nfine our thought, reality appears as a ceaseless
upspringing of something new, which has no sooner arisen to make the
present than it has already fallen back into the past; at this exact
moment it falls under the glance of the intellect, whose eyes are ever
turned to the rear. This is already the case with our inner life. For
each of our acts we shall easily find antecedents of which it may in
some sort be said to be the mechanical resultant. And it may equally
well be said that each action is the realization of an intention. In
this sense mechanism is everywhere, and finality everywhere, in the
evolution of our conduct. But if our action be one that involves the
whole of our person and is truly ours, it could not have been foreseen,
even though its antecedents explain it when once it has been
accomplished. And though it be the realizing of an intention, it
differs, as a present and _new_ reality, from the intention, which can
never aim at anything but recommencing or rearranging the past.
Mechanism and finalism are therefore, here, only external views of our
conduct. They extract its intellectuality. But our conduct slips between
them and extends much further. Once again, this does not mean that free
action is capricious, unreasonable action. To behave according to
caprice is to oscillate mechanically between two or more ready-made
alternatives and at length to settle on one of them; it is no real
maturing of an internal state, no real evolution; it is merely--however
paradoxical the assertion may seem--bending the will to imitate the
mechanism of the intellect. A conduct that is truly our own, on the
contrary, is that of a will which does not try to counterfeit intellect,
and which, remaining itself--that is to say, evolving--ripens gradually
into acts which the intellect will be able to resolve indefinitely into
intelligible elements without ever reaching its goal. The free act is
incommensurable with the idea, and its "rationality" must be defined by
this very incommensurability, which admits the discovery of as much
intelligibility within it as we will. Such is the character of our own
evolution; and such also, without doubt, that of the evolution of life.

Our reason, incorrigibly presumptuous, imagines itself possessed, by
right of birth or by right of conquest, innate or acquired, of all the
essential elements of the knowledge of truth. Even where it confesses
that it does not know the object presented to it, it