164 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 



it will abstract, separate, eliminate, so as to substitute for 

 the object itself, if necessary, an approximate equivalent 

 in which things will happen in this way. But that each 

 instant is a fresh endowment, that the new is ever upspring- 

 ing, that the form just come into existence (although, 

 when once produced, it may be regarded as an effect de- 

 termined by its causes) could never have been foreseen — 

 because the causes here, unique in their kind, are part of 

 the effect, have come into existence with it, and are de- 

 termined by it as much as they determine it — all this we 

 can feel within ourselves and also divine, by sympathy, 

 outside ourselves, but we cannot think it, in the strict sense 

 of the word, nor express it in terms of pure understanding. 

 No wonder at that: we must remember what our intellect 

 is meant for. The causality it seeks and finds everywhere 

 expresses the very mechanism of our industry, in which 

 we go on recomposing the same whole with the same parts, 

 repeating the same movements to obtain the same result. 

 The finality it understands best is the finality of our in- 

 dustry, in which we work on a model given in advance, that 

 is to say, old or composed of elements already known. As 

 to invention properly so called, which is, however, the point 

 of departure of industry itself, our intellect does not 

 succeed in grasping it in its upspringing, that is to say, 

 in its indivisibility, nor in its fervor, that is to say, in 

 its creativeness. Explaining it always consists in re- 

 solving it, it the unforeseeable and new, into elements 

 old or known, arranged in a different order. The intellect 

 can no more admit complete novelty than real becoming; 

 that is to say, here again it lets an essential aspect of life 

 escape, as if it were not intended to think such an object. 

 All our analyses bring us to this conclusion. But it 

 is hardly necessary to go into such long details concerning 

 the mechanism of intellectual working; it is enough to 



