ts advance,
is what each of us finds when he watches himself act. Things are
constituted by the instantaneous cut which the understanding practices,
at a given moment, on a flux of this kind, and what is mysterious when
we compare the cuts together becomes clear when we relate them to the
flux. Indeed, the modalities of creative action, in so far as it is
still going on in the organization of living forms, are much simplified
when they are taken in this way. Before the complexity of an organism
and the practically infinite multitude of interwoven analyses and
syntheses it presupposes, our understanding recoils disconcerted. That
the simple play of physical and chemical forces, left to themselves,
should have worked this marvel, we find hard to believe. And if it is a
profound science which is at work, how are we to understand the
influence exercised on this matter without form by this form without
matter? But the difficulty arises from this, that we represent
statically ready-made material particles juxtaposed to one another, and,
also statically, an external cause which plasters upon them a skilfully
contrived organization. In reality, life is a movement, materiality is
the inverse movement, and each of these two movements is simple, the
matter which forms a world being an undivided flux, and undivided also
the life that runs through it, cutting out in it living beings all along
its track. Of these two currents the second runs counter to the first,
but the first obtains, all the same, something from the second. There
results between them a _modus vivendi_, which is organization. This
organization takes, for our senses and for our intellect, the form of
parts entirely external to other parts in space and in time. Not only do
we shut our eyes to the unity of the impulse which, passing through
generations, links individuals with individuals, species with species,
and makes of the whole series of the living one single immense wave
flowing over matter, but each individual itself seems to us as an
aggregate, aggregate of molecules and aggregate of facts. The reason of
this lies in the structure of our intellect, which is formed to act on
matter from without, and which succeeds by making, in the flux of the
real, instantaneous cuts, each of which becomes, in its fixity,
endlessly decomposable. Perceiving, in an organism, only parts external
to parts, the understanding has the choice between two systems of
explanation only: eit