264 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



aggregate of molecules and aggregate of facts. The 

 reason of this lies in the structure of our intellect, which 

 is formed to act on matter from without, and which 

 succeeds by making, in the flux of the real, instantaneous 

 cuts, each of which becomes, in its fixity, endlessly 

 decomposable. Perceiving, in an organism, only parts 

 external to parts, the understanding has the choice 

 between two systems of explanation only : either to 

 regard the infinitely complex (and thereby infinitely 

 well-contrived) organization as a fortuitous concatena 

 tion of atoms, or to relate it to the incomprehensible 

 influence of an external force that has grouped its 

 elements together. But this complexity is the work of 

 the understanding ; this incomprehensibility is also its 

 work. Let us try to see, no longer with the eyes of 

 the intellect alone, which grasps only the already made 

 and which looks from the outside, but with the spirit, 

 I mean with that faculty of seeing which is immanent 

 in the faculty of acting and which springs up, somehow, 

 by the twisting of the will on itself, when action is turned 

 into knowledge, like heat, so to say, into light. To 

 movement, then, everything will be restored, and into 

 movement everything will be resolved. Where the 

 understanding, working on the image supposed to be 

 fixed ot the progressing action, shows us parts infinitely 

 manifold and an order infinitely well contrived, we catch 

 a glimpse of a simple process, an action which is making 

 itself across an action of the same kind which is 

 unmaking itself, like the fiery path torn by the last 

 rocket of a fireworks display through the black cinders 

 of the spent rockets that are falling dead. 



From this point of view, the general considerations 

 we have presented concerning the evolution of life will 



