CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



of order.&quot; In so doing it thinks a word or a set of 

 words, nothing more. If it seeks to attach an idea to 

 the word 3 it finds that disorder may indeed be the 

 negation of order, but that this negation is then the 

 implicit affirmation of the presence of the opposite 

 order, which we shut our eyes to because it does not 

 interest us, or which we evade by denying the second 

 order in its turn that is, at bottom, by re-establishing 

 the first. How can we speak, then, of an incoherent 

 diversity which an understanding organizes ? It is no 

 use for us to say that no one supposes this incoherence 

 to be realized or realizable : when we speak of it, we 

 believe we are thinking of it ; now, in analysing the idea 

 actually present, we find, as we said before, only the dis 

 appointment of the mind confronted with an order that 

 does not interest it, or a swaying of the mind between 

 two kinds of order, or, finally, the idea pure and simple 

 of the empty word that we have created by joining a 

 negative prefix to a word which itself signifies some 

 thing. But it is this analysis that we neglect to make. 

 We omit it, precisely because it does not occur to us 

 to distinguish two kinds of order that are irreducible 

 to one another. 



We said, indeed, that all order necessarily appears 

 as contingent. If there are two kinds of order, this 

 contingency of order is explained : one of the forms 

 is contingent in relation to the other. Where I find 

 the geometrical order, the vital was possible ; where 

 the order is vital, it might have been geometrical. 

 But suppose that the order is everywhere of the same 

 kind, and simply admits of degrees which go from the 

 geometrical to the vital : if a determinate order still 

 appears to me to be contingent, and can no longer 

 be so by relation to an order of another kind, I shall 



