250 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



freedom to mechanical necessity by way of inversion. 

 It was not enough to prove that this relation between 

 the two terms is suggested to us, at once, by con 

 sciousness and by sensible experience. It was necessary 

 to prove that the geometrical order has no need of 

 explanation, being purely and simply the suppression 

 of the inverse order. And, for that, it was indispensable 

 to prove that suppression is always a substitution 

 and is even necessarily conceived as such : it is the 

 requirements of practical life alone that suggest to us 

 here a way of speaking that deceives us both as to 

 what happens in things and as to what is present to 

 our thought. We must now examine more closely the 

 inversion whose consequences we have just described. 

 What, then, is the principle that has only to let go its 

 tension, may we say to defend^ in order to extend, the 

 interruption of the cause here being equivalent to a 

 reversal of the effect ? 



For want of a better word we have called it 

 consciousness. But we do not mean the narrowed 

 consciousness that functions in each of us. Our own 

 consciousness is the consciousness of a certain living 

 being, placed in a certain point of space ; and though it 

 does indeed move in the same direction as its principle, 

 it is continually drawn the opposite way, obliged, 

 though it goes forward, to look behind. This retro 

 spective vision is, as we have shown, the natural 

 function of the intellect, and consequently of distinct 

 consciousness. In order that our consciousness shall 

 coincide with something of its principle, it must detach 

 itself from the already-made and attach itself to the 

 being-made. It needs that, turning back on itself 

 and twisting on itself, the faculty of seeing should be 

 made to be one with the act of willing, a painful 



