i BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 47 



unconsciously, have made use of the law of causality. 

 Moreover, the more sharply the idea of efficient 

 causality is defined in our mind, the more it takes 

 the form of a mechanical causality. And this scheme, 

 in its turn, is the more mathematical according as it 

 expresses a more rigorous necessity. That is why we 

 have only to follow the bent of our mind to become 

 mathematicians. But, on the other hand, this natural 

 mathematics is only the rigid unconscious skeleton 

 beneath our conscious supple habit of linking the 

 same causes to the same effects ; and the usual object 

 of this habit is to guide actions inspired by intentions, 

 or, what comes to the same, to direct movements com 

 bined with a view to reproducing a pattern. We are 

 born artisans as we are born geometricians, and indeed 

 we are geometricians only because we are artisans. 

 Thus the human intellect, inasmuch as it is fashioned 

 for the needs of human action, is an intellect which 

 proceeds at the same time by intention and by calcula 

 tion, by adapting means to ends and by thinking out 

 mechanisms of more and more geometrical form. 

 Whether nature be conceived as an immense machine 

 regulated by mathematical laws, or as the realization 

 of a plan, these two ways of regarding it are only the 

 consummation of two tendencies of mind which are 

 complementary to each other, and which have their 

 origin in the same vital necessities. 



For that reason, radical finalism is very near radical 

 mechanism on many points. Both doctrines are reluct 

 ant to see in the course of things generally, or even 

 simply in the development of life, an unforeseeable 

 creation of form. In considering reality, mechanism 

 regards only the aspect of similarity or repetition. It 

 is therefore dominated by this law, that in nature there 



