n the course of its evolution.
More and more indeterminate also, more and more free, is the activity to
which these forms serve as the vehicle. A nervous system, with neurones
placed end to end in such wise that, at the extremity of each, manifold
ways open in which manifold questions present themselves, is a veritable
_reservoir of indetermination_. That the main energy of the vital
impulse has been spent in creating apparatus of this kind is, we
believe, what a glance over the organized world as a whole easily shows.
But concerning the vital impulse itself a few explanations are
necessary.

* * * * *

It must not be forgotten that the force which is evolving throughout the
organized world is a limited force, which is always seeking to transcend
itself and always remains inadequate to the work it would fain produce.
The errors and puerilities of radical finalism are due to the
misapprehension of this point. It has represented the whole of the
living world as a construction, and a construction analogous to a human
work. All the pieces have been arranged with a view to the best possible
functioning of the machine. Each species has its reason for existence,
its part to play, its allotted place; and all join together, as it were,
in a musical concert, wherein the seeming discords are really meant to
bring out a fundamental harmony. In short, all goes on in nature as in
the works of human genius, where, though the result may be trifling,
there is at least perfect adequacy between the object made and the work
of making it.

Nothing of the kind in the evolution of life. There, the disproportion
is striking between the work and the result. From the bottom to the top
of the organized world we do indeed find one great effort; but most
often this effort turns short, sometimes paralyzed by contrary forces,
sometimes diverted from what it should do by what it does, absorbed by
the form it is engaged in taking, hypnotized by it as by a mirror. Even
in its most perfect works, though it seems to have triumphed over
external resistances and also over its own, it is at the mercy of the
materiality which it has had to assume. It is what each of us may
experience in himself. Our freedom, in the very movements by which it is
affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to
renew itself by a constant effort: it is dogged by automatism. The most
living thought becomes frigid in the for