Creative Evolution
Henri Bergson
Translated by Arthur Mitchell
Excerpts on Time
Chapter I
The Evolution of Life
– Mechanism and Teleology
For our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present--no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. Memory, as we have tried to prove,[1] is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared-in short, only that which can give useful work. At the most, a few superfluous recollections may succeed in smuggling themselves through the half-open door. These memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what we are dragging behind us unawares. But, even though we may have no distinct idea of it, we feel vaguely that our past remains present to us. What are we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived from our birth-nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions? Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act. Our past, then, as a whole, is made manifest to us in its impulse; it is felt in the form of tendency, although a small part of it only is known in the form of idea. […]
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 science 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 distinguished, 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 form of existence like our own, should not be attributed to the systems that science isolates, provided such systems are reintegrated into the Whole. But they must be so reintegrated. The same is even more obviously true of the objects cut out by our perception. The distinct outlines which we see in an object, and which give it its individuality, are only the design of a certain kind of influence 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.
[…]
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 nothing more than
the past, and what is found in the effect was 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 living 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 something of this power may remain diffused in the rest of the
organism, as the facts of regeneration prove, and it is conceivable 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 should have presented a certain systematization of parts
before the division, and that the same systematization tend to be reproduced in
each separate portion afterwards. Now, that is precisely what we observe in the
organic world. We may conclude, then, that individuality is never perfect, 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
individuality, as if it strove to constitute systems naturally isolated,
naturally closed.
By this is a living being distinguished from all that our perception or our
science isolates or closes artificially. It would therefore be wrong to compare
it to an object. Should we wish to find a term of comparison in the
inorganic world, it is not to a determinate material object, but much rather to
the totality of the material universe that we ought to compare the living
organism. It is true that the comparison would not be worth much, for a living
being is observable, whilst the whole of the universe is constructed or
reconstructed by thought. But at least our attention would thus have been
called to the essential character of organization. Like the universe as a
whole, like each conscious being taken separately, the organism which lives is
a thing that endures. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged into its
present, and abides there, actual and acting. How otherwise could we understand
that it passes through distinct and well-marked phases, that it changes its
age--in short, that it has a history? If I consider my body in particular, I
find that, like my consciousness, it matures little by little from infancy to
old age; like myself, it grows old. Indeed, maturity and old age are, properly
speaking, attributes only of my body - it is only metaphorically that, 1
apply the same names to the corresponding changes of my conscious self.
Now, if I pass from the top to the bottom of the scale of living beings, from
one of the most to one of the least differentiated, from the multicellular organism
of man to the unicellular organism of the Infusorian, I find, even in this
simple cell, the same process of growing old. The Infusorian is exhausted at
the end of a certain number of divisions, and though it may be possible, by
modifying the environment, to put off the moment when a rejuvenation by
conjugation becomes necessary, this cannot be indefinitely postponed.[2]
It is true that between these two extreme cases, in which the organism is
completely individualized, there might be found a multitude of others in which
the individuality is less well marked, and in which, although there is
doubtless an ageing somewhere, one cannot say exactly what it is that grows
old. Once more, there is no universal biological law which applies precisely
and automatically to every living thing. There are only directions in
which life throws out species in general. Each particular species, in the very
act by which it is constituted, affirms its independence, follows its caprice,
deviates more or less from the straight line, sometimes even remounts the slope
and seems to turn its back on its original direction. It is easy enough to
argue that a tree never grows old, since the tips of its branches are always
equally young, always equally capable of engendering new trees by budding. But
in such an organism-which is, after all, a society rather than an
individual-something ages, if only the leaves and the interior of the trunk.
And each cell, considered separately, evolves in a specific way. Wherever
anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time
is being inscribed.
This, it will be said, is only a metaphor.--It is of the very essence of
mechanism, in fact, to consider as metaphorical every expression which
attributes to time an effective action and a reality of its own. In vain does
immediate experience show us that the very basis of our conscious existence is
memory, that is to say, the prolongation of the past into the present, or, in a
word, duration, acting and irreversible. In vain does reason prove to us that
the more we get away from the objects cut out and the systems isolated by
common sense and by science and the deeper we dig beneath them, the more we
have to do with a reality which changes as a whole in its inmost states, as if
an accumulative memory of the past made it impossible to go back again. The
mechanistic instinct of the mind is stronger than reason, stronger than
immediate experience. The metaphysician that we each carry unconsciously within
us, and the presence of which is explained, as we shall see later on, by the
very place that man occupies amongst the living beings, has its fixed
requirements, its ready-made explanations, its irreducible propositions: all
unite in denying concrete duration. Change must be reducible to an arrangement
or rearrangement of parts; the irreversibility of time must be an appearance
relative to our ignorance; the impossibility of turning back must be only the
inability of man to put things in place again. So growing old can be nothing
more than the gradual gain or loss of certain substances, perhaps both
together. Time is assumed to have just as much reality for a living being as
for an hour-glass, in which the top part empties while the lower fills, and all
goes where it was before when you turn the glass upside down.
