y, it is with the _vital_ that we have here to do, and
the whole present study strives to prove that the vital is in the
direction of the voluntary. We may say then that this first kind of
order is that of the _vital_ or of the _willed_, in opposition to the
second, which is that of the _inert_ and the _automatic_. Common sense
instinctively distinguishes between the two kinds of order, at least in
the extreme cases; instinctively, also, it brings them together. We say
of astronomical phenomena that they manifest an admirable order, meaning
by this that they can be foreseen mathematically. And we find an order
no less admirable in a symphony of Beethoven, which is genius,
originality, and therefore unforeseeability itself.

But it is exceptional for order of the first kind to take so distinct a
form. Ordinarily, it presents features that we have every interest in
confusing with those of the opposite order. It is quite certain, for
instance, that if we could view the evolution of life in its entirety,
the spontaneity of its movement and the unforeseeability of its
procedures would thrust themselves on our attention. But what we meet in
our daily experience is a certain determinate living being, certain
special manifestations of life, which repeat, _almost_, forms and facts
already known; indeed, the similarity of structure that we find
everywhere between what generates and what is generated--a similarity
that enables us to include any number of living individuals in the same
group--is to our eyes the very type of the _generic_: the inorganic
genera seem to us to take living genera as models. Thus the vital order,
such as it is offered to us piecemeal in experience, presents the same
character and performs the same function as the physical order: both
cause experience to _repeat itself_, both enable our mind to
_generalize_. In reality, this character has entirely different origins
in the two cases, and even opposite meanings. In the second case, the
type of this character, its ideal limit, as also its foundation, is the
geometrical necessity in virtue of which the same components give the
same resultant. In the first case, this character involves, on the
contrary, the intervention of something which manages to obtain the same
total effect although the infinitely complex elementary causes may be
quite different. We insisted on this last point in our first chapter,
when we showed how identical structures are to be met with