In a cosmogony hke that of Spencer, intelligence ifl taken for granted, as matter also at the same time. We are shown matter obeying laws, objects connected with objects and facts with facts by constant relations, con- sciousness receiving the imprint of these relations and laws, and thus adopting the general configuration of nature and shaping itself into intellect. But how can we fail to see that intelligence is supposed when we admit objects and facts? A priori and apart from any hypothesis on the nature of the matter, it is evident that the material- ity of a body does not stop at the point at which we touch it: a body is present wherever its influence is felt; ita attractive force, to speak only of that, is exerted on the sun, on the planets, perhaps on the entire universe. The more physics advances, the more it effaces the individuahty of bodies and even of the particles into which the scientific imagination began by decomposing them: bodies and corpuscles tend to dissolve into a universal interaction. Our perceptions give us the plan of our eventual action on things much more than that of things themselves. The outlines we find in objects simply mark what we can attain and modify in them. The lines we see traced through matter are just the paths on which we are called to move. Outlines and paths have declared themselves in the measure and proportion that consciousness haa prepared for action on unorganized matter — that is to say, in the measure and proportion that intelligence haa been formed. It is doubtful whether animals built on a different plan — a mollusc or an insect, for instance — cut matter up
m.i THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 189
along the same articulations. It is not indeed necessary that they should separate it into bodies at all. In order to follow the indications of instinct, there is no need to per- ceive objects, it is enough to distinguish properties. In- telligence, on the contrary, even in its humblest form, already aims at getting matter to act on matter. If on one side matter lends itself to a division into active and passive bodies, or more simply into coexistent and distinct fragments, it is from this side that intelligence will regard it; and the more it busies itself with dividing, the more it will spread out in space, in the form of extension adjoining extension, a matter that undoubtedly itself has a tendency to epatiality, but whose parts are yet in a state of reciprocal implication and interpenetration. Thus the same move- ment by which the mind is brought to form itself into intellect, that is to say, into distinct concepts, brings matter to break itself up into objects excluding one another. Th£ more consciousness is intellectualized, the more is matter spaiialized. So thai the evolutionist philosophy, when it imagines in space a matter cut up on the very hues that our action will follow, has given itself in advance, ready made, the intelligence of which it claims to show the genesis. Metaphysics applies itself to a work of the same kind, though subtler and more self-conscious, when it deduces a priori the categories of thought. It compresses intellect, reduces it to its quintessence, holds it tight in a principle 80 simple that it can be thought empty: from this principle we then draw out what we have virtually put into it. In this way we may no doubt show the coherence of intelli- gence, define intellect, give its formula, but we do not trace its genesis. An enterprise hke that of Fichte, al- though more philosophical than that of Spencer, in that it pays more respect to the true order of things, hardly leads us any further. Fichte takes thought in a concentrated
Ciieati\'E Evolution
lOHAP.
Btate, and expands it into reality; Spencer starts from external reality, and condenses it into intellect. But, in the one case as in the other, the intellect must be taken at the beginning as given — either condensed or expanded, grasped in itself by a direct vision or perceived by reflection in nature, as in a mirror.
The agreement of most philosophers on this point comes from the fact that they are at one in affirming the unity of nature, and in representing this unity under an abstract and geometrical form. Between the organized and the unorganized they do not see and they will not see the cleft. Some start from the inorganic, and, by com- pounding it with itself, claim to form the Hving; othera place life first, and proceed towards matter by a skilfully managed decrescendo; but, for both, there are only dif- ferences of degree in nature — degrees of complexity in the first hypothesis, of intensity in the second, Once this principle is admitted, intelligence becomes as vast as reality; for it is unquestionable that whatever is geometrical in things is entirely accessible to human intelligence, and if the continuity between geometry and the rest is per- fect, all the rest must Indeed be equally intelligible, equally intelligent. Such is the postulate of most systems. Any one can easily be convinced of this by comparing doctrines that seem to have no common point, no common measure, those of Fichte and Spencer for instance, two names that we happen to have just brought together.
At the root of these speculations, then, there are the two convictions correlative and complementary, that nature is one and that the function of intellect is to embrace it in its entirety. The faculty of knowing being supposed coextensive with the whole of experience, there can no longer be any question of engendering it. It is already given, and we merely h&ve to use it, aa we use our sight to
take in the horizon. It is true that opinions differ as to the value of the result. For some, it is reality itself that the intellect embraces; for others, it is only a phantom. But, phantom or reality, what intelligence grasps is thought to be all that can be attained.
