xiv CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



of knowledge have been constructed nor how we 

 can enlarge or go beyond them. It is necessary that 

 these two inquiries, theory of knowledge and theory 

 of life, should join each other, and, by a circular 

 process, push each other on unceasingly. 



Together, they may solve by a method more sure, 

 brought nearer to experience, the great problems that 

 philosophy poses. For, if they should succeed in 

 their common enterprise, they would show us the 

 formation of the intellect, and thereby the genesis of 

 that matter of which our intellect traces the general 

 configuration. They would dig to the very root of 

 nature and of mind. They would substitute for the 

 false evolutionism of Spencer which consists in cutting 

 up present reality, already evolved, into little bits 

 no less evolved, and then recomposing it with these 

 fragments., thus positing in advance everything that 

 is to be explained a true evolutionism, in which 

 reality would be followed in its generation and its 

 growth. 



But a philosophy of this kind will not be made in a 

 day. Unlike the philosophical systems properly so 

 called, each of which was the individual work of a man 

 of genius and sprang up as a whole, to be taken or 

 left, it will only be built up by the collective and pro 

 gressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers 

 also, completing, correcting and improving one another. 

 So the present essay does not aim at resolving at once 

 the greatest problems. It simply desires to define the 

 method and to permit a glimpse, on some essential 

 points, of the possibility of its application. 



Its plan is traced by the subject itself. In the 

 first chapter, we try on the evolutionary progress the 

 two ready-made garments that our understanding 



