One system of metaphysics, I said some time ago, underlies common-sense,
animating and informing it. According to this system, which is the
inverse of that which we have just intimated, reality in its very depths
is fixity and permanence. This is the completely static conception which
sees in being exactly the opposite of becoming: we cannot become, it
seems to say, except in so far as we are not. It does not, however, mean
to deny movement. But it represents it as fluctuation round invariable
types, as a whirling but captive eddy. Every phenomenon appears to it as
a transformation which ends where it began, and the result is that the
world takes the form of an eternal equilibrium in which "nothing is
created, nothing destroyed." The idea does not need much forcing to end
in the old supposition of a cyclic return which restores everything to
its original conditions. Everything is thus conceived in astronomical
periods. All that is left of the universe henceforward is a whirl of
atoms in which nothing counts but certain fixed quantities translated by
our systems of equations; the rest has vanished "in algebraical smoke."
There is therefore nothing more or less in the effect than in the group
of causes; and the causal relation moves towards identity as towards its
asymptote.

Such a view of nature is open to many objections, even if it were only
a question of inorganised matter. Simple physics already betoken the
insufficiency of a purely mechanic conception. The stream of phenomena
flows in an irreversible direction and obeys a determined rhythm. "If I
wish to prepare myself a glass of sugar and water, I may do what I like,
but I must wait for my sugar to melt." ("Creative Evolution", page
10.) Here are facts which pure mechanism does not take into account,
regarding as it does only statically conceived relations, and making
time into a measure only, something like a common denominator of
concrete successions, a certain number of coincidences from which all
true duration remains absent, which would remain unchanged even if the
world's history, instead of opening out in consecutive phases, were to
be unfolded before our eyes all at once like a fan. Do we not indeed
speak today of aging and atomic separation. If the quantity of energy
is preserved, at least its quality is continually deteriorating. By
the side of something which remains constant, the world also contains
something which is being used up, dissipated, exhaust