only of
my body; it is only metaphorically that I 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.[4] 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
deepe
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