Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism have imposed a conceptual system which Bergson inherits even if he contests Haeckel’s monism and the Spencerian “system”. Life perpetuates itself and spreads through life forms arrived at by evolution, while each specific individual is both an epitome and a new individual, a bud burgeoning with vitalist drive and a being given over to death. The metaphorical networks which link the biological and the social, the psychological and the biological, seem to be this gradualism’s counterpart on the rhetorical plane. During the last ten years of the century, life affirms itself as the creator of value. Life is fecundity, it points to economic productivity, to the expansion of the civilised races. Immediate, foundational, life is also the final word of an ethical system in Zola’s novel Le Docteur Pascal (Doctor Pascal) or in the essays of Jean-Marie Guyau. Art and life must be reconciled, judge, as does this philosopher, the naturist writers whom Gide seems to be emulating with Les Nourritures terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth). In reality, he differentiates himself from this current by abandoning any form of solidaristic thinking, and breaks with biological gradualism. More generally, the last ten years of the century move away from the pathos and the drama with which Darwinism had at times glorified itself. The eulogy of the living being is also that of that joy Bergson sings of.