But how does he fail to see that the real result of this so-called division of labor is to mix up everything and con- fuse everything? The metaphysic or the critique that the philosopher has reserved for himself he has to receive, ready-made, from positive science, it being already con- tained in the descriptions and analyses, the whole care of which he left to the scientists. For not having wished to intervene, at the beginning, in questions of fact, he finds himself reduced, in questions of principle, to formulating purely and simply in more precise terms the unconscious and consequently inconsistent metaphysic and critique which the very attitude of science to reality marks out. Let us not be deceived by an apparent analogy between natural things and human things. Here we are not in the judiciary domain, where the description of fact and the
m.i
judgment on the fact are two distinct things, distinct for the very simple reason that above the fact, and in- dependent of it, there is a law promulgated by a legislator. Here the laws are internal to the facts and relative to the lines that have been followed in cutting the real into distinct facts. We cannot describe the outward appearance of the object without prejudging its inner nature and its organization. Form is no longer entirely isolable from matter, and he who has begun by reserving to philos- ophy questions of principle, and who has thereby tried to put philosophy above the sciences, as a "court of cassa- tion" ia above the courts of assizes and of appeal, will gradually come to make no more of philosophy than a registration court, charged at most with wording more precisely the sentences that are brought to it, pronounced and irrevocable.
Positive science is, in fact, a work of pure intellect. Now, whether our conception of the intellect be accepted or rejected, there is one point on which everybody will agree with us, and that is that the intellect is at home in the presence of unorganized matter. This matter it makes use of more and more by mechanical inventions, and mechanical inventions become the easier to it the more it thinks matter as mechanism. The intellect bears within itself, in the form of natural logic, a latent geometrisra that is set free in the measure and proportion that the intellect penetrates into the inner nature of inert matter. Intelligence is in tune with this matter, and that is why the physics and metaphysics of inert matter are so near each other. Now, when the intellect undertakes thei study of life, it necessarily treats the living like the inert,! applying the same forma to this new object, carrj'ing over into this new field the same habits that have succeeded so well in the old ; and it is right to do so, for only on such
terms does the living offer to our action the same hold as inert matter. But the truth we thus arrive at becomes altogether relative to our faculty of action. It is no more than a symbolic verity. It cannot have the same value as the physical verity, being only an e.\tension of physics to an object which we are a priori agreed to look at only in its external aspect. The duty of philosophy should be to intervene here actively, to examine the living without any reservation as to practical utility, by freeing itself from forms and habits that are strictly intellectual. Its own special object is to speculate, that is to say, to see; its attitude toward the living should not be that of science, which aims only at action, and which, being able to act only by means of inert matter, presents to itself the rest of reality in this single respect. What must the result be, if it leave biological and psychological facts to positive science alone, as it has left, and rightly left, physical facta? It will accept a priori a mechanistic conception of all nature, a conception unreflected and even unconscious, the outcome of the material need. It will a priori accept the doctrine of the simple unity of know- ledge and of the abstract unity of nature.
The moment it does so, its fate is scaled. The philoso- pher has no longer any choice save between a metaphysical dogmatism and a metaphysical skepticism, both of which rest, at bottom, on the same postulate, and neither of which adds anything to positive science. He may hypostasize the unity of nature, or, what comes to the same thing, the unity of science, in a being who is nothing since he docs nothing, an ineffectual God who simply sums up in himself all the given; or in an eternal Matter from whose womb have been poured out the properties of things and the laws of nature; or, again, in a pure Form which en- deavors to seize an unseizable multiplicity, and which 13,
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as we will, the form of nature or the form of thought. All these philosophies tell us, in their different languages, that science is right to treat the living as the inert, and that there is no difference of value, no distinction to be made between the results which intellect arrives at in applyii^ it3 categories, whether it rests on inert matter or attacks life.
In many cases, however, we feel the frame cracking. But as we did not begin by distinguishing between the inert and the living, the one adapted in advance to the frame in which we insert it, the other incapable of be- ing held in the frame otherwise than by a convention which ehrainates from it all that is essential, we find our- selves, in the end, reduced to regarding everything the frame contains with equal suspicion. To a metaphysical dogmatism, which has erected into an absolute the factitious miity of science, there succeeds a skepticism or a relativism that universalizes and extends to all the results of science the artificial character of some among them. So philosophy swings to and fro between the doctrine that regards ab- Bolute reality as unknowable and that which, in the idea it gives us of this reality, says nothing more than science has said. For having wished to prevent all conflict be- tween science and philosophy, we have sacrificed philosophy without any appreciable gain to science. And for having' tried to avoid the seeming vicious circle which consists in using the intellect to transcend the intellect, we find ourselves turning in a real circle, that which consists in laboriously rediscovering by metaphysics a unity that we began by positing a priori, a unity that we admitted blindly and unconsciously by the very act of abandoning the whole of experience to science and the whole of reality to the pure understanding.
