the mathematical order with itself,
however elaborate we may suppose it, can introduce an atom of novelty
into the world, whereas this power of creation once given (and it
exists, for we are conscious of it in ourselves, at least when we act
freely) has only to be diverted from itself to relax its tension, only
to relax its tension to extend, only to extend for the mathematical
order of the elements so distinguished and the inflexible determinism
connecting them to manifest the interruption of the creative act: in
fact, inflexible determinism and mathematical order are one with this
very interruption.

It is this merely negative tendency that the particular laws of the
physical world express. None of them, taken separately, has objective
reality; each is the work of an investigator who has regarded things
from a certain bias, isolated certain variables, applied certain
conventional units of measurement. And yet there is an order
approximately mathematical immanent in matter, an objective order, which
our science approaches in proportion to its progress. For if matter is a
relaxation of the inextensive into the extensive and, thereby, of
liberty into necessity, it does not indeed wholly coincide with pure
homogeneous space, yet is constituted by the movement which leads to
space, and is therefore on the way to geometry. It is true that laws of
mathematical form will never apply to it completely. For that, it would
have to be pure space and step out of duration.

We cannot insist too strongly that there is something artificial in the
mathematical form of a physical law, and consequently in our scientific
knowledge of things.[84] Our standards of measurement are conventional,
and, so to say, foreign to the intentions of nature: can we suppose that
nature has related all the modalities of heat to the expansion of the
same mass of mercury, or to the change of pressure of the same mass of
air kept at a constant volume? But we may go further. In a general way,
_measuring_ is a wholly human operation, which implies that we really or
ideally superpose two objects one on another a certain number of times.
Nature did not dream of this superposition. It does not measure, nor
does it count. Yet physics counts, measures, relates "quantitative"
variations to one another to obtain laws, and it succeeds. Its success
would be inexplicable, if the movement which constitutes materiality
were not the same movement which, prolonged by us to