250 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



these two currents the second runs counter to the first, 

 but the first obtains, all the same, something from the 

 second. There results between them a modus vivendi, 

 which is organization. This organization takes, for our 

 senses and for our intellect, the form of parts entirely 

 external to other parts in space and in time. Not only 

 do we shut our eyes to the unity of the impulse which, 

 passing through generations, finks individuals with in- 

 dividuals, species with species, and makes of the whole 

 series of the living one single immense wave flowing over 

 matter, but each individual itself seems to us as an aggre- 

 gate, aggregate of molecules and aggregate of facts. The 

 reason of this lies in the structure of our intellect, which 

 is formed to act on matter from without, and which suc- 

 ceeds by making, in the flux of the real, instantaneous 

 cuts, each of which becomes, in its fixity, endlessly de- 

 composable. Perceiving, in an organism, only parts 

 external to parts, the understanding has the choice 

 between two systems of explanation only: either to 

 regard the infinitely complex (and thereby infinitely 

 well-contrived) organization as a fortuitous concatena- 

 tion of atoms, or to relate it to the incomprehensible 

 influence of an external force that has grouped its ele- 

 ments together. But this complexity is the work of 

 the understanding; this incomprehensibility is also its 

 work. Let us try to see, no longer with the eyes of 

 the intellect alone, which grasps only the already made 

 and which looks from the outside, but with the spirit, 

 I mean with that faculty of seeing which is immanent 

 in the faculty of acting and which springs up, somehow, 

 by the twisting of the will on itself, when action is turned 

 into knowledge, like heat, so to say, into light. To 

 movement, then, everything will be restored, and into 

 movement everything will be resolved. Where the un- 



