230 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



elements so distinguished and the inflexible deter 

 minism connecting them to manifest the interruption 

 of the creative act : in fact, inflexible determinism and 

 mathematical order are one with this very interruption. 



It is this merely negative tendency that the particular 

 laws of the physical world express. None of them, 

 taken separately, has objective reality ; each is the 

 work of an investigator who has regarded things from 

 a certain bias, isolated certain variables, applied certain 

 conventional units of measurement. And yet there is 

 an order approximately mathematical immanent in 

 matter, an objective order, which our science approaches 

 in proportion to its progress. For if matter is a 

 relaxation of the inextensive into the extensive and, 

 thereby, of liberty into necessity, it does not indeed 

 wholly coincide with pure homogeneous space, yet it is 

 constituted by the movement which leads to space, and 

 is therefore on the way to geometry. It is true that 

 laws of mathematical form will never apply to it com 

 pletely. For that, it would have to be pure space and 

 step out of duration. 



We cannot insist too strongly that there is something 

 artificial in the mathematical form of a physical law, 

 and consequently in our scientific knowledge of things. 1 

 Our standards of measurement are conventional, and, 

 so to say, foreign to the intentions of nature : can we 

 suppose that nature has related all the modalities of heat 

 to the expansion of the same mass of mercury, or to the 

 change of pressure of the same mass of air kept at a 

 constant volume? But we may go further. In a general 

 way, measuring is a wholly human operation, which 

 implies that we really or ideally superpose two objects 



1 Cf. especially the profound studies of M. Ed. Le Roy in the Re&amp;lt;vue 

 de mttaph. et de morale. 