Let us begin, on the contrary, by tracing a line of de-
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marcation between the inert and the living. We shall
find that the inert enters naturally into the frames of the intellect, but that the living is adapted to these frames only arti5cially, so that we must adopt a special attitude towards it and examine it with other eyes than those of positive science. Philosophy, then, invades the domain of experience. She busies herself with many things which hitherto have not concerned her. Science, theory of know- ledge, and metaphysics find themselves on the same ground. At first there may be a certain confusion. All three may thmk they have lost something. But all three will profit from the meeting.
Positive science, indeed, may pride itself on the uniform value attributed to its affirmations in the whole field of experience. But, if they are all placed on the same foot^ ing, they are all tainted with the same relativity. It is not so, if we begin by making the distinction which, in our view, is forced upon us. The understanding ia at home in the domain of unorganized matter. On this matter human action is naturally exercised; and action, as we said above, cannot be set in motion in the unreal. Thus, of physics — so long as we are considering only its general form and not the particular cutting out of matter in which it is manifested — we may say that it touches the absolute. On the contrary, it is by accident — chance or convention, as you please — that science obtains a hold on the Uving analogous to the hold it has on matter. Here the use of conceptual frames is no longer natural. I do not wish to say that it is not legitimate, in the scientific mean- ing of the term. If science ia to extend our action on things, and if we can act only with inert matter for in- strument, science can and must continue to treat the living as it has treated the inert. But, in doing bo, it must be understood that the further it jrenetmtes the
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depths of life, the more symbolic, the more relative to the contingencies of action, the knowledge it supplies to us becomes. On this new ground philosophy ought then to follow science, in order to superpose on scientific truth a knowledge of another kind, which may be called metaphysical. Thus combined, all our knowledge, both scientific and metaphysical, is heightened. In the absolute we live and move and have our being. The knowledge we possess of it is incomplete, no doubt, but not external or relative. It is reality itself, in the profoundest meaning of the word, that we reach by the combined and pro- gressive development of science and of philosophy.
Thus, in renouncing the factitioa? unity which the
understanding imposes on nature from outside, we shall
perhaps find its true, inward and living unity. For the
effort we make to transcend the pure understanding in-
troduces us into that more vast something out of which
our understanding is cut, and from which it has detached
itself. And, as matter is determined by intelligence, aa
there is between them an evident agreement, we cannot
make the genesis of the one without making the genesis
of the other. An identical process must have cut out
matter and the intellect, at the same time, from a stuff
that contained both. Into this reality we shall get back
more and more completely, in proportion as we compel
ourselves to transcend pure intelligence.
Let ua then concentrate attention on that which we have that is at the same time the most removed from externality and the least penetrated with intellectuality. Let U8 seek, in the depths of our experience, the point where we feel ourselves most intimately within our own life. It is into pure duration that we then plunge back, a duration in which the past, always moving on, is swelling
unceasingly with a present that is absolutely new. But. at the same time, we feel the spring of our will strained to its utmost limit. We must, by a strong recoil of our personality on itself, gather up our past which is slipping away, in order to thrust it, compact and undivided, into a present which it will create by entering. Rare indeed are the moments when we are self-possessed to this extent: it is then that our actions are truly free. And even at these moments we do not completely possess ourselves. Our feeling of duration, I should say the actual coinciding of ourself with itself, admits of degrees. But the more the feeling is deep and the coincidence complete, the more the life in which it replaces us absorbs intellectuality by transcending it. For the natural function of the in- tellect is to bind like to like, and it is oiJy facta that can be repeated that are entirely adaptable to intellectual conceptions. Now, our intellect does undoubtedly grasp the real moments of real duration after they are past; we do so by reconstituting the new state of consciousness out of a series of views taken of it from the outside, each of which resembles as much as possible something already known; in this sense we may say that the state of con- sciousness contains intellectuality implicitly- Yet the state of consciousness overflows the intellect; it is indeed incommensurable with the intellect, being itself indivisible and new.
Now let us relax the strain, let us interrupt the effort to crowd as much as possible of the past into the present. If the relaxation were complete, there would no longer be either memory or will — which amounts to saying that, in fact, we never do fall into this absolute passivity, any more than we can make ourselves absolutely free. But, in the limit, we get a glimpse of an existence made of a pre&eot which reconamences uncea^ngly — devoid of real