Creative Evolution |
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absolute action affirmation ancient ancient philosophy animal annihilation Aristotle arthropods becoming body cause cinematographical complete concepts consciousness continuity contrary creates creation definite Descartes direction duration effect elements energy essential everything evolution evolutionism existence experience express external eyes fact faculty finality function geometry homogeneous space human hymenoptera hypothesis idea imagine individual inert matter instinct intellect intelligence intuition inverse Kant kinds of order knowledge laws laws of Kepler Leibniz less living longer material mathematical means mechanism ment metaphysics mind mobility molluscs monads movement nature negation nought object once organism ourselves pass perceive perception philosophy physical Plato Plotinus point of view positive positive science possible precisely present principle protoplasm psychical pure reality regard relation represent sense simple solar system space speak species Spinoza suppose tendency theory things thought true unity variations vegetable vertebrates vital void whole words
Popular passages
Page 270 - They are nothing else than the little rills into which the great river of life divides itself, flowing through the body of humanity. The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness is distinct from the organism it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes.
Page 14 - ... the present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
Page 4 - Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.
Page 249 - In reality, life is a movement, materiality is the inverse movement, and each of these two movements is simple, the matter which forms a world being an undivided flux, and undivided also the life that runs through it, cutting out in it living beings all along the track. Of these two currents, the second runs counter to the first, but the first obtains, all the same, something from the second.
Page 5 - From this survival of the past it follows that conscious- , ness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person, since they find him at a new moment of his history.
Page 39 - Radical mechanism implies a metaphysic in which the totality of the real is postulated complete in eternity, and in which vv "^ the apparent duration of things expresses merely the infirmity of a mind that cannot know everything at once.
Page 38 - If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay potentially in the cosmic vapour, and that a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say the state of the fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapour of the breath on a cold winter's day .... The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive.
Page 4 - Vain, therefore, is the attempt to range such states beside each other on the ego supposed to sustain them: never can these solids strung upon a solid make up that duration which flows. What we actually obtain in this way is an artificial...
Page 176 - I mean instinct that has become disinterested, selfconscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely.
Page 103 - If, on the contrary, evolution is a creation unceasingly renewed, it creates, as it goes on, not only the forms of life, but the ideas that will enable the intellect to understand it, the terms which will serve to express it.