ld be maintained or cut in order that life
should affect the social or the individual form. Thus, in rudimentary
organisms consisting of a single cell, we already find that the apparent
individuality of the whole is the composition of an _undefined_ number
of potential individualities potentially associated. But, from top to
bottom of the series of living beings, the same law is manifested. And
it is this that we express when we say that unity and multiplicity are
categories of inert matter, that the vital impetus is neither pure unity
nor pure multiplicity, and that if the matter to which it communicates
itself compels it to choose one of the two, its choice will never be
definitive: it will leap from one to the other indefinitely. The
evolution of life in the double direction of individuality and
association has therefore nothing accidental about it: it is due to the
very nature of life.

Essential also is the progress to reflexion. If our analysis is correct,
it is consciousness, or rather supra-consciousness, that is at the
origin of life. Consciousness, or supra-consciousness, is the name for
the rocket whose extinguished fragments fall back as matter;
consciousness, again, is the name for that which subsists of the rocket
itself, passing through the fragments and lighting them up into
organisms. But this consciousness, which is a _need of creation_, is
made manifest to itself only where creation is possible. It lies dormant
when life is condemned to automatism; it wakens as soon as the
possibility of a choice is restored. That is why, in organisms
unprovided with a nervous system, it varies according to the power of
locomotion and of deformation of which the organism disposes. And in
animals with a nervous system, it is proportional to the complexity of
the switchboard on which the paths called sensory and the paths called
motor intersect--that is, of the brain.

Consciousness corresponds exactly to the living being's power of choice;
it is coextensive with the fringe of possible action that surrounds the
real action: consciousness is synonymous with invention and with
freedom. Now, in the animal, invention is never anything but a variation
on the theme of routine. Shut up in the habits of the species, it
succeeds, no doubt, in enlarging them by its individual initiative; but
it escapes automatism only for an instant, for just the time to create a
new automatism. The gates of its prison close as soon as they are