which unmakes itself_ we have already a more exact
representation of matter. In vital activity we see, then, that which
subsists of the direct movement in the inverted movement, _a reality
which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself_.

Everything is obscure in the idea of creation if we think of _things_
which are created and a _thing_ which creates, as we habitually do, as
the understanding cannot help doing. We shall show the origin of this
illusion in our next chapter. It is natural to our intellect, whose
function is essentially practical, made to present to us things and
states rather than changes and acts. But things and states are only
views, taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, there are
only actions. More particularly, if I consider the world in which we
live, I find that the automatic and strictly determined evolution of
this well-knit whole is action which is unmaking itself, and that the
unforeseen forms which life cuts out in it, forms capable of being
themselves prolonged into unforeseen movements, represent the action
that is making itself. Now, I have every reason to believe that the
other worlds are analogous to ours, that things happen there in the same
way. And I know they were not all constructed at the same time, since
observation shows me, even to-day, nebulae in course of concentration.
Now, if the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether it is
that which is unmaking itself or whether it is that which is striving to
remake itself, I simply express this probable similitude when I speak of
a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fireworks
display--provided, however, that I do not present this centre as a
_thing_, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus defined, has
nothing of the already made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom.
Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves
when we act freely. That new things can join things already existing is
absurd, no doubt, since the _thing_ results from a solidification
performed by our understanding, and there are never any things other
than those that the understanding has thus constituted. To speak of
things creating themselves would therefore amount to saying that the
understanding presents to itself more than it presents to itself--a
self-contradictory affirmation, an empty and vain idea. But that action
increases as it goes on, that it creates in the measure of i