deceives us both as to what happens in
things and as to what is present to our thought. We must now examine
more closely the inversion whose consequences we have just described.
What, then, is the principle that has only to let go its tension--may we
say to _detend_--in order to _extend_, the interruption of the cause
here being equivalent to a reversal of the effect?

For want of a better word we have called it consciousness. But we do not
mean the narrowed consciousness that functions in each of us. Our own
consciousness is the consciousness of a certain living being, placed in
a certain point of space; and though it does indeed move in the same
direction as its principle, it is continually drawn the opposite way,
obliged, though it goes forward, to look behind. This retrospective
vision is, as we have shown, the natural function of the intellect, and
consequently of distinct consciousness. In order that our consciousness
shall coincide with something of its principle, it must detach itself
from the _already-made_ and attach itself to the _being-made_. It needs
that, turning back on itself and twisting on itself, the faculty of
_seeing_ should be made to be one with the act of _willing_--a painful
effort which we can make suddenly, doing violence to our nature, but
cannot sustain more than a few moments. In free action, when we contract
our whole being in order to thrust it forward, we have the more or less
clear consciousness of motives and of impelling forces, and even, at
rare moments, of the becoming by which they are organized into an act:
but the pure willing, the current that runs through this matter,
communicating life to it, is a thing which we hardly feel, which at most
we brush lightly as it passes. Let us try, however, to instal ourselves
within it, if only for a moment; even then it is an individual and
fragmentary will that we grasp. To get to the principle of all life, as
also of all materiality, we must go further still. Is it impossible? No,
by no means; the history of philosophy is there to bear witness. There
is no durable system that is not, at least in some of its parts,
vivified by intuition. Dialectic is necessary to put intuition to the
proof, necessary also in order that intuition should break itself up
into concepts and so be propagated to other men; but all it does, often
enough, is to develop the result of that intuition which transcends it.
The truth is, the two procedures are of opposite d