of events; in return, it retains of the moving reality only eventual immobilities, tliat is to say, views taken of it by our mind. It symbolizes the real and transposes it into the human rather than expresses it. The other knowledge, if it is possible, is practically uselesa, it will not extend our empire over nature, it will even go against certain natural aspirations of the intellect; but, if it succeeds, it is reality itself that it will hold in a firm and final embrace. Not only may we thus complete the intellect and its know- ledge of matter by accustoming it to install itself within the moving, but by developing also another faculty, com- plementary to the intellect, we may open a perspective on the other half of the real. For, as soon as we are con- fronted with true duration, we see that it means creation, and that if that which is being unmade endures, it can only be becaase it is inseparably bound to what is making itself. Thus will appear the necessity of a continual growth of the universe, I should say of a life of the real. And thus will be seen in a new light the life which we find on the surface of our planet, a life directed the same way as that of the universe, and inverse of materiality. To intellect, in short, there will be added intuition.
The more we reflect on it, the more we shall find that this conception of metaphysics is tkat which modem science
For the ancients, indeed, time is theoretically negligible, because the duration of a thing only manifests the degra- dation of its essence: it is with this motionless essence that science has to deal. Change being only the effort of a form toward its own realization, the realization is all that it concerns us to know. No doubt the realization is never complete: it is this that ancient philosophy expresses by Baying that we do not perceive form without matter. But if we consider the changing object at a certain essential
[crf^^^
moment, at its apogee, we may say that there it just touches its intelligible fonn. This intelligible form, this ideal and, BO to speak, limiting form, our science seizes upon. And possessing in this the gold-piece, it holds eminently the small money which we call becoming or change. This change is less than being. The knowledge that would take it for object, supposing such knowledge were possible, would be less than science.
But, for a science that places all the moments of time in the same rank, that admits no essential moment, no culminating point, no apogee, change is no longer a dimin- ution of essence, duration is not a dilution of eternity. The flux of time is the reality itself, and the things which we study are the things which flow. It is true that of this flowing reality we are limited to taking instantaneous views. But, just because of this, scientiflc knowledge must appeal to another knowledge to complete it. While the ancient conception of scientiflc knowledge ended in making time a degradation, and change the diminution of a fonn given from all eternity — on the contrary, by foUowing the new conception to the end, we should come to see in time a progressive gronlh of the absolute, and in the evolution of things a continual invention of forms ever new.
It is true that it would be to break with the metaphyMcs
of the ancients, They saw only one way of knowing defi-
nitely. Their science consisted in a scattered and frag-
mentary metaphysics, their metaphysics in a concentrated
and systematic science- Their science and metaphj-sica
were, at most, two species of one and the same genus. In
our hypothesis, on the contrary, science and metaphysics
are two opposed although complementary ways of knowing,
the first retaining only moments, that is to say, that which
does not endure, the second bearing on duration itself.
Now, it was natural to hesitate between so novel a cod-
Descartes
ception of metaphysics and the traditional conception. The temptation must have been strong to repeat with the new science what had been tried on the old, to suppose our scientific knowledge of nature completed at once, to unify it entirely, and to give to this unification, as the Greeks had already done, the name of metaphysics. So, beside the new way that philosophy might have prepared, the old remained open, that indeed which physics trod. And, as physics retained of time only what could as well be spread out aU at once in space, the metaphysics that chose the same direction had necessarily to proceed as if time created and annihilated nothing, as if duration had no efficacy. Bound, Hke the physics of the modems and the metaphysics of the ancients, to the cinematographical method, it ended with the conclusion, implicitly admitted at the start and immanent in the method itself: AU is
That metaphysics hesitated at fiist between the two paths seems to us unquestionable. The indecision is visible in Cartesianisra. On the one hand, Descartes affirms uni- versal mechanism; from this point of view movement would be relative,' and, as time has just as much reality as movement, it would follow that past, present and future are given from all eternity. But, on the other hand (and that is why the philosopher has not gone to these extreme consequences), Descartes believes in the free will of man. He superposes on the determinism of physical phenomena the indetenninism of human actions, and, consequently, on time-length a time in which there is invention, creation, true succession. This duration he supports on a God who is unceasingly renewing the creative act, and who, being thus tangent to time and becoming, sustains them, communicates to them necessarily something of hia absolute > Descartea, Prindpet, ii. { 29.
346 CREATira EVOLUTION [ohap
reality. When he places himself at this second point of
view, Descartes speaks of movement, even spatial, as of an
absolute."
