m.] IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 239 



and, above all, assured of external points of reference in 

 order not to go astray. To that end a continual coming 

 and going is necessary between nature and mind. 



When we put back our being into our will, and our 

 will itself into the impulsion it prolongs, we understand, 

 we feel, that reality is a perpetual growth, a creation 

 pursued without end. Our will already performs this 

 miracle. Every human work in which there is invention, 

 every voluntary act in which there is freedom, every 

 movement of an organism that manifests spontaneity, 

 brings something new into the world. True, these are 

 only creations of form. How could they be anything 

 else? We are not the vital current itself; we are this 

 current already loaded with matter, that is, with con- 

 gealed parts of its own substance which it carries along 

 its course. In the composition of a work of genius, as 

 in a simple free decision, we do, indeed, stretch the spring 

 of our activity to the utmost and thus create what no mere 

 assemblage of materials could have given (what assemblage 

 of curves already known can ever be equivalent to the 

 pencil-stroke of a great artist?) but there are, none the 

 less, elements here that pre-exist and survive their or- 

 ganization. But if a simple arrest of the action that 

 generates form could constitute matter (are not the original 

 lines drawn by the artist themselves already the fixation 

 and, as it were, congealment of a movement?), a creation 

 of matter would be neither incomprehensible nor inad- 

 missible. For we seize from within, we live at every 

 instant, a creation of form, and it is just in those cases 

 in which the form is pure, and in which the creative current 

 is momentarily interrupted, that there is a creation of 

 matter. Consider the letters of the alphabet that enter 

 into the composition of everything that has ever been 

 written: we do not conceive that new letters spring up 



