288 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



intellect and senses themselves would show us of 

 matter, if they could obtain a direct and disinterested 

 idea of it. But, preoccupied before everything with 

 the necessities of action, the intellect, like the senses, 

 is limited to taking, at intervals, views that are instan 

 taneous and by that very fact immobile of the becoming 

 of matter. Consciousness, being in its turn formed on 

 the intellect, sees clearly of the inner life what is 

 already made, and only feels confusedly the making. 

 Thus, we pluck out of duration those moments 

 that interest us, and that we have gathered along its 

 course. These alone we retain. And we are right in 

 so doing, while action only is in question. But when, 

 in speculating on the nature of the real, we go on regard 

 ing it as our practical interest requires us to regard it, 

 we become unable to perceive the true evolution, the 

 radical becoming. Of becoming we perceive only states, 

 of duration only instants, and even when we speak of 

 duration and of becoming, it is of another thing that 

 we are thinking. Such is the most striking of the 

 two illusions we wish to examine. It consists in 

 supposing that we can think the unstable by means of 

 the stable, the moving by means of the immobile. 



The other illusion is near akin to the first. It 

 has the same origin, being also due to the fact that 

 we import into speculation a procedure made for 

 practice. All action aims at getting something that 

 we feel the want of, or at creating something that does 

 not yet exist. In this very special sense, it fills a void, 

 and goes from the empty to the full, from an absence 

 to a presence, from the unreal to the real. Now the 

 unreality which is here in question is purely relative 

 to the direction in which our attention is engaged, for 

 we are immersed in realities and cannot pass out of 



