Is not the real mystery of heredity the difference, not the resemblance,
occurring between one term and another?

Whatever be its solution, all the individual phases mutually extend and
interpenetrate one another. There is a racial memory by which the past is
continually accumulated and preserved. Life's history is embodied in its
present. And that is really the ultimate reason of the perpetual novelty
which surprised us just now. The characteristics of biological evolution
are thus the same as those of human progress. Once again we find the very
stuff of reality in duration. "We must not then speak any longer of life
in general as an abstraction, or a mere heading under which we write down
all living beings." ("Creative Evolution", page 28.) On the contrary, to
it belongs the primordial function of reality. It is a very real current
transmitted from generation to generation, organising and passing through
bodies, without failing or becoming exhausted in any one of them.

We may, already, then, draw one conclusion: Reality, at bottom, is
becoming. But such a thesis runs counter to all our familiar ideas. It is
imperative that we should submit it to the test of critical examination and
positive verification.

One system of metaphysics, I said some time ago, underlies common-sense,
animating and informing it. According to this system, which is the inverse
of that which we have just intimated, reality in its very depths is fixity
and permanence. This is the completely static conception which sees in
being exactly the opposite of becoming: we cannot become, it seems to say,
except in so far as we are not. It does not, however, mean to deny
movement. But it represents it as fluctuation round invariable types, as a
whirling but captive eddy. Every phenomenon appears to it as a
transformation which ends where it began, and the result is that the world