By
degrees, the plant withers and disappears from view, leaving behind
more or fewer apparently inert and simple bodies, just like the bean
from which it sprang; and, like it, endowed with the potentiality of
giving rise to a similar cycle of manifestations. Neither the poetic
nor the scientific imagination is put to much strain in the search
after analogies with this process of going forth and, as it were,
returning to the starting-point. It may be likened to the ascent and
descent of a slung stone, or the course of an arrow along its
trajectory. Or we may say that the living energy takes first an upward
and then a downward road. Or it may seem preferable to compare the
expansion of the germ into the full-grown plant, to the unfolding of a
fan, or to the rolling forth and widening of a stream; and thus to
arrive at the conception of "development," or "evolution." Here, as
elsewhere, names are "noise and smoke"; the important point is to have
a clear and adequate conception of the fact signified by a name. And,
in this case, the fact is the Sisyphaean process, in the course of
which, the living and growing plant passes from the relative
simplicity and latent potentiality of the seed to the full epiphany of
a highly differentiated type, thence to fall back to simplicity and
potentiality.
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