i BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 31 



The essential function of our intellect, as the evolution 

 of life has fashioned it, is to be a light for our conduct, 

 to make ready for our action on things, to foresee, for 

 a given situation, the events, favourable or unfavourable, 

 which may follow thereupon. Intellect therefore in 

 stinctively selects in a given situation whatever is like 

 something already known ; it seeks this out, in order 

 that it may apply its principle that like produces like.&quot; 

 In just this does the prevision of the future by 

 common sense consist. Science carries this faculty to 

 the highest possible degree of exactitude and preci 

 sion, but does not alter its essential character. Like 

 ordinary knowledge, in dealing with things science is 

 concerned only with the aspect of repetition. Though 

 the whole be original, science will always manage to 

 analyse it into elements or aspects which are approxi 

 mately a reproduction of the past. Science can work 

 only on what is supposed to repeat itself that is to say, 

 on what is withdrawn, by hypothesis, from the action 

 of real time. Anything that is irreducible and irrever 

 sible in the successive moments of a history eludes 

 science. To get a notion of this irreducibility and 

 irreversibility, we must break with scientific habits 

 which are adapted to the fundamental requirements of 

 thought, we must do violence to the mind, go counter 

 to the natural bent of the intellect. But that is just 

 the function of philosophy. 



In vain, therefore, does life evolve before our eyes 

 as a continuous creation of unforeseeable form : the 

 idea always persists that form, unforeseeability and con 

 tinuity are mere appearance, the outward reflection of 

 our own ignorance. What is presented to the senses as 

 a continuous history would break up, we are told, into 

 a series of successive states. &quot; What gives you the 



