278 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



Let us then see what we are thinking about when we 

 speak of " Nothing." To represent "Nothing," we must 

 either imagine it or conceive it. Let us examine what 

 this image or this idea may be. First, the image. 



I am going to close my eyes, stop my ears, extinguish 

 one by one the sensations that come to me from the outer 

 world. Now it is done; all my perceptions vanish, the 

 material universe sinks into silence and the night .r— I 

 subsist, however, and cannot help myself subsisting. I 

 am still there, with the organic sensations which come to 

 me from the surface and from the interior of my body, 

 with the recollections which my past perceptions have 

 left behind them — nay, with the impression, most positive 

 and full, of the void I have just made about me. How can 

 I suppress all this? How eliminate myself? I can even, 

 it may be, blot out and forget my recollections up to my 

 immediate past; but at least I keep the consciousness 

 of my present reduced to its extremest poverty, that is to 

 say, of the actual state of my body. I will try, however, 

 to do away even with this consciousness itself. I will 

 reduce more and more the sensations my body sends in to 

 me: now they are almost gone; now they are gone, they 

 have disappeared in the night where all things else have 

 already died away. But no! At the very instant that 

 my consciousness is extinguished, another consciousness 

 lights up — or rather, it was already alight: it had arisen 

 the instant before, in order to witness the extinction of the 

 first; for the first could disappear only for another and 

 in the presence of another. I see myself annihilated only 

 if I have already resuscitated myself by an act which is 

 positive, however involuntary and unconscious. So, do 

 what I will, I am always perceiving something, either from 

 without or from within. When I no longer know anything 

 of external objects, it is because I have taken refuge in 



