294 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



more and more the sensations my body sends in to 

 me : now they are almost gone ; now they are gone, 

 they have disappeared in the night where all things 

 else have already died away. But no ! At the very 

 instant that my consciousness is extinguished, another 

 consciousness lights up or rather, it was already alight : 

 it had arisen the instant before, in order to witness the 

 extinction of the first ; for the first could disappear 

 only for another and in the presence of another. I see 

 myself annihilated only if I have already resuscitated 

 myself by an act which is positive, however involuntary 

 and unconscious. So, do what I will, I am always 

 perceiving something, either from without or from 

 within. When I no longer know anything of external 

 objects, it is because I have taken refuge in the con 

 sciousness that I have of myself. If I abolish this 

 inner self, its very abolition becomes an object for an 

 imaginary self which now perceives as an external 

 object the self that is dying away. Be it external or 

 internal, some object there always is that my imagina 

 tion is representing. My imagination, it is true, can 

 go from one to the other, I can by turns imagine a 

 nought of external perception or a nought of internal 

 perception, but not both at once, for the absence of 

 one consists, at bottom, in the exclusive presence of the 

 other. But, from the fact that two relative noughts are 

 imaginable in turn, we wrongly conclude that they are 

 imaginable together : a conclusion the absurdity of 

 which must be obvious, for we cannot imagine a nought 

 without perceiving, at least confusedly, that we are 

 imagining it, consequently that we are acting, that we 

 are thinking, and therefore that something still subsists. 

 The image, then, properly so called, of a suppression 

 of everything is never formed by thought. The 



