258 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



dividuality is distributed. But, if I make it distinctly 

 manifold, my consciousness rebels quite as strongly; it 

 affirms that ipy sensations, my feelings, my thoughts 

 are abstractions which I effect on myself, and that each 

 of my states implies all the others. I am then (we must 

 adopt the language of the understanding, since only 

 the understanding has a language) a unity that is multiple 

 and a multiplicity that is one; 1 but unity and multiplicity 

 are only views of my personality taken by an understand- 

 ing that directs its categories at me; I enter neither into 

 one nor into the other nor into both at once, although 

 both, united, may give a fair imitation of the mutual 

 interpenetration and continuity that I find at the base of 

 my own self. Such is my inner life, and such also is life 

 in general. While, in its contact with matter, life is 

 comparable to an impulsion or an impetus, regarded in 

 itself it is an immensity of potentiality, a mutual encroach- 

 ment of thousands and thousands of tendencies which 

 nevertheless are "thousands and thousands" only when 

 once regarded as outside of each other, that is, when 

 spatialized. Contact with matter is what determines 

 this dissociation. Matter divides actually what was but 

 potentially manifold; and, in this sense, individuation 

 is in part the work of matter, in part the result of life's 

 own inclination. Thus, a poetic sentiment, which bursts 

 into distinct verses, lines and words, may be said to have 

 already contained this multiplicity of individuated ele- 

 ments, and yet, in fact, it is the materiality of language 

 that creates it. 



But through the words, lines and verses runs the simple 

 inspiration which is the whole poem. So, among the 



1 We have dwelt on this point in an article entitled "Introduction 

 a la metaphysique" (Revue de nrftaphysique et de morale, January, 1903, 

 pp. 1-25). 



