156 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



the form to be obtained. As to the matter, we choose 

 that which is most convenient; but, in order to choose 

 it, that is to say, in order to go and seek it among many 

 others, we must have tried, in imagination at least, to 

 endow every kind of matter with the form of the object 

 conceived. In other words, an intelligence which aims 

 at fabricating is an intelligence which never stops at the 

 actual form of things nor regards it as final, but, on the 

 contrary, looks upon all matter as if it were carvable at 

 will. Plato compares the good dialectician to the skilful 

 cook who carves the animal without breaking its bones, 

 by following the articulations marked out by nature. 1 

 An intelligence which always proceeded thus would really 

 be an intelligence turned toward speculation. But 

 action, and in particular fabrication, requires the opposite 

 mental tendency: it makes us consider every actual 

 form of things, even the form of natural things, as artificial 

 and provisional; it makes our thought efface from the object 

 perceived, even though organized and living, the lines 

 that outwardly mark its inward structure; in short, it 

 makes us regard its matter as indifferent to its form. The 

 whole of matter is made to appear to our thought as an 

 immense piece of cloth in which we can cut out what we 

 will and sew it together again as we please. Let us note, 

 in passing, that it is this power that we affirm when we say 

 that there is a space, that is to say, a homogeneous and 

 empty medium, infinite and infinitely divisible, lending 

 itself indifferently to any mode of decomposition whatso- 

 ever. A medium of this kind is never perceived; it is only 

 conceived. What is perceived is extension colored, re- 

 sistant, divided according to the lines which mark out the 

 boundaries of real bodies or of their real elements. But 

 when we think of our power over this matter, that is to say, 



» Plato, Phaearus, 265 e. 



