evolution, but not the general directions of the movement, still less the
movement itself. The road which leads to the town is certainly obliged to
climb the hills and go down the slopes; it adapts itself to the accidents
of the ground; but the accidents of the ground are not the cause of the
road, any more than they have imparted its direction." ("Creative
Evolution", pages 111-112.)

At the bottom of all these errors there are only prejudices of practical
action. That is of course why every work appears to be an outside
construction beginning with previous elements; a phase of anticipation
followed by a phase of execution, calculation, and art, an effective
projecting cause, and a concerted goal, a mechanism which hurls to a
finality which aims. But the genuine explanation must be sought elsewhere.
And Mr Bergson makes this plain by two admirable analyses in which he takes
to pieces the common ideas of disorder and nothingness in order to explain
their meaning relative to our proceedings in industry or language.

Let us come back to facts, to immediate experience, and try to translate
its pure data simply. What are the characteristics of vital evolution?
First of all it is a dynamic continuity, a continuity of qualitative
progress; next, it is essentially a duration, an irreversible rhythm, a
work of inner maturation. By the memory inherent in it, the whole of its
past lives on and accumulates, the whole of its past remains for ever
present to it; which is tantamount to saying that it is experience.

It is also an effort of perpetual invention, a generation of continual
novelty, indeducible and capable of defying all anticipation, as it defies
all repetition. We see it at its task of research in the groping attempts
exhibited by the long-sought genesis of species; we see it triumphant in
the originality of the least state of consciousness, of the least body, of