30 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



or at least the same elementary phenomena, can be 

 repeated. But an original situation, which imparts 

 something of its own originality to its elements, that is 

 to say, to the partial views that are taken of it, how 

 can such a situation be pictured as given before it is 

 actually produced ? l All that can be said is that, once 

 produced, it will be explained by the elements that 

 analysis will then carve out of it. Now, what is true of 

 the production of a new species is also true of the pro 

 duction of a new individual, and, more generally, of any 

 moment of any living form. For, though the variation 

 must reach a certain importance and a certain generality 

 in order to give rise to a new species, it is being produced 

 every moment, continuously and insensibly, in every 

 living being. And it is evident that even the sudden 

 &quot; mutations &quot; which we now hear of are possible only if 

 a process of incubation, or rather of maturing, is going 

 on throughout a series of generations that do not seem 

 to change. In this sense it might be said of life, as 

 of consciousness, that at every moment it is creating 

 something. 2 



But against this idea of the absolute originality and un- 

 foreseeability of forms our whole intellect rises in revolt. 



1 We have dwelt on this point and tried to make it clear in the Essai 

 sur les donntes immediate; de la conscience, pp. 140-151. 



2 In his fine work on Genius in Art (Le Gtnie dam I art}, M. Seailles 

 develops this twofold thesis, that art is a continuation of nature and that 

 life is creation. We should willingly accept the second formula ; but by 

 creation must we understand, as the author does, a synthesis of elements ? 

 Where the elements pre-exist, the synthesis that will be made is virtually 

 given, being only one of the possible arrangements. This arrangement a 

 superhuman intellect could have perceived in advance among all the 

 possible ones that surround it. We hold, on the contrary, that in the 

 domain of life the elements have no real and separate existence. They are 

 manifold mental views of an indivisible process. And for that reason there 

 is radical contingency in progress, incommensurability between what goes 

 before and what follows in short, duration. 



