canvas bequeathed by the ancestor to his posterity, and possessed in common
by them, each broiders his original pattern." ("Creative Evolution", pages
24-25.)

We may, it is true, ask ourselves whether the genealogical method permits
results so far divergent as those presented to us by variety of species.
But embryology answers by showing us the highest and most complex forms of
life attained every day from very elementary forms; and palaeontology, as
it develops, allows us to witness the same spectacle in the universal
history of life, as if the succession of phases through which the embryo
passes were only a recollection and an epitome of the complete past whence
it has come. In addition, the phenomena of sudden changes, recently
observed, help us to understand more easily the conception which obtrudes
itself under so many heads, by diminishing the importance of the apparent
lacunae in genealogical continuity. Thus the trend of all our experience
is the same.

Now there are some certainties which are only centres of concurrent
probabilities; there are some truths determined only by succession of
facts, but yet, by their intersection and convergence, sufficiently
determined.

"That is how we measure the distance from an inaccessible point, by
regarding it time after time from the points to which we have access."
("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)

Is not that the case here? The affirmative seems all the more inevitable
inasmuch as the language of transformism is the only language known to the
biology of today. Evolution can, it is true, be transposed, but not
suppressed, since in any actual state there would always remain this