ts
past lives on and accumulates, the whole of its past remains for ever
present to it; which is tantamount to saying that it is experience.

It is also an effort of perpetual invention, a generation of continual
novelty, indeducible and capable of defying all anticipation, as it
defies all repetition. We see it at its task of research in the groping
attempts exhibited by the long-sought genesis of species; we see it
triumphant in the originality of the least state of consciousness, of
the least body, of the tiniest cell, of which the infinity of times and
spaces does not offer two identical specimens.

But the reef which lies in its way, and on which too often it founders,
is habit; habit would be a better and more powerful means of action if
it remained free, but in so far as it congeals and becomes materialised,
is a hindrance and an obstacle. First of all we have the average types
round which fluctuates an action which is decreasing and becoming
reduced in breadth. Then we have the residual organs, the proofs of dead
life, the encrustations from which the stream of consciousness gradually
ebbs; and finally we have the inert gear from which all real life has
disappeared, the masses of shipwrecked "things" rearing their spectral
outlines where once rolled the open sea of mind. The concept of
mechanism suits the phenomena which occur within the zone of wreckage,
on this shore of fixities and corpses. But life itself is rather
finality, if not in the anthropomorphic sense of premeditated design,
plan, or programme, at least in this sense, that it is a continually
renewed effort of growth and liberation. And it is from here we get Mr
Bergson's formulae: vital impetus and creative evolution.

In this conception of being consciousness is everywhere, as original and
fundamental reality, always present in a myriad degrees of tension or
sleep, and under infinitely various rhythms.

The vital impulse consists in a "demand for creation"; life in its
humblest stage already constitutes a spiritual activity; and its effort
sends out a current of ascending realisation which again determines the
counter-current of matter. Thus all reality is contained in a double
movement of ascent and descent. The first only, which translates an
inner work of creative maturation, is essentially durable; the second
might, in strictness, be almost instantaneous, like that of an escaping
spring; but the one imposes its rhythm on the other. From thi