234 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



a bad genius, conspiring against my person: in both cases 

 I find a mechanism where I should have looked for, where, 

 indeed, it seems as if I ought to have found, an intention. 

 That is what I express in speaking of chance. And of an 

 anarchical world, in which phenomena succeed each other 

 capriciously, I should say again that it is a realm of chance, 

 meaning that I find before me wills, or rather decrees, 

 when what I am expecting is mechanism. Thus is ex- 

 plained the singular vacillation of the mind when it tries 

 to define chance. Neither efficient cause nor final cause 

 can furnish the definition sought. The mind swings to 

 and fro, unable to rest, between the idea of an absence of 

 final cause and that of an absence of efficient cause, each 

 of these definitions sending it back to the other. The 

 problem remains insoluble, in fact, so long as the idea of 

 chance is regarded as a pure idea, without mixture of feel- 

 ing. But, in reality, chance merely objectifies the state 

 of mind of one who, expecting one of the two kinds of 

 order, finds himself confronted with the other. Chance 

 and disorder are therefore necessarily conceived as relative. 

 So if we wish to represent them to ourselves as absolute, 

 we perceive that we are going to and fro like a shuttle 

 between the two kinds of order, passing into the one just 

 at the moment at which we might catch ourself in the 

 other, and that the supposed absence of all order is really 

 the presence of both, with, besides, the swaying of a mind 

 that cannot rest finally in either. Neither in things 

 nor in our idea of things can there be any question of 

 presenting this disorder as the substratum of order, since 

 it implies the two kinds of order and is made of their 

 combination. 



But our intelligence is not stopped by this. By a 

 simple sic jvbeo it posits a disorder which is an ''absence 

 of order." In so doing it thinks a word or a set of words, 



