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epetition is their common tendency, which is most often hindered, to indefinite multiplication. The
same law of progressive enlargement necessarily applies to the three forms of adaptation and of
opposition, since the oppositions and adaptations multiply along with the repetitions with which they
interfere either through battle or alliance. Opposition has led to another very simple generalization,
one which has had a great success, greater, I believe, than its explanatory ability merits: all forms of
biological, social, and even physical battle terminate in victory for the stronger, called in biology
survival of the fittest. This is as true for the competition of physical forces or chemical affinities as it
is for the competition of species or nations—whence there follows a selection, alternately physical,
biological, or social, whose main property is elimination or purification but not creation.
Does adaptation also have its general laws? Despite frequent substitutions and destruction, is not a
tendency toward increasing accumulation common to the three forms of adaptation: to chemical
combination, which increases in complexity from so-called simple bodies to organic substances; to
the fertile coupling, which is a treasury ceaselessly enlarged by hereditary legacies from monera to
man, from the mushroom to the highest mammal; and to invention, which grafts a new idea to the
previous inventions of which it is composed and is destined, in turn, to support new grafts, and so on
from prehistoric inventions of the lever and the wheel to today’s most highly perfected machines?
Every invention adds something to previous ones, which it synthesizes rather than replaces, in the
same way that each new species or race, created by a succession of small but vital innovations
through auspicious marriages, is a synthesis of previous species or races. Similarly, new chemical
bodies are complications of previous chemical bodies.
No less than this principle of accumulation, the principle of irreversibility which derives from it
appears applicable to all forms of adaptation. We observe no law that predetermines the appearance
of all or almost all inventions at a particular time and place. There is nothing to prevent us from
imagining that the compass was discovered two or three centuries earlier or later, likewise America,
the printing press, or electricity. But of a given invention we can say that it could not occur before
some other invention which preceded and stimulated it, and to a large extent we know beyond doubt
that there is a logical chain of discoveries and inventions, that is, an irreversible order in their
appearance. The paleontological series of flora and fauna, no less than ideas and human progress, are
conceived as essentially irreversible 2 as are astronomical or geological series of chemical
formulations. According to thermodynamics, even transformations of physical forces are, owing to
their final conversion into heat, thrown against a hill impossible to reascend. Thus all three of these
aspects make life in the universe appear to us to have a meaning and a raison d’être.
This principle of irreversibility has such great significance that one might be tempted to exaggerate
its importance. It is advisable to circumscribe it in order to understand it well because, clearly
understood, it leaves a large share in social destinies to individual irregularities, personal initiative,
and genius. Irreversibility is far from a rule without exceptions. There are series of discoveries
which can always be conceived of as having followed one another in exactly inverse order—
geographical discoveries for instance. However, they also retain the particular quality that they
necessarily are deduced one from another, that one is inevitably led from one of them to not one other
but others in the immediate vicinity. Thus, a sociologist thought of seeking a formula for the evolution
of geographical discoveries, he would certainly be wasting his time. On the other hand, it is certain
that by no matter which evolution of sufficiently extensive geographical discoveries, one ought
inevitably to arrive at a world map which in its basic features would be more or less the same as the
map studied by the students of today. Whatever the starting point in America, the series of
explorations pushed to their conclusion would have led the navigators of whatever nation and