in.] IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 23? 



order has no need of explanation, being purely and simply 

 the suppression of the inverse order. And, for that, it 

 was indispensable to prove that suppression is always a 

 substitution and is even necessarily conceived as such: 

 it is the requirements of practical life alone that suggest 

 to us here a way of speaking that deceives us both as to 

 what happens in things and as to what is present to our 

 thought. We must now examine more closely the in- 

 version whose consequences we have just described. 

 What, then, is the principle that has only to let go its 

 tension — may we say to detend — in order to extend, the 

 interruption of the cause here being equivalent to a re- 

 versal of the effect? 



For want of a better word we have called it consciousness. 

 But we do not mean the narrowed consciousness that 

 functions in each of us. Our own consciousness is the con- 

 sciousness of a certain living being, placed in a certain 

 point of space; and though it does indeed move in the same 

 direction as its principle, it is continually drawn the op- 

 posite way, obliged, though it goes forward, to look be- 

 hind. This retrospective vision is, as we have shown, 

 the natural function of the intellect, and consequently 

 of distinct consciousness. In order that our consciousness 

 shall coincide with something of its principle, it must 

 detach itself from the already-made and attach itself to the 

 being-made. It needs that, turning back on itself and 

 twisting on itself, the faculty of seeing should be made to 

 be one with the act of willing — a painful effort which we 

 can make suddenly, doing violence to our nature, but 

 cannot sustain more than a few moments. In free action, 

 when we contract our whole being in order to thrust it 

 forward, we have the more or less clear consciousness 

 of motives and of impelling forces, and even, at rare mo- 

 ments, of the becoming by which they are organized into 



