8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



influence of an external force, our idea of this change is 

 that of a displacement of parts which themselves do not 

 change. If these parts took to changing, we should split 

 them up in their turn. We should thus descend to the 

 molecules of which the fragments are made, to the atoms 

 that make up the molecules, to the corpuscles that generate 

 the atoms, to the "imponderable" within which the 

 corpuscle is perhaps a mere vortex. In short, we should 

 push the division or analysis as far as necessary. But we 

 should stop only before the unchangeable. 



Now, we say that a composite object changes by the 

 displacement of its parts. But when a part has left its 

 position, there is nothing to prevent its return to it. A 

 group of elements which has gone through a state can 

 therefore always find its way back to that state, if not by 

 itself, at least by means of an external cause able to restore 

 everything to its place. This amounts to saying that any 

 state of the group may be repeated as often as desired, 

 and consequently that the group does not grow old. It 

 has no history. 



Thus nothing is created therein, neither form nor matter. 

 What the group will be is already present in what it is, 

 provided "what it is" includes all the points of the uni- 

 verse with which it is related. A superhuman intellect 

 could calculate, for any moment of time, the position of 

 any point of the system in space. And as there is nothing 

 more in the form of the whole than the arrangement of 

 its parts, the future forms of the system are theoretically 

 visible in its present configuration. 



All our belief in objects, all our operations on the systems 

 that science isolates, rest in fact on the idea that time does 

 not bite into them. We have touched on this question 

 in an earlier work, and shall return to it in the course of 

 the present study. For the moment, we will confine our- 



