298 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



the work is not done, there is "nothing" — nothing that we 

 want. Our life is thus spent in filling voids, which our 

 intellect conceives under the influence, by no means 

 intellectual, of desire and of regret, under the pressure of 

 vital necessities; and if we mean by void an absence of 

 utility and not of things, we may say, in this quite relative 

 sense, that we are constantly going from the void to the 

 full: such is the direction which our action takes. Our 

 speculation cannot help doing the same; and, naturally, 

 it passes from the relative sense to the absolute sense, 

 since it is exercised on things themselves and not on the 

 utility they have for us. Thus is implanted in us the idea 

 that reality fills a void, and that Nothing, conceived as 

 an absence of everything, pre-exists before all things in 

 right, if not in fact. It is this illusion that we have tried 

 to remove by showing that the idea of Nothing, if we try 

 to see in it that of an annihilation of all things, is self- 

 destructive and reduced to a mere word; and that if, on 

 the contrary, it is truly an idea, then we find in it as much 

 matter as in the idea of All. 



This long analysis has been necessary to show that 

 a self-sufficient reality is not necessarily a reality foreign 

 to duration. If we pass (consciously or unconsciously) 

 through the idea of the nought in order to reach that 

 of being, the being to which we come is a logical or mathe- 

 matical essence, therefore non-temporal. And, conse- 

 quently, a static conception of the real is forced on us: 

 everything appears given once for all, in eternity. But 

 we must accustom ourselves to think being directly, 

 without making a detour, without first appealing to 

 the phantom of the nought which interposes itself be- 

 tween it and us. We must strive to see in order to see, 

 and no longer to see in order to .act. Then the Absolute 



