brication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and
even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a
new arrangement of elements already known. Its principle is that "we
must have like to produce like." In short, the strict application of the
principle of finality, like that of the principle of mechanical
causality, leads to the conclusion that "all is given." Both principles
say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond
to the same need.

That is why again they agree in doing away with time. Real duration is
that duration which gnaws on things, and leaves on them the mark of its
tooth. If everything is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the
same concrete reality never recurs. Repetition is therefore possible
only in the abstract: what is repeated is some aspect that our senses,
and especially our intellect, have singled out from reality, just
because our action, upon which all the effort of our intellect is
directed, can move only among repetitions. Thus, concentrated on that
which repeats, solely preoccupied in welding the same to the same,
intellect turns away from the vision of time. It dislikes what is fluid,
and solidifies everything it touches. We do not _think_ real time. But
we _live_ it, because life transcends intellect. The feeling we have of
our evolution and of the evolution of all things in pure duration is
there, forming around the intellectual concept properly so-called an
indistinct fringe that fades off into darkness. Mechanism and finalism
agree in taking account only of the bright nucleus shining in the
centre. They forget that this nucleus has been formed out of the rest by
condensation, and that the whole must be used, the fluid as well as and
more than the condensed, in order to grasp the inner movement of life.

Indeed, if the fringe exists, however delicate and indistinct, it should
have more importance for philosophy than the bright nucleus it
surrounds. For it is its presence that enables us to affirm that the
nucleus is a nucleus, that pure intellect is a contraction, by
condensation, of a more extensive power. And, just because this vague
intuition is of no help in directing our action on things, which action
takes place exclusively on the surface of reality, we may presume that
it is to be exercised not merely on the surface, but below.

As soon as we go out of the encasings in which radical mechanism and
radical finalism co