of the material universe? Can each moment be mathematically deduced from the preceding moment? We have throughout this work, and for the convenience of study, supposed that it was really so; and such is, in fact, the distance between the rhythm of our duration and that of the flow of things, that the contingency of the course of nature, so profoundly studied in recent philosophy, must, for us, be practically equivalent to necessity. So let us keep to our hypothesis, though it might have to be attenuated. Even so, freedom is not in nature an imperium in imperio. We have said that this nature might be regarded as a neutralized and consequently a latent consciousness, a consciousness of which the eventual manifestations hold each other reciprocally in check, and annul each other precisely at the moment when they might appear. The first gleams which are thrown upon it by an individual consciousness do not therefore shine on it with an unheralded light: this consciousness does but remove an obstacle; it extracts from the whole that is real a part that is virtual, chooses and finally disengages that which interests it; and although, by that intelligent choice, it indeed manifests that it owes to spirit its form, it assuredly takes from nature its matter. Moreover, while we watch the birth of that consciousness we are confronted, at the same time, by the apparition of living bodies, capable, even in their simplest forms, of movements spontaneous and unforeseen.
