3. The later stages in evolution, while connected with the earlier in continuity of development, may contain elements that are essentially new. A living being is "a reservoir of indetermination and unforeseeability."[152] The new species cannot be explained, except by an illegitimate process of thought, by what is presented in the old. The appearance of a new species is something as new as the composition of a symphony of Beethoven. Man, then, in his powers and destinies is not to be judged by his likeness to the brutes, but by what he possesses over and above the qualities of animal life, by those achievements and endowments to which animals have failed to attain. Since man, and man alone, has come so far, and in him alone consciousness has broken the chains of mechanical necessity, "we shall have no repugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone, consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life."[153]
[152: "Life and Consciousness," _Hibbert Journal_, October, 1911, p. 34.]
4. Creative evolution is the antithesis of mechanical evolution. Bergson protests that the conception of mechanism as applied to life is inadequate, because (1) it is artificial, growing out of our habits of controlling matter. It is an instrument of the intelligence, not giving us an insight into life, which we must gain rather in intuition, the higher faculty in Bergson's system. A mechanical representation of nature is always a "representation necessarily artificial and symbolic."[154] (2) Mechanical conceptions are inapplicable to living beings, because of the irreversibility of the movements of living forms; and (3) the mechanical theory is negatived by the facts of the psychophysical connection. "The hypothesis of an equivalence between the psychical state and the cerebral state implies a veritable absurdity, as we tried to prove in a former work."[155] No mechanical theory and no theory of accidental variations, whether insensible or abrupt, can account for the production of so complex an organ as the eye.[156]
[154: "L'Évolution Créatrice," 7th ed., 1911, p. iv.; E. T., "Creative Evolution," 1911, p. xii.]
[156: _Ibid._, pp. 82 ff.; E. T., pp. 75 ff.]
His critique of other theories prepares the way for Bergson's own view that the forms of living beings are due to an original vital impulsion, not in the single organism, but in life as a whole, seeking, without foresight of the result, to overcome the downward tendency of matter.