irection: the same
effort, by which ideas are connected with ideas, causes the intuition
which the ideas were storing up to vanish. The philosopher is obliged to
abandon intuition, once he has received from it the impetus, and to rely
on himself to carry on the movement by pushing the concepts one after
another. But he soon feels he has lost foothold; he must come into touch
with intuition again; he must undo most of what he has done. In short,
dialectic is what ensures the agreement of our thought with itself. But
by dialectic--which is only a relaxation of intuition--many different
agreements are possible, while there is only one truth. Intuition, if it
could be prolonged beyond a few instants, would not only make the
philosopher agree with his own thought, but also all philosophers with
each other. Such as it is, fugitive and incomplete, it is, in each
system, what is worth more than the system and survives it. The object
of philosophy would be reached if this intuition could be sustained,
generalized and, above all, assured of external points of reference in
order not to go astray. To that end a continual coming and going is
necessary between nature and mind.

When we put back our being into our will, and our will itself into the
impulsion it prolongs, we understand, we feel, that reality is a
perpetual growth, a creation pursued without end. Our will already
performs this miracle. Every human work in which there is invention,
every voluntary act in which there is freedom, every movement of an
organism that manifests spontaneity, brings something new into the
world. True, these are only creations of form. How could they be
anything else? We are not the vital current itself; we are this current
already loaded with matter, that is, with congealed parts of its own
substance which it carries along its course. In the composition of a
work of genius, as in a simple free decision, we do, indeed, stretch the
spring of our activity to the utmost and thus create what no mere
assemblage of materials could have given (what assemblage of curves
already known can ever be equivalent to the pencil-stroke of a great
artist?) but there are, none the less, elements here that pre-exist and
survive their organization. But if a simple arrest of the action that
generates form could constitute matter (are not the original lines drawn
by the artist themselves already the fixation and, as it were,
congealment of a movement?), a creation of m