moderns, as it
lay behind the dogmatism of the ancients.

We have said enough to mark the origin of this confusion. It is due to
the fact that the "vital" order, which is essentially creation, is
manifested to us less in its essence than in some of its accidents,
those which _imitate_ the physical and geometrical order; like it, they
present to us repetitions that make generalization possible, and in that
we have all that interests us. There is no doubt that life as a whole is
an evolution, that is, an unceasing transformation. But life can
progress only by means of the living, which are its depositaries.
Innumerable living beings, almost alike, have to repeat each other in
space and in time for the novelty they are working out to grow and
mature. It is like a book that advances towards a new edition by going
through thousands of reprints with thousands of copies. There is,
however, this difference between the two cases, that the successive
impressions are identical, as well as the simultaneous copies of the
same impression, whereas representatives of one and the same species are
never entirely the same, either in different points of space or at
different moments of time. Heredity does not only transmit characters;
it transmits also the impetus in virtue of which the characters are
modified, and this impetus is vitality itself. That is why we say that
the repetition which serves as the base of our generalizations is
essential in the physical order, accidental in the vital order. The
physical order is "automatic;" the vital order is, I will not say
voluntary, but analogous to the order "willed."

Now, as soon as we have clearly distinguished between the order that is
"willed" and the order that is "automatic," the ambiguity that underlies
the idea of _disorder_ is dissipated, and, with it, one of the principal
difficulties of the problem of knowledge.

The main problem of the theory of knowledge is to know how science is
possible, that is to say, in effect, why there is order and not disorder
in things. That order exists is a _fact_. But, on the other hand,
disorder, _which appears to us to be less than order_, is, it seems, of
_right_. The existence of order is then a mystery to be cleared up, at
any rate a problem to be solved. More simply, when we undertake to found
order, we regard it as contingent, if not in things, at least as viewed
by the mind: of a thing that we do not judge to be contingent we do not
require