320 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



original insufficiency. The alternations of generation and 

 decay, the evolutions ever beginning over and over again, 

 the infinite repetition of the cycles of celestial spheres — 

 this all represents merely a certain fundamental deficit, 

 in which materiality consists. Fill up this deficit : at once 

 you suppress space and time, that is to say, the endlessly 

 renewed oscillations around a stable equilibrium always 

 aimed at, never reached. Things re-enter into each other. 

 What was extended in space is contracted into pure Form. 

 And past, present, and future shrink into a single moment, 

 which is eternity. 



This amounts to saying that physics is but logic spoiled. 

 In this proposition the whole philosophy of Ideas is sum- 

 marized. And in it also is the hidden principle of the 

 philosophy that is innate in our understanding. If im- 

 mutability is more than becoming, form is more than 

 change, and it is by a veritable fall that the logical system 

 of Ideas, rationally subordinated and coordinated among 

 themselves, is scattered into a physical series of objects and 

 events accidentally placed one after another. The genera- 

 tive idea of a poem is developed in thousands of imaginations 

 which are materialized in phrases that spread themselves 

 out in words. And the more we descend from the motion- 

 less idea, wound on itself, to the words that unwind it, 

 the more room is left for contingency and choice. Other 

 metaphors, expressed by other words, might have arisen; 

 an image is called up by an image, a word by a word. All 

 these words run now one after another, seeking in vain, by 

 themselves, to give back the simplicity of the generative 

 idea. Our ear only hears the words: it therefore per- 

 ceives only accidents. But our mind, by successive bounds, 

 leaps from the words to the images, from the images to the 

 original idea, and so gets back, from the perception of 

 words — accidents called up by accidents — to the con- 



