236 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 



And this state of things I shall believe that I am think- 

 ing of, because it is implied, it seems, in the very con- 

 tingency of order, which is an unquestionable fact. I 

 shall therefore place at the summit of the hierarchy the 

 vital order; then, as a diminution or lower complication 

 of it, the geometrical order; and finally, at the bottom of 

 all, an absence of order, incoherence itself, on which order 

 is superposed. This is why incoherence has the effect 

 on me of a word behind which there must be something 

 real, if not in things, at least in thought. But if I observe 

 that the state of things implied by the contingency of a 

 determinate order is simply the presence of the contrary 

 order, and if by this very fact I posit two kinds of order, 

 each the inverse of the other, I perceive that no inter- 

 mediate degrees can be imagined between the two orders, 

 and that there is no going down from the two orders to 

 the "incoherent." Either the incoherent is only a word, 

 devoid of meaning, or, if I give it a meaning, it is on con- 

 dition of putting incoherence midway between the two 

 orders, and not below both of them. There is not first 

 the incoherent, then the geometrical, then the vital; 

 there is only the geometrical and the vital, and then, by a 

 swaying of the mind between them, the idea of the in- 

 coherent. To speak of an uncoordinated diversity to 

 which order is superadded is therefore to commit a veritable 

 petitio prinripii; for in imagining the uncoordinated we 

 really posit an order, or rather two. 



This long analysis was necessary to show how the real 

 can pass from tension to extension and from freedom to 

 mechanical necessity by way of inversion. It was not 

 enough to prove that this relation between the two terms 

 is suggested to us, at once, by consciousness and by sensible 

 experience. It was necessary to prove that the geometrical 



