in IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 263 



kind, and what is mysterious when we compare the cuts 

 together becomes clear when we relate them to the flux. 

 Indeed, the modalities of creative action, in so far as it 

 is still going on in the organization of living forms, 

 are much simplified when they are taken in this way. 

 Before the complexity of an organism and the practically 

 infinite multitude of interwoven analyses and syntheses 

 it presupposes, our understanding recoils disconcerted. 

 That the simple play of physical and chemical forces, 

 left to themselves, should have worked this marvel, 

 we find hard to believe. And if it is a profound 

 science which is at work, how are we to understand 

 the influence exercised on this matter without form 

 by this form without matter ? But the difficulty arises 

 from this, that we represent statically ready - made 

 material particles juxtaposed to one another, and, also 

 statically, an external cause which plasters upon them 

 a skilfully contrived organization. In reality, life is a 

 movement, materiality is the inverse movement, and 

 each of these two movements is simple, the matter 

 which forms a world being an undivided flux, and 

 undivided also the life that runs through it, cutting out 

 in it living beings all along its track. Of these two 

 currents the second runs counter to the first, but the 

 first obtains, all the same, something from the second. 

 There results between them a modus vivendi, which is 

 organization. This organization takes, for our senses 

 and for our intellect, the form of parts entirely external 

 to other parts in space and in time. Not only do we 

 shut our eyes to the unity of the impulse which, passing 

 through generations, links individuals with individuals, 

 species with species, and makes of the whole series of 

 the living one single immense wave flowing over matter, 

 but each individual itself seems to us as an aggregate, 



