The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Dunan - Le problème de la vie - Part 2
Since we cannot explain how the organism, is produced by the unification of different portions of the world, we must admit that the world proceeds from it. The organism is not composite, it is one. This unity must be conceived as primordial and substantial, without antecedents and causes, whose fundamental law it is to unfold itself through time and space under the form of a living, organized body, embracing in its bounds the entire universe. Hence, it cannot be regarded as a metaphysical entity more or less distinct, or even separable from the body. D. calls it a metempirical being, transcending not only the senses and the imagination, but even the understanding itself. It is the whole of an infinite multiplicity, a whole anterior to its parts, without having any existence outside of them. In so far as this being is manifold, it enters into experience; in so far as one, it is inaccessible. What renders the explanation of life by mechanism and teleology necessary is the conception according to which space and time are two media, perfectly homogeneous, in which phenomena successively or simultaneously develop. Consider space as a multiplicity, indefinitely diffused, and you must consider the things which are in space as being also diffused and infinitely divisible. We are then compelled to compose it of an infinity of infinities, like mathematical points, which can know no other laws than those of movement. And then movement must be considered as the primordial reality from which everything proceeds, to which everything returns. Although philosophers have admitted the other principle of the non-composition of extension and duration, they have not taken sufficient account of it in their speculations. To this principle we must return, if we would understand living nature. The contradictions involved in the other theory render its acceptance impossible. All arguments lose their force, however, if we regard extension and duration, time and space, as primordial realities, whose elements and principles we need not seek, because they admit of no composition, and result from no synthesis. Time and space are unities; their nature imposes on us a conception of life (quite different from that of Leibniz and Descartes) according to which the living being constitutes its organs instead of resulting from them.
All duration and extension, then, are one before being manifold. We see in duration a double nature: succession and simultaneity mutually imply each other. Neither pure succession nor pure simultaneity of parts of time can be conceived; both render time and thinking impossible. Absolute succession means absolute multiplicity without any principle of unity; that is, nothing. Absolute simultaneity means absolute unity without any multiplicity; that is, nothing. But in the union of these two contraries we find the real; this union is a fundamental, and therefore unanalyzable law of our mental constitution, as well as of the nature of things. The same reasoning applied to extension yields similar results. In themselves, things are neither one nor manifold, but both at the same time, and the same is true of consciousness; that is, consciousness and nature have one and the same law. Whence it happens that thought is misled to look at things under an exclusive aspect, now from the point of view of multiplicity, — now from that of unity.
The conclusion then reached is that duration and extension, time and space, present precisely the same characteristics as those attributed by us to living beings, i.e. they are true unities and indivisible essences. Time and space have not the principle of their being, either in themselves, or in a fundamental and irreducible law of the mind; they are simply the necessary forms of every concrete existence in the phenomenal order; and the principle which produces them is life. That which is one could not be abstract; in the law which creates out of a metaphysical unity a phenomenal plurality there is real dynamic force. Time and space are then, metaphysically, forces, having power and life. They are but two aspects, not of movement, but of a living, organized being, primordial and absolute, causa sui. Time and space are in and through the organisms. We may say, therefore, life and space and time are one and the same thing. Empirical time and space presuppose, as the fundamental principle of their own nature, metaphysical time and space; while metaphysical time and space necessarily give empirical time and space. In order that a thing be in space, it is necessary that space be in some manner the being of this thing. The living being is the only corporeal thing which exists before its parts, and does not result from their mere aggregation. Since time and space and the living being are one and the same, we can arrive at a knowledge of life by studying the nature of time and space. For the sake of simplicity, D. substitutes the straight line. Any two points of this line determine it altogether. The part of the line comprised between the two points is the perfect, adequate, absolute expression of the entire straight line considered in the infinitude of its possible development. The finite is the adequate expression of the infinite. The only possible way in which the infinite can exist is to exist, like the straight line, en raison et en puissance. Similarly, the living being, though infinite in reality, has a bounded body. Parts of time and space are really expressions of total time and space, expressions which differ according to the positions they occupy. The whole of time and space, being infinite, is not adequately expressed by any of its parts, but only by their totality, which is itself an infinity. Similarly, the infinite universe does not exist in itself, but only in living beings, which, forming an infinity, express it an infinite number of times under infinitely different aspects, which are complements of each other.