a first organism--organic matter was
not produced all at once, but was reached through steps or gradations.
Yet it puzzles one to see how there can be any gradations or degrees
between being and not being. Can there be any halfway house between
something and nothing?

II

There is another way out of the difficulty that besets our rational
faculties in their efforts to solve this question, and that is the
audacious way of Henri Bergson in his "Creative Evolution." It is to
deny any validity to the conclusion of our logical faculties upon this
subject. Our intellect, Bergson says, cannot grasp the true nature of
life, nor the meaning of the evolutionary movement. With the emphasis of
italics he repeats that "_the intellect is characterized by a natural
inability to comprehend life_." He says this in a good many pages and in
a good many different ways; the idea is one of the main conclusions of
his book. Our intuitions, our spiritual nature, according to this
philosopher, are more _en rapport_ with the secrets of the creative
energy than are our intellectual faculties; the key to the problem is to
be found here, rather than in the mechanics and chemistry of the latter.
Our intellectual faculties can grasp the physical order because they are
formed by a world of solids and fluids and give us the power to deal
with them and act upon them. But they cannot grasp the nature and the
meaning of the vital order.

"We treat the living like the lifeless, and think all reality, however
fluid, under the form of the sharply defined solid. We are at ease only
in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. Perceiving in an
organism only parts external to parts, the understanding has the choice
between two systems of explanation only: either to regard the infinitely
complex (and thereby infinitely well contrived) organization as a
fortuitous concatenation of atoms, or to relate it to the
incomprehensible influence of an external force that has grouped its
elements together."

"Everything is obscure in the idea of creation, if we think of things
which are created and a thing which creates." If we follow the lead of
our logical, scientific faculties, then, we shall all be mechanists and
materialists. Science can make no other solution of the problem because
it sees from the outside. But if we look from the inside, with the
spirit or "with that faculty of seeing which is immanent in the faculty
of acting," we shall escape from t