240 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



and come to join themselves to the others in order to 

 make a new poem. But that the poet creates the poem 

 and that human thought is thereby made richer, we under- 

 stand very well: this creation is a simple act of the mind, 

 and action has only to make a pause, instead of continuing 

 into a new creation, in order that, of itself, it may break 

 up into words which dissociate themselves into letters 

 which are added to all the letters there are already in the 

 world. Thus, that the number of atoms composing the 

 material universe at a given moment should increase runs 

 counter to our habits of mind, contradicts the whole of 

 our experience; but that a reality of quite another order, 

 which contrasts with the atom as the thought of the poet 

 with the letters of the alphabet, should increase by sudden 

 additions, is not inadmissible; and the reverse of each 

 addition might indeed be a world, which we then represent 

 to ourselves, symbolically, as an assemblage of atoms. 



The mystery that spreads over the existence of the 

 universe comes in great part from this, that we want the 

 genesis of it to have been accomplished at one stroke or 

 the whole of matter to be eternal. Whether we speak of 

 creation or posit an uncreated matter, it is the totality 

 of the universe that we are considering at once. At the 

 root of this habit of mind lies the prejudice which we 

 will analyze in our next chapter, the idea, common to 

 materialists and to their opponents, that there is no really 

 acting duration, and that the absolute — matter or mind — 

 can have no place in concrete time, in the time which we 

 feel to be the very stuff of our life. From which it follows 

 that everything is given once for all, and that it is necessary 

 to posit from all eternity either material multiplicity it- 

 self, or the act creating this multiplicity, given in block 

 in the divine essence. Once this prejudice is eradicated, 

 the idea of creation becomes more clear, for it is merged 



