HI IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 253 



themselves already the fixation and, as it were, 

 congealment of a movement ?), a creation of matter 

 would be neither incomprehensible nor inadmissible. 

 For we seize from within, we live at every instant, a 

 creation of form, and it is just in those cases in which 

 the form is pure, and in which the creative current is 

 momentarily interrupted, that there is a creation of 

 matter. Consider the letters of the alphabet that enter 

 into the composition of everything that has ever been 

 written : we do not conceive that new letters spring 

 up and come to join themselves to the others in order 

 to make a new poem. But that the poet creates the 

 poem and that human thought is thereby made richer, 

 we understand very well : this creation is a simple act 

 of the mind, and action has only to make a pause, 

 instead of continuing into a new creation, in order that, 

 of itself, it may break up into words which dissociate 

 themselves into letters which are added to all the letters 

 there are already in the world. Thus, that the number 

 of atoms composing the material universe at a given 

 moment should increase, runs counter to our habits of 

 mind, contradicts the whole of our experience ; but 

 that a reality of quite another order, which con 

 trasts with the atom as the thought of the poet with 

 the letters of the alphabet, should increase by sudden 

 additions, is not inadmissible ; and the reverse of each 

 addition might indeed be a world, which we then 

 represent to ourselves, symbolically, as an assemblage 

 of atoms. 



The mystery that spreads over the existence of the 

 universe comes in great part from this, that we want the 

 genesis of it to have been accomplished at one stroke or 

 the whole of matter to be eternal. Whether we speak of 

 creation or posit an uncreated matter, it is the totality 



