in.] PHYSICAL LAWS 217 



duction, finds there. This order, on which our action 

 leans and in which our intellect recognizes itself, seems to 

 us marvelous. Not only do the same general causes al- 

 ways produce the same general effects, but beneath the 

 visible causes and effects our science discovers an infinity 

 of infinitesimal changes which work more and more exactly 

 into one another, the further we push the analysis: so 

 much so that, at the end of this analysis, matter becomes, 

 it seems to us, geometry itself. Certainly, the intellect 

 is right in admiring here the growing order in the growing 

 complexity; both the one and the other must have a 

 positive reality for it, since it looks upon itself as positive. 

 But things change their aspect when we consider the whole 

 of reality as an undivided advance forward to successive 

 creations. It seems to us, then, that the complexity of 

 the material elements and the mathematical order that 

 binds them together must arise automatically when within 

 the whole a partial interruption or inversion is produced. 

 Moreover, as the intellect itself is cut out of mind by a 

 process of the same kind, it is attuned to this order and 

 complexity, and admires them because it recognizes 

 itself in them. But what is admirable in itself, what really 

 deserves to provoke wonder, is the ever-renewed creation 

 which reality, whole and undivided, accomplishes in ad- 

 vancing; for no complication of the mathematical order 

 with itself, however elaborate we may suppose it, can in- 

 troduce an atom of novelty into the world, whereas this 

 power of creation once given (and it exists, for we are 

 conscious of it in ourselves, at least when we act freely) 

 has only to be diverted from itself to relax its tension, only 

 to relax its tension to extend, only to extend for the mathe- 

 matical order of the elements so distinguished and the in- 

 flexible determinism connecting them to manifest the inter- 

 ruption of the creative act: in fact, inflexible determinism 



