3i 8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



mentary changes that its faculty of perceiving con 

 centrates into one of its instants. And the progress 

 must be continuous, in nature, from the beings that 

 vibrate almost in unison with the oscillations of the ether, 

 up to those that embrace trillions of these oscillations 

 in the shortest of their simple perceptions. The first 

 feel hardly anything but movements ; the others per 

 ceive quality. The first are almost caught up in the 

 running-gear of things ; the others react, and the 

 tension ot their faculty of acting is probably proportional 

 to the concentration of their faculty of perceiving. The 

 progress goes on even in humanity itself. A man is so 

 much the more a &quot; man of action &quot; as he can embrace 

 in a glance a greater number of events : he who per 

 ceives successive events one by one will allow himself 

 to be led by them ; he who grasps them as a whole 

 will dominate them. In short, the qualities of matter 

 are so many stable views that we take of its instability. 

 Now, in the continuity of sensible qualities we 

 mark off the boundaries of bodies. Each of these 

 bodies really changes at every moment. In the first 

 place, it resolves itself into a group of qualities, and 

 every quality, as we said, consists of a succession of 

 elementary movements. But, even if we regard the 

 quality as a stable state, the body is still unstable in 

 that it changes qualities without ceasing. The body 

 pre-eminently that which we are most justified in 

 isolating within the continuity of matter, because it 

 constitutes a relatively closed system, is the living 

 body ; it is, moreover, for it that we cut out the others 

 within the whole. Now, life is an evolution. We 

 concentrate a period of this evolution in a stable view 

 which we call a form, and, when the change has 

 become considerable enough to overcome the fortunate 



