154 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



we see that the intellect is never quite at its ease, never 

 entirely at home, except when it is working upon inert 

 matter, more particularly upon solids. What is the most 

 general property of the material world? It is extended: 

 it presents to us objects external to other objects, and, in 

 these objects, parts external to parts. No doubt, it is 

 useful to us, in view of our ulterior manipulation, to regard 

 each object as divisible into parts arbitrarily cut up, each 

 part being again divisible as we like, and so on ad infinitum. 

 But it is above all necessary, for our present manipulation, 

 to regard the real object in hand, or the real elements into 

 which we have resolved it, as provisionally final, and to 

 treat them as so many units. To this possibility of de- 

 composing matter as much as we please, and in any way 

 we please, we allude when we speak of the continuity of 

 material extension; but this continuity, as we see it, is 

 nothing else but our ability, an ability that matter allows 

 to us to choose the mode of discontinuity we shall find in 

 it. It is always, in fact, the mode of discontinuity once 

 chosen that appears to us as the actually real one and 

 that which fixes our attention, just because it rules our 

 action. Thus discontinuity is thought for itself; it is 

 thinkable in itself; we form an idea of it by a positive 

 act of our mind; while the intellectual representation of 

 continuity is negative, being, at bottom, only the refusal 

 of our mind, before any actually given system of decompo- 

 sition, to regard it as the only possible one. Of the 

 discontinuous alone does the intellect form a clear idea. 



On the other hand, the objects we act on are certainly 

 mobile objects, but the important thing for us to know is 

 whither the mobile object is going and where it is at any 

 moment of its passage. In other words, our interest is 

 directed, before all, to its actual or future positions, and 

 not to the progress by which it passes from one position 



