Finally, in reviewing the evolutionary process as a whole, Bergson
asserts that it manifests a radical contingency. The forms of life
created, also the proportion of Intuition to Intelligence, in man, and
the physique and morality of man, are all of them contingent. Life
might have stored up energy in a different way through plants selecting
different chemical elements. The whole of organic chemistry would then
have been different. Then, too, it is probable that Life manifests
itself in other planets, in other solar systems also, in forms of which
we have no idea. He points out that between the perfect humanity and
ours one may conceive many possible intermediaries, corresponding to all
the degrees imaginable of Intelligence and Intuition. Another solution
might have issued in a humanity either more intelligent or more
intuitive. Man has warred like the other species, he has warred
against the other species. If the evolution of life had been opposed by
different accidents en route, if the current of life had been divided
otherwise, we should have been, in physique and in morality, very
different from what we are. [Footnote: Creative Evolution, pp. 280-282
(Fr. p. 288-290).] We cannot regard humanity as prefigured in the
evolutionary process, nor look on man as the ultimate outcome of the
whole of Evolution. The rest of Nature does not exist simply for
the sake of man. Certainly man stands highest, for only in man has
consciousness succeeded, but man has, as it were, lost much in coming
to this position. The whole process of Evolution "IS AS IF A VAGUE AND
FORMLESS BEING, WHOM WE MAY CALL, AS WE WILL, man OR super-man, HAD
SOUGHT TO REALIZE HIMSELF AND HAD SUCCEEDED ONLY BY ABANDONING A PART OF
HIMSELF ON THE WAY." [Footnote: Creative Evolution, p. 281 (Fr. p. 289).
(Italics are Bergson's.)]
In the lectures on The Nature of the Soul, Bergson referred to the
"Pathway of the evolutionary process" as being a "Way to Personality."
For on the line which leads to man liberation has been accomplished and
thus personalities have been able to constitute themselves. If we could
view this line of evolution it would appear to resemble a telegraph
wire on which has travelled a dispatch sent off as long ago as the first
beginnings of life, a message which was then confused, of which a part
has been lost on the way, but which has at last found in the human race
the appropriate instrument.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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