48 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



is only like reproducing like. The more the geometry 

 in mechanism is emphasized, the less can mechanism 

 admit that anything is ever created, even pure form. 

 In so far as we are geometricians, then, we reject the 

 unforeseeable. We might accept it, assuredly, in so 

 far as we are artists, for art lives on creation and 

 implies a latent belief in the spontaneity of nature. 

 But disinterested art is a luxury, like pure specula 

 tion. Long before being artists, we are artisans ; and 

 all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness 

 and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves 

 as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which 

 it sets out to reproduce ; and even w r hen it invents, 

 it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new 

 arrangement of elements already known. Its principle 

 is that &quot;we must have like to produce like.&quot; In 

 short, the strict application of the principle of finality, 

 like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads 

 to the conclusion that &quot; all is given.&quot; Both principles 

 say the same thing in their respective languages, because 

 they respond to the same need. 



That is why again they agree in doing away with time. 

 Real duration is that duration which gnaws on things, 

 and leaves on them the mark of its tooth. If every 

 thing is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the 

 same concrete reality never recurs. Repetition is there 

 fore possible only in the abstract : what is repeated is 

 some aspect that our senses, and especially our intellect, 

 have singled out from reality, just because our action, 

 upon which all the effort of our intellect is directed, 

 can move only among repetitions. Thus, concentrated 

 on that which repeats, solely preoccupied in welding 

 the same to the same, intellect turns away from the 

 vision of time. It dislikes what is fluid, and solidifies 



