Let us consider that external reality which is nearest us, our body. It is
known to us both externally by our perceptions and internally by our
affections. It is then a privileged case for our inquiry. In addition,
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