of increased dangers
is one proof that vital force is an absolute thing; for if life were
an equilibrium, it would not displace itself and run new risks of
death, by making itself more complex and ticklish, as it does in the
higher organisms and the finer arts.[6] Yet if life is the only
substance, how is such a risk of death possible at all? I suppose the
special life that arises about a given nucleus of feeling, by
emphasising some of the relations which that feeling has in the
world, might be abolished if a greater emphasis were laid on another
set of its relations, starting from some other nucleus. We must
remember that these selections, according to M. Bergson, are not
apperceptions merely. They are creative efforts. The future
constitution of the flux will vary in response to them. Each mind
sucks the world, so far as it can, into its own vortex. A cross
apperception will then amount to a contrary force. Two souls will not
be able to dominate the same matter in peace and friendship. Being
forces, they will pull that matter in different ways. Each soul will
tend to devour and to direct exclusively the movement influenced by
the other soul. The one that succeeds in ruling that movement will
live on; the other, I suppose, will die, although M. Bergson may not
like that painful word. He says the lower organisms store energy for
the higher organisms to use; but when a sheep appropriates the energy
stored up in grass, or a man that stored up in mutton, it looks as if
the grass and the sheep had perished. Their _elan vital_ is no longer
theirs, for in this rough world to live is to kill. Nothing arises in
nature, Lucretius says, save helped by the death of some other thing.
Of course, this is no defeat for the _elan vital_ in general; for
according to our philosopher the whole universe from the beginning has
been making for just that supreme sort of consciousness which man, who
eats the mutton, now possesses. The sheep and the grass were only
things by the way and scaffolding for our precious humanity. But would
it not be better if some being should arise nobler than man, not
requiring abstract intellect nor artificial weapons, but endowed with
instinct and intuition and, let us say, the power of killing by
radiating electricity? And might not men then turn out to have been
mere explosives, in which energy was stored for convenient digestion
by that superior creature? A shocking thought, no doubt, like the
thought of de