atter would be neither
incomprehensible nor inadmissible. For we seize from within, we live at
every instant, a creation of form, and it is just in those cases in
which the form is pure, and in which the creative current is momentarily
interrupted, that there is a creation of matter. Consider the letters of
the alphabet that enter into the composition of everything that has ever
been written: we do not conceive that new letters spring up and come to
join themselves to the others in order to make a new poem. But that the
poet creates the poem and that human thought is thereby made richer, we
understand very well: this creation is a simple act of the mind, and
action has only to make a pause, instead of continuing into a new
creation, in order that, of itself, it may break up into words which
dissociate themselves into letters which are added to all the letters
there are already in the world. Thus, that the number of atoms composing
the material universe at a given moment should increase runs counter to
our habits of mind, contradicts the whole of our experience; but that a
reality of quite another order, which contrasts with the atom as the
thought of the poet with the letters of the alphabet, should increase by
sudden additions, is not inadmissible; and the reverse of each addition
might indeed be a world, which we then represent to ourselves,
symbolically, as an assemblage of atoms.

The mystery that spreads over the existence of the universe comes in
great part from this, that we want the genesis of it to have been
accomplished at one stroke or the whole of matter to be eternal. Whether
we speak of creation or posit an uncreated matter, it is the totality of
the universe that we are considering at once. At the root of this habit
of mind lies the prejudice which we will analyze in our next chapter,
the idea, common to materialists and to their opponents, that there is
no really acting duration, and that the absolute--matter or mind--can
have no place in concrete time, in the time which we feel to be the very
stuff of our life. From which it follows that everything is given once
for all, and that it is necessary to posit from all eternity either
material multiplicity itself, or the act creating this multiplicity,
given in block in the divine essence. Once this prejudice is eradicated,
the idea of creation becomes more clear, for it is merged in that of
growth. But it is no longer then of the universe in its totality that