in such manner that we can fit them together and obt^n from them a common action. The parts are arranged, so to speak, around the action as an ideal centre. To manu- facture, therefore, is to work from the periphery to the centre, or, as the philosophers say, from the many to the one. Organization, on the contrary, works from the centre to the periphery. It begins in a point that is ahnost a mathematical point, and spreads around this point by concentric waves which go on enlarging. The work of manufacturing is the more effective, the greater the quant- ity of matter dealt with. It proceeds by concentration and compression. The organizing act, on the contrary, has something explosive about it: it needs at the begin- ning the smallest possible place, a minimum of matter, as if the organizing forces only entered space reluctantly. The spermatozoon, which sets in motion the evolutionary process of the embryonic life, is one of the smallest cells of the organism ; and it is only a small part of the spenna- tozoon which really takes part in the operation.
But these are only superficial differences. Digging beneath them, we think, a deeper difference would be found.
A manufactured thing delineates exactly the form of
the work of manufacturing it. I mean that the manu-
facturer finds in his product exactly what he has put
into it. If he is going to make a machine, he cuts out
its pieces one by one and then puts them together: the
machine, when made, will show both the pieces and their
assemblage. The whole of the result represents the whole
of the work; and to each part of the work corresponds
a part of the result.
M the Vital Impetus 93
Now I recognize that positive science can and should proceed as if organization was like making a machine. Only so will it have any hold on organized bodies. For its object is not to show us the essence of things, but to furnish us with the best means of acting on them. Physics and chemistry are well advanced sciences, and living matter lends itself to our action only so far as we can treat it by the processes of our physics and chemistry. Organization can therefore only be studied scientifically if the organized body has first been likened to a machine. The cells will be the pieces of the machine, the organism their assemblage, and the elementary labors which have organized the parts will be regarded as the real elements of the labor which has oi^anized the whole. This is the standpoint of science. Quite different, in our opinion, is that of philosophy.
For us, the whole of an organized machine may, strictly speaking, represent the whole of the organizing work (this is, however, only approximately true), yet the parts of the machine do not correspond to parts of the work, because the materialily of this machine does not represent a sum of means employed, but a sum of obstacles avoided: it is a negation rather than a positive reality. So, as we have shown in a former study, vision is a power which should attain by right an infinity of thinp inaccessible to our eyes. But such a vision would not be continued into action; it might suit a phantom, but not a living being. The vision of a living being is an effective vision, limited to objects on which the being can act: it is a vision that is canalized, and the visual apparatus simply symbolizes the work of canalizing. Therefore the creation of the visual apparatus is no more explained by the assembling of its anatomic elements than the digging of a canal could be expl^aed by the heaping-up of the earth which miglit have formed its banks. A mechanistic theory would maintain that the
Creative Evo]
earth had been brought cart-load by cart-load; finalisin
would add that it had not been dumped down at random,
that the carters had followed a plan. But both theories
would be mistaken, for the canal has been made in another
way.
With greater precision, we may compare the process by which nature constructs an eye to the simple act by which we raise the hand. But we supposed at first that the hand met with no resistance. Let us now imagine that, instead of moving in air, the hand has to pass through iron filings which are compressed and offer resistance to it in proportion as it goes forward. At a certain moment the hand will have exhausted its effort, and, at this very moment, the filings will be massed and coordinated in a certain definite form, to wit, that of the hand that is stopped and of a part of the arm. Now, suppose that the hand and arm are invisible. Lookers-on will seek the reason of the arrangement in the filings themselves and in forces within the mass. Some will account for the position of each filing by the action exerted upon it by the neighboring filings: these are the mechanists. Others vrill prefer to think that a plan of the whole has presided over the detail of these elementary actions, they are the finalists. But the truth is that there has been merely one indivisible act, that of the hand passing through the filings: the inexhaustible detail of the movement of the grains, as well as the order of their final arrangement, expresses negatively, in a way, this undivided movement, being the unitarj" form of a resistance, and not a synthesis of positive elementary actions. For this reason, if the arrangement of the grains is termed an "effect" and the movement of the hand a "cause," it may indeed be said that the whole of the effect is explained by the whole of the cause, but to parts of the cause parts of the effect will in no wise correspond. In
THE VITAL IllPETUS
other words, neither mechanism nor finalism will here be in place, and we must resort to an explanation of a different kind. Now, in the hypothesis we propose, the relation of vision to the visual apparatus would be very nearly that of the hand to the iron filings that follow, canalize and limit its motion.
