298 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



interference between, this feeling of preference and this 

 idea of substitution. 



Such is the mechanism of the operation by which 

 our mind annihilates an object and succeeds in repre 

 senting in the external world a partial nought. Let 

 us now see how it represents it within itself. We 

 find in ourselves phenomena that are produced, and 

 not phenomena that are not produced. I experience 

 a sensation or an emotion, I conceive an idea, I 

 form a resolution : my consciousness perceives these 

 facts, which are so many presences, and there is no 

 moment in which facts of this kind are not present to 

 me. I can, no doubt, interrupt by thought the course 

 of my inner life ; I may suppose that I sleep with 

 out dreaming or that I have ceased to exist ; but at the 

 very instant when I make this supposition, I conceive 

 myself, I imagine myself watching over my slumber or 

 surviving my annihilation, and I give up perceiving 

 myself from within only by taking refuge in the 

 perception of myself from without. That is to say that 

 here again the full always succeeds the full, and that an 

 intelligence that was only intelligence, that had neither 

 regret nor desire, whose movement was governed by 

 the movement of its object, could not even conceive 

 an absence or a void. The conception of a void arises 

 here when consciousness, lagging behind itself, remains 

 attached to the recollection of an old state when another 

 state is already present. It is only a comparison 

 between what is and what could or ought to be, 

 between the full and the full. In a word, whether it 

 be a void of matter or a void of consciousness, the repre 

 sentation of the void is always a representation which is 

 full and which resolves itself on analysis into two positive 

 elements : the idea, distinct or confused, of a substitution, 



