in.] IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 247 



Let us imagine a vessel full of steam at a high pressure, 

 and here and there in its sides a crack through which the 

 steam is escaping in a jet. The steam thrown into the air 

 is nearly all condensed into little drops which fall back, and 

 this condensation and this fall represent simply the loss 

 of something, an interruption, a deficit. But a small 

 part of the jet of steam subsists, uncondensed, for some 

 seconds; it is making an effort to raise the drops which 

 are falling; it succeeds at most in retarding their fall. 

 So, from an immense reservoir of life, jets must be gushing 

 out unceasingly, of which each, falling back, is a world. 

 The evolution of living species within this world repre- 

 sents what subsists of the primitive direction of the 

 original jet, and of an impulsion which continues itself 

 in a direction the inverse of materiality. But let us 

 not carry too far this comparison. It gives us but a 

 feeble and even deceptive image of reality, for the crack, 

 the jet of steam, the forming of the drops, are deter- 

 mined necessarily, whereas the creation of a world is 

 a free act, and the life within the material world partici- 

 pates in this liberty. Let us think rather of an action 

 like that of raising the arm; then let us suppose that 

 the arm, left to itself, falls back, and yet that there sub- 

 sists in it, striving to raise it up again, something of the 

 will that animates it. In this image of a creative action 

 which unmakes itself we have already a more exact re- 



the present state of our solar system? Beside the worlds which are 

 dying, there are without doubt worlds that are being born. On the 

 other hand, in the organized world, the death of individuals does not 

 seem at all like a diminution of "life in general," or like a necessity 

 which life submits to reluctantly. As has been more than once re- 

 marked, life has never made an effort to prolong indefinitely the exist- 

 ence of the individual, although on so many other points it has made 

 so many successful efforts. Everything is as if this death had been 

 willed, or at least accepted, f^r the greater progress of life in general. 