The greater the effort of the hand, the farther it will go into the filings. But at whatever point it stops, in- stantaneously and automatically the filings coordinate and find their equilibrium. So with vision and its organ. According as the undivided act constituting vision ad- vances more or less, the materiality of the organ is made of a more or less considerable number of mutually co- ordinated elements, but the order is necessarily complete and perfect. It could not be partial, because, once agaia the real process which ^ves rise to it has no parts. That is what neither mechanism nor finalism takes into account, and it is what we also fail to consider when we wonder at the marvelous structure of an instrument such as the eye. At the bottom of our wondering is always this idea, that it would have been possible for o part ordy of tlus coordination to have been realized, that the complete realization is a kind of special favor. This favor the finalists consider as dispensed to them all at once, by the final cause; the mechanists claim to obtain it little by little, by the effect of natural selection; but both see something positive in this coordination, and consequently something fractionable in its cause, — something which admits of every possible degree of achievement. In reality, the cause, though more or less intense, cannot produce its effect except in one piece, and completely finished. According as it goes further and further in the direction of vision, it gives the simple pigmentary masses of a lower organism, or the rudimentary eye of
96 Creative Evolution
a Serpula, or the slightly differentiated eye of the Alciope, or the marvelously perfected eye of the bird; but all these organs, unequal as is their complexity, necessarily present an equal coordination. For this reason, no matter how distant two animal species may be from each other, if the progress toward vision has gone equally far in both, there is the same visual organ in each case, for the form of the organ only expresses the degree in which the exercise of the function has been obtained.
But, in sjjeaking of a progress toward vision, are we not coming back to the old notion of finality? It would be 80, undoubtedly, if this progress required the conscious or unconscious idea of an end to be attained. But it ia really effected in virtue of the original Impetus of life; it is implied in this movement itself, and that is just why it is found in independent lines of evolution. If now we are asked why and how it is implied therein, we reply that life is, more than anything else, a tendency to act on inert matter. The direction of this action is not prede- termined; hence the unforeseeable variety of forms which life, in evolving, sows along its path. But this action always presents, to some extent, the character of con- tingency; it implies at least a rudiment of choice. Now a choice involves the anticipatory idea of several possible actions. Possibilities of action must therefore be marked out for the living being before the action itself. Visual perception is nothing else:' the visible outlines of bodies are the design of our eventual action on them. Vision will be found, therefore, in different degrees in the most diverse animals, and it will appear in the same complexity of structure wherever it has reached the same degree of intensity.
We have dwelt on these resemblances of structure > See, on Uiia subject, AfoMre el mimoire, dmp. i.
i.l THE VITAL IMPETUS 97
in general, and on the example of the eye in particular,
because we had to define our attitude toward mechanism
on the one hand and finalism on the other. It remains
for us to describe it more precisely in itself. This we
shall now do by showing the divergent results of evolution
not as presenting analogies, but as themselves mutually
complementary.
THE DIVERGENT DIRECTIONS OF THE EVOLUTION OF UFE. TORPOR, INTELLIGENCE, INSTINCT
The evolution movement would be a simple one, and we should soon have been able to determine its direc- tion, if life had described a single course, like that of a solid ball shot from a cannon. But it proceeds rather like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments, which fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their turn into fragments destined to burst again, and so on for a time incommensurably long. We perceive only what is nearest to us, namely, the scattered movements of the pulverized explosions. From them we have to go back, Btage by stage, to the original movement.
When a shell bursts, the particular way it breaks is explained both by the explosive force of the powder it contains and by the resistance of the metal. So of the way life breaks into individuals and species. It depends, we think, on two series of causes: the resistance life meets from inert matter, and the explosive force — due to an unstable balance of tendencies — which life bears within itself.
The reedstance of inert matter was the obstacle that
had first to be overcome. Life seeras to have succeeded
in this by dint of humility, by making itself very small
and very insinuating, bending to physical and chemical
forces, consenting even to go a part of the way with them,
like the switch that adopts for a while the direction of