dition,
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 i