of which each is a complete individual.
True, in the more complex animals, nature localizes in the almost
independent sexual cells the power of producing the whole anew. But
something of this power may remain diffused in the rest of the organism,
as the facts of regeneration prove, and it is conceivable that in
certain privileged cases the faculty may persist integrally in a latent
condition and manifest itself on the first opportunity. In truth, that I
may have the right to speak of individuality, it is not necessary that
the organism should be without the power to divide into fragments that
are able to live. It is sufficient that it should have presented a
certain systematization of parts before the division, and that the same
systematization tend to be reproduced in each separate portion
afterwards. Now, that is precisely what we observe in the organic
world. We may conclude, then, that individuality is never perfect, and
that it is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell what is an
individual, and what is not, but that life nevertheless manifests a
search for individuality, as if it strove to constitute systems
naturally isolated, naturally closed.

* * * * *

By this is a living being distinguished from all that our perception or
our science isolates or closes artificially. It would therefore be wrong
to compare it to an _object_. Should we wish to find a term of
comparison in the inorganic world, it is not to a determinate material
object, but much rather to the totality of the material universe that we
ought to compare the living organism. It is true that the comparison
would not be worth much, for a living being is observable, whilst the
whole of the universe is constructed or reconstructed by thought. But at
least our attention would thus have been called to the essential
character of organization. Like the universe as a whole, like each
conscious being taken separately, the organism which lives is a thing
that _endures_. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged into its
present, and abides there, actual and acting. How otherwise could we
understand that it passes through distinct and well-marked phases, that
it changes its age--in short, that it has a history? If I consider my
body in particular, I find that, like my consciousness, it matures
little by little from infancy to old age; like myself, it grows old.
Indeed, maturity and old age are, properly speaking, attributes