INTRODUCTION xi 



organized matter. It begins by showing us in the 

 intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame, perhaps 

 accidental, which lights up the coming and going of 

 living beings in the narrow passage open to their action ; 

 and lo ! forgetting what it has just told us, it makes of 

 this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun which can 

 illuminate the world. Boldly it proceeds, with the 

 powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal recon 

 struction of all things, even of life. True, it hurtles in 

 its course against such formidable difficulties, it sees 

 its logic end in such strange contradictions, that it very 

 speedily renounces its first ambition. &quot; It is no longer 

 reality itself,&quot; it says, &quot; that it will reconstruct, but only 

 an imitation of the real, or rather a symbolical image ; 

 the essence of things escapes us, and will escape us 

 always ; we move among relations ; the absolute is not 

 in our province ; we are brought to a stand before 

 the Unknowable.&quot; But for the human intellect, after 

 too much pride, this is really an excess of humility. 

 If the intellectual form of the living being has been 

 gradually modelled on the reciprocal actions and 

 reactions of certain bodies and their material environ 

 ment, how should it not reveal to us something of 

 the very essence of which these bodies are made ? 

 Action cannot move in the unreal. A mind born 

 to speculate or to dream, I admit, might remain 

 outside reality, might deform or transform the real, 

 perhaps even create it, as we create the figures of 

 men and animals that our imagination cuts out of 

 the passing cloud. But an intellect bent upon the act 

 to be performed and the reaction to follow, feeling its 

 object so as to get its mobile impression at every instant, 

 is an intellect that touches something of the absolute. 

 Would the idea ever have occurred to us to doubt 