[…]
The author who begins a novel puts into his hero many things which he is obliged to discard as he goes on. Perhaps he will take them up later in other books, and make new characters with them, who will seem like extracts from, or rather like complements of, the first; but they will almost always appear somewhat poor and limited in comparison with the original character. So with regard to the evolution of life. The bifurcations on the way have been numerous, but there have been many blind alleys beside the two or three highways; and of these highways themselves, only one, that which leads through the vertebrates up to man, has been wide enough to allow free passage to the full breath of life. We get this impression when we compare the societies of bees and ants, for instance, with human societies. The former are admirably ordered and united, but stereotyped; the latter are open to every sort of progress, but divided, and incessantly at strife with themselves. The ideal would be a society always in progress and always in equilibrium, but this ideal is perhaps unrealizable: the two characteristics that would fain complete each other, which do complete each other in their embryonic state, can no longer abide together when they grow stronger. If one could speak, otherwise than metaphorically, of an impulse toward social life, it might be said that the brunt of the impulse was borne along the line of evolution ending at man, and that the rest of it was collected on the road leading to the hymenoptera: the societies of ants and bees would thus present the aspect complementary to ours. But this would be only a manner of expression. There has been no particular impulse towards social life; there is simply the general movement of life, which on divergent lines is creating forms ever new. If societies should appear on two of these lines, they ought to show divergence of paths at the same time as community of impetus. They will thus develop two classes of characteristics which we shall find vaguely complementary of each other.
So our study of the evolution movement will have to unravel a certain number of divergent directions, and to appreciate the importance of what has happened along each of them-in a word, to determine the nature of the dissociated tendencies and estimate their relative proportion. Combining these tendencies, then, we shall get an approximation, or rather an imitation, of the indivisible motor principle whence their impetus proceeds. Evolution will thus prove to be something entirely different from a series of adaptations to circumstances, as mechanism claims; entirely different also from the realization of a plan of the whole, as maintained by the doctrine of finality.
That adaptation to environment is the necessary condition of evolution we do not question for a moment. It is quite evident that a species would disappear, should it fail to bend to the conditions of existence which are imposed on it. But it is one thing to recognize that outer circumstances are forces evolution must reckon with, another to claim that they are the directing causes of evolution. This latter theory is that of mechanism. It excludes absolutely the hypothesis of an original impetus, I mean an internal push that has carried life, by more and more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies. Yet this impetus is evident, and a mere glance at fossil species shows us that life need not have evolved at all, or might have evolved only in very restricted limits, if it bad chosen the alternative, much more convenient to itself, of becoming anchylosed in its primitive forms. Certain Foraminifera have not varied since the Silurian epoch. Unmoved witnesses of the innumerable revolutions that have upheaved our planet, the Lingulae are today what they were at the remotest times of the paleozoic era.
The truth is that adaptation explains the sinuosities of the movement of evolution, but not its general directions, still less the movement itself.[1] The road that leads to the town is obliged to follow the ups and downs of the hills; it adapts itself to the accidents of the ground; but the accidents of the ground are not the cause of the road, nor accidents have they given it its direction. At every moment they furnish it with what is indispensable, namely, the soil on which it lies; but if we consider the whole of the road, instead of each of its parts, the accidents of the ground appear only as impediments or causes of delay, for the road aims simply at the town and would fain be a straight line. Just so as regards the evolution of life and the circumstances through which it passes-with this difference, that evolution does not mark out a solitary route, that it takes directions without aiming at ends, and that it remains inventive even in its adaptations. But, if the evolution of life is something other than a series of adaptations to accidental circumstances, so also it is not the realization of a plan. A plan is given in advance. It is represented, or at least representable, before its realization. The complete execution of it may be put off to a distant future, or even indefinitely; but the idea is none the less formulable at the present time, in terms actually given. If, on the contrary, evolution is a creation unceasingly renewed, it creates, as it goes on, not only the forms of life, but the ideas that will enable the intellect to understand it, the terms which will serve to express it. That is to say that its future overflows its present, and can not be sketched out therein in an idea.