striking fact that the living forms met with as remains in geological
layers are ranged by the natural affinity of their characteristics in an
order of succession parallel to the succession of the ages. We are not
really then inventing a hypothesis in beginning with the affirmation of
evolution. But what we have to do is to appreciate its object.

Evolution! We meet the word everywhere today. But how rare is the true
idea! Let us ask the astronomers who originate cosmogonical hypotheses,
and invent a primitive nebula, the natural philosophers who dream that by
the deterioration of energy and the dissipation of movement the material
world will obtain final rest in the inertia of a homogeneous equilibrium,
let us ask the biologists and psychologists who are enemies of fixed
species and inquisitive about ancestral history. What they are anxious to
discern in evolution is the persistent influence of an initial cause once
given, the attraction of a fixed end, a collection of laws before the
eternity of which change becomes negligible like an appearance. Now he who
thinks of the universe as a construction of unchangeable relations denies
by his method the evolution of which he speaks, since he transforms it into
a calculable effect necessarily produced by a regulated play of generating
conditions, since he implicitly admits the illusive character of a becoming
which adds nothing to what is given.

Finality itself, if he keeps the name, does not save him from his error,
for finality in his eyes is nothing but an efficient cause projected into
the future. So we see him fixing stages, marking periods, inserting means,
putting in milestones, continually destroying movement by halting it before
his gaze. And we all do the same by instinctive inclination. Our concept
of law, in its classical form, is not general: it represents only the law
of co-existence and of mechanism, the static relation between two
numerically disconnected terms; and in order to grasp evolution we shall