390 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



reason about the whole ; that the same principles are 

 not applicable to the origin and to the end of a pro 

 gress ; that neither creation nor annihilation, for instance, 

 is inadmissible when we are concerned with the con 

 stituent corpuscles of the atom. Thereby they tend 

 to place themselves in the concrete duration, in which 

 alone there is true generation and not only a composi 

 tion of parts. It is true that the creation and annihila 

 tion of which they speak concern the movement or the 

 energy, and not the imponderable medium through 

 which the energy and the movement are supposed to 

 circulate. But what can remain of matter when you 

 take away everything that determines it, that is to say, 

 just energy and movement themselves? The philosopher 

 must go further than the scientist. Making a clean 

 sweep of everything that is only an imaginative symbol, 

 he will see the material world melt back into a simple 

 flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming. And he will 

 thus be prepared to discover real duration there where 

 it is still more useful to find it, in the realm of life 

 and of consciousness. For, so far as inert matter is 

 concerned, we may neglect the flowing without com 

 mitting a serious error : matter, we have said, is 

 weighted with geometry ; and matter, the reality 

 which descends^ endures only by its connection with 

 that which ascends. But life and consciousness are this 

 very ascension. When once we have grasped them in 

 their essence by adopting their movement, we under 

 stand how the rest of reality is derived from them. 

 Evolution appears and, within this evolution, the pro 

 gressive determination of materiality and intellectuality 

 by the gradual consolidation of the one and of the 

 other. But, then, it is within the evolutionary move 

 ment that we place ourselves, in order to follow it to 