He therefore entered both roads one after the other, hav- ing resolved to follow neither of them to the end. The first would have led him to the denial of free will in man and of real will in God. It was the suppression of alt efficient duration, the likening of the universe to a thing given, which a superhuman intelligence would embrace at once in a moment or in eternity. lo following the second, on the contrary, he would have been led to all the conse- quences which the intuition of true duration implies. Cre- ation would have appeared not simply as continued, but also as continuous. The universe, regarded as a whole, would really evolve. The future would no longer be deter- minable by the present; at most we might say that, once reahzed, it can be found again in its antecedents, as the sounds of a new language can be expressed with the letters of an old alphabet if we agree to enlarge the value of the letters and to attribute to them, retro-actively. sounds which no combination of the old sounds could have pro- duced beforehand. Finally, the mechanistic explanation might have remained universal in this, that it can indeed be extended to as many systems as we choose to cut out in the continuity of the universe; but mechanism would then have become a method rather than a doctrine. It would have expressed the fact that science must proceed after the cinematographical manner, that the function of science is to scan the rhythm of the flow of things and not to fit itself into that flow, — Such were the two opposite con- ceptions of metaphysics which were offered to philosophy. It chose the first. The reason of this choice is undoubt- edly the mind's tendency to follow the cinematographical Descartes, Prineipta, ii. jj 3S ff.
method, a method so natural to our intellect, and so well adjusted also to the requirements of our science, that we must feel doubly sure of its speculative impotence to re- nounce it in metaphysics. But ancient philosophy also influenced the choice. Artists for ever admirable, the Greeks created a type of suprasensible truth, as of sensible beauty, whose attraction Is hard to resist. As soon as we incline to make metaphysics a systematization of science, we glide in the direction of Plato and of Aristotle. And,
I once in the zone of attraction in which the Greek philoso- phers moved, we are drawn along in their orbit. Such was the case with Leibniz, as also with Spinoza. We are not blind to the treasures of originality their doc- trines contain. Spinoza and Leibniz have poured into them the whole content of their souls, rich with the in- ventions of their genius and the acquisitions of modem thought. And there are in each of them, especially in Spinoza, flashes of intuition that break through the system. But if we leave out of the two doctrines what breathes life into them, if we retain the skeleton only, we have before us the very picture of Platonism and Aristotehanism seen through Cartesian mechanism. They present to us a systematization of the new physics, constructed on the model of the ancient metaphysics.
What, indeed, could the unification of physics be? The inspiring idea of that science was to isolate, within the uni- verse, systems of material points such that, the position of each of these points being known at a given moment, we could then calculate it for any moment whatever. As, moreover, the systems thus defined were the only ones on which the new science had hold, and as it could not be known beforehand whether a system satisfied or did not satisfy the desired condition, it was useful to proceed always and everywhere as if the condition was realized. There
was in this a methodological rule, a very natural rule — ao natural, indeed, that it was not even necessary to formu- late it. For simple common sense tells us that when we are possessed of an effective instrument of research, and are ignorant of the limits of its applicability, we should act as if it3 applicability were unlimited ; there will always be time to abate it. But the temptation must have been great for the philosopher to hypostatize this hope, or rather this impetus, of the new science, and to convert a general rule of method into a fundamental law of things. So he transported himself at once to the limit ; he supposed ph>'sics to have become complete and to embrace the whole of the sensible world. The universe became a system of points, the position of which was rigorously determined at each instant by relation to the preceding instant and theoretically calculable for any moment whatever. The result, in short, was universal mechanism. But it was not enough to fonnulate this mechanism; what was required was to found it, to give the reason for it and prove its necessity. And the essential affirmation of mechanism being that of a reciprocal mathematical dependence of all the points of the universe, as also of all the moments of the universe, the reason of mechani.'im had to be discovered in the unity of a principle into which could be contracted all that is juxtaposed in space and successive in time. Hence, the whole of the re^l was supposed to be given at once. The reciprocal determination of the juxtaposed appearances in space was explained by the indivisibility of true being, and the inflexible determinism of successive phenomena in time simply expressed that the whole of being is ^ven in the eternal.
The new philosophy was going, then, to be a recommence-
ment, or rather a transposition, of the old. The ancient
philosophy had taken each of the concepts into which a
becoming is concentrated or which mark its apogee: it
supposed them all known, and gathered them up into a
single concept, form of forms, idea of ideas, like the God
of Aristotle- The new philosophy was going to take each
»of the laws which condition a beconaing in relation to others
and which are as the permanent eubstratum of phenomena:
it would suppose them all known, and would gather them
up into a unity which also would express them eminently,
but which, like the God of Aristotle and for the same