Hence the exaggerated confidence of philosophy in the powers of the individual mind. Whether it is dog- matic or critical, whether it admits the relativity of our knowledge or claims to be established within the absolute, a philosophy is generally the work of a philosopher, a single and unitary vision of the whole. It is to be taken or left.
More modest, and also alone capable of bang completed and perfected, is the philosophy we advocate. Human intelligence, as we represent it, is not at all what Plato taught in the allegory of the cave. Its function is not to look at passing shadows nor yet to turn itself round and contemplate the glaring sun. It has something else to do. Harnessed, like yoked oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the play of our muscles and joints, the weight of the plow and the resistance of the soil. To act and to know that we are acting, to come into touch with reality and even to hve it, but only in the measure in which it concerns the work that is being accomplished and the furrow that is bdng plowed, such is the function of human intelligence. Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence we draw the very forcb to labor and to live. From this ocean of life, in which we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, and we feel that oiu- being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has been formed therein by a kind of local con- centration. Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve again into the Whole. Intelligence, reabsorbed into its principle, may thus live back again its own genesis. But the enterprise cannot be achieved in one stroke; it is
necessarily collective and progressive. It consists in an
interchange of impressions which, correcting and adding
to each other, will end by expanding the humanity in
us and making us even transcend it.
But this method has against it the most inveterate habits of the mind. It at once suggests the idea of a vicious circle. In vain, we shall be told, you claim to go beyond intelligence: how can you do that except by intelligence? All that is clear in your consciousness is intelligence. You are inside your own thought; you cannot get out of it. Say, if you like, that the intellect is capable of progress, that it will see more and more clearly into a greater and greater number of things; but do not speak of engendering it, for it is with your intellect itself that you would have to do the work.
The objection presents itself naturally to the mind. But the same reasoning would prove also the impossibility of acquiring any new habit. It is of the essence of reason- ing to shut us up in the circle of the given. But action breaks the circle. If we had never seen a man swim, we might say that swimming is an impossible thing, inasmuch as, to learn to swim, we must begin by holding ourselves up in the water and, consequently, already know how to swim. Reasoning, in fact, always nails us down to the solid ground. But if, quite simply, I throw myself into the water without fear, I may keep myself up well enough at first by merely struggling, and gradually adapt myself to the new environment: I shall thus have learnt to swim. So, in theory, there is & kind of absurdity in trying to know otherwise than by intelligence; but if the risk be frankly accepted, action will perhaps cut the knot that reasoning has tied and will not unloose.
Besides, the risk will appear to grow less, the more our poiot of view is adopted. We have shown that in-
m.i
The Method of Philosophy
tellect has detached itself from a vastly wider reality, but that there has never been a clean cut between the two; all around conceptual thought there remains an indistinct fringe which recalls its origin. And further we compared the intellect to a solid nucleus formed by means of con- densation. This nucleus does not differ radically from the fluid surrounding it. It can only be reabsorbed in it be- cause it is made of the same substance. He who throws himself into the water, having known only the resistance of the solid earth, will immediately be drowned if he does not struggle against the fluidity of the new environment: he must perforce still cling to that solidity, so tt^ speak, which even water presents. Only on this condition can he get used to the fluid's fluidity. So of our thought, when it has decided to make the leap.
But leap it must, that is, leave its own environment. Reason, reasoning on its powers, will never succeed in extending them, though the extension would not appear at all unreasonable once it were accomplished. Thousands and thousands of variations on the theme of walking will never yield a rule for swimming: come, enter the water, and when you know how to swim, you will under- stand how the mechanism of swimming is connected with that of walking. Swimming is an extension of walk- mg, but walking would never have pushed you on to swimming. So you may speculate as intelligently as you will on the mechanism of intelligence; you will never, by this method, succeed in going beyond it. You may get something more complex, but not something higher nor even something different. You must take things by storm: you must thrust inteUigence outside itself by an act of will.
So the vicious circle is only apparent. It Ls, on the
contrary, real, we thiok, in every other method of philoso-
phy. This we must try to show in a few words, if only
Great
Evol
to prove that philosophy cannot and must not accept
the relation established by pure intellectualism between
the theory of knowledge and the theory of the known,
between metaphysics and science.
At first sight, it may seem prudent to leave the consider- ation of facts to positive science, to let physics and chemis- try busy themselves with matter, the biological and psy- chological sciences with life. The task of the philosopher is then clearly defintrf. He takes facts and laws from the scientists' hand ; and whether he tries to go beyond them in order to reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to go further and even proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge, in both cases he has for the facts and relations, handed over by science, the sort of respect that is due to a final verdict. To this knowledge he adds a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks proper, a metaphysic; but the nialter of knowledge he regards as the affair of science and not of philosophy.