720 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



positive to the physicist and to the geometrician 

 would become, from this new point of view, an inter 

 ruption or inversion of the true positivity, which 

 would have to be defined in psychological terms. 



When we consider the admirable order of mathe 

 matics, the perfect agreement of the objects it deals 

 with, the immanent logic in numbers and figures, 

 our certainty of always getting the same conclusion, 

 however diverse and complex our reasonings on 

 the same subject, we hesitate to see in properties 

 apparently so positive a system of negations, the 

 absence rather than the presence of a true reality. 

 But we must not forget that our intellect, which 

 finds this order and wonders at it, is directed in 

 the same line of movement that leads to the 

 materiality and spatiality of its object. The more 

 complexity the intellect puts into its object by analys 

 ing it, the more complex is the order it finds there. 

 And this order and this complexity necessarily appear 

 to the intellect as a positive reality, since reality and 

 intellectuality are turned in the same direction. 



When a poet reads me his verses, I can interest 

 myself enough in him to enter into his thought, put 

 myself into his feelings, live over again the simple 

 state he has broken into phrases and words. I 

 sympathize then with his inspiration, I follow it 

 with a continuous movement which is, like the 

 inspiration itself, an undivided act. Now, I need 

 only relax my attention, let go the tension that there 

 is in me, for the sounds, hitherto swallowed up in 

 the sense, to appear to me distinctly, one by one, in 

 their materiality. For this I have not to do any 

 thing ; it is enough to withdraw something. In 



