m.l IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 249 



things already existing is absurd, no doubt, since the 

 thing results from a solidification performed by our under- 

 standing, and there are never any things other than those 

 that the understanding has thus constituted. To speak 

 of things creating themselves would therefore amount 

 to saying that the understanding presents to itself more 

 than it presents to itself — a self-contradictory affirmation, 

 an empty and vain idea. But that action increases as it 

 goes on, that it creates in the measure of its advance, 

 is what each of us finds when he watches himself act. 

 Things are constituted by the instantaneous cut which 

 the understanding practices, at a given moment, on a flux 

 of this kind, and what is mysterious when we compare 

 the cuts together becomes clear when we relate them to 

 the flux. Indeed, the modalities of creative action, in so 

 far as it is still going on in the organization of living forms, 

 are much simplified when they are taken in this way. 

 Before the complexity of an organism and the practically 

 infinite multitude of interwoven analyses and syntheses 

 it presupposes, our understanding recoils disconcerted. 

 That the simple play of physical and chemical forces, 

 left to themselves, should have worked this marvel, we 

 find hard to believe. And if it is a profound science 

 which is at work, how are we to understand the influence 

 exercised on this matter without form by this form without 

 matter? But the difficulty arises from this, that we 

 represent statically ready-made material particles juxta- 

 posed to one another, and, also statically, an external 

 cause which plasters upon them a skilfully contrived 

 organization. In reality, life is a movement, materiality 

 is the inverse movement, and each of these two movements 

 is simple, the matter which forms a world being an un- 

 divided flux, and undivided also the fife that runs through 

 it, cutting out in it living beings all along its track. Of 



