xii CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



this absolute value of our knowledge if philosophy 

 had not shown us what contradictions our speculation 

 meets, what dead-locks it ends in ? But these diffi 

 culties and contradictions all arise from trying to apply 

 the usual forms of our thought to objects with which 

 our industry has nothing to do, and for which, therefore, 

 our moulds are not made. Intellectual knowledge, in 

 so far as it relates to a certain aspect of inert matter, 

 ought, on the contrary, to give us a faithful imprint of 

 it, having been stereotyped on this particular object. 

 It becomes relative only if it claims, such as it is, to 

 present to us life that is to say, the maker of the 

 stereotype-plate. 



Must we then give up fathoming the depths of life ? 

 Must we keep to that mechanistic idea of it which the 

 understanding will always give us an idea necessarily 

 artificial and symbolical, since it makes the total 

 activity of life shrink to the form of a certain human 

 activity which is only a partial and local manifestation 

 of life, a result or by-product of the vital process ? We 

 should have to do so, indeed, if life had employed all 

 the psychical potentialities it possesses in producing pure 

 understandings that is to say, in making geometricians. 

 But the line of evolution that ends in man is not the 

 only one. On other paths, divergent from it, other 

 forms of consciousness have been developed, which 

 have not been able to free themselves from external 

 constraints or to regain control over themselves, as 

 the human intellect has done, but which, none the less, 

 also express something that is immanent and essential 

 in the evolutionary movement. Suppose these other 

 forms of consciousness brought together and amalga 

 mated with intellect : would not the result be a 



