e to an impulsion or an
impetus, regarded in itself it is an immensity of potentiality, a mutual
encroachment of thousands and thousands of tendencies which nevertheless
are "thousands and thousands" only when once regarded as outside of each
other, that is, when spatialized. Contact with matter is what determines
this dissociation. Matter divides actually what was but potentially
manifold; and, in this sense, individuation is in part the work of
matter, in part the result of life's own inclination. Thus, a poetic
sentiment, which bursts into distinct verses, lines and words, may be
said to have already contained this multiplicity of individuated
elements, and yet, in fact, it is the materiality of language that
creates it.

But through the words, lines and verses runs the simple inspiration
which is the whole poem. So, among the dissociated individuals, one
life goes on moving: everywhere the tendency to individualize is opposed
and at the same time completed by an antagonistic and complementary
tendency to associate, as if the manifold unity of life, drawn in the
direction of multiplicity, made so much the more effort to withdraw
itself on to itself. A part is no sooner detached than it tends to
reunite itself, if not to all the rest, at least to what is nearest to
it. Hence, throughout the whole realm of life, a balancing between
individuation and association. Individuals join together into a society;
but the society, as soon as formed, tends to melt the associated
individuals into a new organism, so as to become itself an individual,
able in its turn to be part and parcel of a new association. At the
lowest degree of the scale of organisms we already find veritable
associations, microbial colonies, and in these associations, according
to a recent work, a tendency to individuate by the constitution of a
nucleus.[92] The same tendency is met with again at a higher stage, in
the protophytes, which, once having quitted the parent cell by way of
division, remain united to each other by the gelatinous substance that
surrounds them--also in those protozoa which begin by mingling their
pseudopodia and end by welding themselves together. The "colonial"
theory of the genesis of higher organisms is well known. The protozoa,
consisting of one single cell, are supposed to have formed, by
assemblage, aggregates which, relating themselves together in their
turn, have given rise to aggregates of aggregates; so organisms more and
m