Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson.

  • Patrick Geddes
Date:
[1911?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    experience. We change without ceasing; the organism is in a state of ceaseless flux which we call metabolism. Both have the mysterious quality of 44 duree ”—but duration in more than the merely physical and chronological sense; for what he means by it is 44 the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.” 44 Our personality shoots, grows and ripens without ceasing. Each of its moments is something new added to what was before. We are creating ourselves continually.” So of an organism it may be said that 44 its past, in its entirety, is pro¬ longed into its present, and abides there, actual and acting.” “ Continuity of change, preservation of the past in the present, real duration—the living being seems, then, to share these attributes with consciousness. Can we go farther and say that life, like conscious activity, is unceasing creation ? ” Bergson answers this question by an emphatic affirmative. The spontaneity of life is manifested by a continual creation of new forms. 44 A hereditary change in a definite direction, which continues to ac¬ cumulate and add to itself so as to build up a more and more complex machine, must certainly be related to some sort of effort,