238 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



an act: but the pure willing, the current that runs through 

 this matter, communicating life to it, is a thing which we 

 hardly feel, which at most we brush lightly as it passes. 

 Let us try, however, to instal ourselves within it, if only for 

 a moment; even then it is an individual and fragmentary 

 will that we grasp. To get to the principle of all life, as 

 also of all materiality, we must go further still. Is it 

 impossible? No, by no means; the history of philosophy 

 is there to bear witness. There is no durable system that 

 is not, at least in some of its parts, vivified by intuition. 

 Dialectic is necessary to put intuition to the proof, necessary 

 also in order that intuition should break itself up into 

 concepts and so be propagated to other men; but all it 

 does, often enough, is to develop the result of that intuition 

 which transcends it. The truth is, the two procedures 

 are of opposite direction: the same effort, by which ideas 

 are connected with ideas, causes the intuition which the 

 ideas were storing up to vanish. The philosopher is 

 obliged to abandon intuition, once he has received from 

 it the impetus, and to rely on himself to carry on the 

 movement by pushing the concepts one after another. 

 But he soon feels he has lost foothold; he must come 

 into touch with intuition again; he must undo most of 

 what he has done. In short, dialectic is what ensures 

 the agreement of our thought with itself. But by dia- 

 lectic — which is only a relaxation of intuition — many 

 different agreements are possible, while there is only 

 one truth. Intuition, if it could be prolonged beyond 

 a few instants, would not only make the philosopher 

 agree with his own thought, but also all philosophers 

 with each other. Such as it is, fugitive and incomplete, 

 it is, in each system, what is worth more than the system 

 and survives it. The object of philosophy would be 

 reached if this intuition could be sustained, generalized 



