200 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



unceasingly with a present that is absolutely new. But> 

 at the same time, we feel the spring of our will strained 

 to its utmost limit. We must, by a strong recoil of our 

 personality on itself, gather up our past which is slipping 

 away, in order to thrust it, compact and undivided, into a 

 present which it will create by entering. Rare indeed are 

 the moments when we are self-possessed to this extent: 

 it is then that our actions are truly free. And even at 

 these moments we do not completely possess ourselves. 

 Our feeling of duration, I should say the actual coinciding 

 of ourself with itself, admits of degrees. But the more 

 the feeling is deep and the coincidence complete, the 

 more the life in which it replaces us absorbs intellectuality 

 by transcending it. For the natural function of the in- 

 tellect is to bind like to like, and it is only facts that can 

 be repeated that are entirely adaptable to intellectual 

 conceptions. Now, our intellect does undoubtedly grasp 

 the real moments of real duration after they are past; 

 we do so by reconstituting the new state of consciousness 

 out of a series of views taken of it from the outside, each 

 of which resembles as much as possible something already 

 known; in this sense we may say that the state of con- 

 sciousness contains intellectuality implicitly. Yet the 

 state of consciousness overflows the intellect; it is indeed 

 incommensurable with the intellect, being itself indivisible 

 and new. 



Now let us relax the strain, let us interrupt the effort 

 to crowd as much as possible of the past into the present. 

 If the relaxation were complete, there would no longer 

 be either memory or will — which amounts to saying that, 

 in fact, we never do fall into this absolute passivity, any 

 more than we can make ourselves absolutely free. But, 

 in the limit, we get a glimpse of an existence made of a 

 present which recommences unceasingly — devoid of real 



