iii IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 251 



effort which we can make suddenly, doing violence 

 to our nature, but cannot sustain more than a few 

 moments. In free action, when we contract our whole 

 being in order to thrust it forward, we have the more 

 or less clear consciousness of motives and of impelling 

 forces, and even, at rare moments, of the becoming by 

 which they are organized into an act : but the pure 

 willing, the current that runs through this matter, 

 communicating life to it, is a thing which we hardly 

 feel, which at most we brush lightly as it passes. Let 

 us try, however, to install ourselves within it, if only for a 

 moment ; even then it is an individual and fragmentary 

 will that we grasp. To get to the principle of all life, 

 as also of all materiality, we must go further still. Is 

 it impossible ? No, by no means ; the history of 

 philosophy is there to bear witness. There is no 

 durable system that is not, at least in some of its parts, 

 vivified by intuition. Dialectic is necessary to put 

 intuition to the proof, necessary also in order that 

 intuition should break itself up into concepts and 

 so be propagated to other men ; but all it does, often 

 enough, is to develop the result of that intuition which 

 transcends it. The truth is, the two procedures are of 

 opposite direction : the same effort, by which ideas are 

 connected with ideas, causes the intuition which the 

 ideas were storing up to vanish. The philosopher is 

 obliged to abandon intuition, once he has received from 

 it the impetus, and to rely on himself to carry on the 

 movement by pushing the concepts one after another. 

 But he soon feels he has lost foothold ; he must come 

 into touch with intuition again ; he must undo most of 

 what he has done. In short, dialectic is what ensures 

 the agreement of our thought with itself. But by 

 dialectic which is only a relaxation of intuition many 



