22 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



natural metaphysic of the human mind. Its apparent 

 clearness, our impatient desire to find it true, the 

 enthusiasm with which so many excellent minds accept 

 it without proof all the seductions, in short, that it 

 exercises on our thought, should put us on our guard 

 against it. The attraction it has for us proves well 

 enough that it gives satisfaction to an innate inclination. 

 But, as will be seen further on, the intellectual tendencies 

 innate to-day, which life must have created in the course 

 of its evolution, are not at all meant to supply us with 

 an explanation of life : they have something else to do. 

 Any attempt to distinguish between an artificial 

 and a natural system, between the dead and the living, 

 runs counter to this tendency at once. Thus it happens 

 that we find it equally difficult to imagine that the 

 organized has duration and that the unorganized has 

 not. When we say that the state of an artificial system 

 depends exclusively on its state at the moment before, 

 does it not seem as if we were bringing time in, as if 

 the system had something to do with real duration r 

 And, on the other hand, though the whole of the past 

 goes into the making of the living being s present 

 moment, does not organic memory press it into the 

 moment immediately before the present, so that the 

 moment immediately before becomes the sole cause of 

 the present one ? To speak thus is to ignore the 

 cardinal difference between concrete time, along which 

 a real system develops, and that abstract time which 

 enters into our speculations on artificial systems. 

 What does it mean, to say that the state of an artificial 

 system depends on what it was at the moment immedi 

 ately before ? There is no instant immediately before 

 another instant ; there could not be, any more than 

 there could be one mathematical point touching another. 



