in INTELLECT AND MATERIALITY 211 



strong recoil of our personality on itself, gather up our 

 past which is slipping away, in order to thrust it, 

 compact and undivided, into a present which it will 

 create by entering. Rare indeed are the moments 

 when we are self-possessed to this extent : it is then that 

 our actions are truly free. And even at these moments 

 we do not completely possess ourselves. Our feeling 

 of duration, I should say the actual coinciding of 

 ourself with itself, admits of degrees. But the more 

 the feeling is deep and the coincidence complete, the 

 more the life in which it replaces us absorbs intel 

 lectuality by transcending it. For the natural function 

 of the intellect is to bind like to like, and it is only 

 facts that can be repeated that are entirely adaptable 

 to intellectual conceptions. Now, our intellect does 

 undoubtedly grasp the real moments of real duration 

 after they are past ; we do so by reconstituting the 

 new state of consciousness out of a series of views 

 taken of it from the outside, each of which resembles 

 as much as possible something already known ; in this 

 sense we may say that the state of consciousness 

 contains intellectuality implicitly. Yet the state of 

 consciousness overflows the intellect ; it is indeed 

 incommensurable with the intellect, being itself in 

 divisible and new. 



Now let us relax the strain, let us interrupt the 

 effort to crowd as much as possible of the past into the 

 present. If the relaxation were complete, there would 

 no longer be either memory or will, which amounts to 

 saying that, in fact, we_ji&ver__dQLj^.J^ntg_th].s absolute 

 passivity^ any_more. than we can make ourselves absol 

 utely free. Btrt r ift~the limit, we get a glimpse of an 

 existence made of a present which recommences 

 unceasingly -devoid of real duration, nothing but the 



