360 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



form. It is a vital process, something like the ripening 

 of an idea. 



The painter is before his canvas, the colours are on 

 the palette, the model is sitting all this we see, and 

 also we know the painter s style : do we foresee what 

 will appear on the canvas ? We possess the elements 

 of the problem ; we know, in an abstract way, how it 

 will be solved, for the portrait will surely resemble the 

 model and will surely resemble also the artist ; but the 

 concrete solution brings with it that unforeseeable 

 nothing which is everything in a work of art. And it 

 is this nothing that takes time. Nought as matter, it 

 creates itself as form. The sprouting and flowering 

 of this form are stretched out on an unshrinkable 

 duration which is one with their essence. So of the 

 works of nature. Their novelty arises from an internal 

 impetus which is progress or succession, which confers 

 on succession a peculiar virtue or which owes to succes 

 sion the whole of its virtue, which, at any rate, makes 

 succession, or continuity of inter penetration in time, irre 

 ducible to a mere instantaneous juxtaposition in space. 

 This is why the idea of reading in a present state of the 

 material universe the future of living forms, and of 

 unfolding now their history yet to come, involves a 

 veritable absurdity. But this absurdity is difficult to 

 bring out, because our memory is accustomed to place 

 alongside of each other, in an ideal space, the terms it 

 perceives in turn, because it always represents past suc 

 cession in the form of juxtaposition. It is able to do so, 

 indeed, just because the past belongs to that which is 

 already invented, to the dead, and no longer to creation 

 and to life. Then, as the succession to come will end by 

 being a succession past, we persuade ourselves that the 

 duration to come admits of the same treatment as past 



