262 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



which we live, I find that the automatic and strictly 

 determined evolution of this well-knit whole is action 

 which is unmaking itself, and that the unforeseen forms 

 which life cuts out in it, forms capable of being them 

 selves prolonged into unforeseen movements, represent 

 the action that is making itself. Now, I have every 

 reason to believe that the other worlds are analogous to 

 ours, that things happen there in the same way. And 

 I know they were not all constructed at the same time, 

 since observation shows me, even to-day, nebulae in 

 course of concentration. Now, if the same kind of 

 action is going on everywhere, whether it is that which 

 is unmaking itself or whether it is that which is striving 

 to remake itself, I simply express this probable simili 

 tude when I speak of a centre from which worlds shoot 

 out like rockets in a fire-works display provided, 

 however, that I do not present this centre as a thing^ 

 but as a continuity of shooting out. God, thus defined, 

 has nothing of the already made ; He is unceasing 

 life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a 

 mystery ; we experience it in ourselves when we act 

 freely. That new things can join things already existing 

 is absurd, no doubt, since the thing results from a solidi 

 fication performed by our understanding, and there are 

 never any things other than those that the understand 

 ing has thus constituted. To speak of things creating 

 themselves would therefore amount to saying that the 

 understanding presents to itself more than it presents to 

 itself a self-contradictory affirmation, an empty and 

 vain idea. But that action increases as it goes on, that 

 it creates in the measure of its advance, is what each of 

 us finds when he watches himself act. Things are 

 constituted by the instantaneous cut which the under 

 standing practises, at a given moment, on a flux of this 



