314 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



is that the &quot; nothing &quot; concerned here is the absence not 

 so much of a thing as of a utility. If I bring a visitor 

 into a room that I have not yet furnished, I say to 

 him that &quot; there is nothing in it.&quot; Yet I know the 

 room is full of air ; but, as we do not sit on air, the 

 room truly contains nothing that at this moment, for 

 the visitor and for myself, counts for anything. In 

 a general way, human work consists in creating utility ; 

 and, as long as the work is not done, there is &quot; nothing &quot; 

 nothing that we want. Our life is thus spent in 

 filling voids, which our intellect conceives under the 

 influence, by no means intellectual, of desire and of 

 regret, under the pressure of vital necessities ; and if 

 we mean by void an absence of utility and not of 

 things, we may say, in this quite relative sense, that 

 we are constantly going from the void to the full : such 

 is the direction which our action takes. Our specula 

 tion cannot help doing the same ; and, naturally, 

 it passes from the relative sense to the absolute 

 sense, since it is exercised on things themselves and 

 not on the utility they have for us. Thus is implanted 

 in us the idea that reality fills a void, and that Nothing, 

 conceived as an absence of everything, pre-exists before 

 all things in right, if not in fact. It is this illusion that 

 we have tried to remove by showing that the idea of 

 Nothing, if we try to see in it that of an annihilation 

 of all things, is self- destructive and reduced to a 

 mere word ; and that if, on the contrary, it is truly 

 an idea, then we find in it as much matter as in the 

 idea of All. 



This long analysis has been necessary to show that 

 a self-sufficient reality is not necessarily a reality foreign 

 to duration. If we pass (consciously or unconsciously) 



