, BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 51 



quest, innate or acquired, of all the essential elements 

 of the knowledge of truth. Even where it confesses 

 that it does not know the object presented to it, it 

 believes that its ignorance consists only in not knowing 

 which one of its time-honoured categories suits the 

 new object. In what drawer, ready to open, shall we 

 put it ? In what garment, already cut out, shall we 

 clothe it ? Is it this, or that, or the other thing ? And 

 &quot;this,&quot; and &quot;that,&quot; and &quot;the other thing&quot; are always 

 something already conceived, already known. The 

 idea that for a new object we might have to create a 

 new concept, perhaps a new method of thinking, is 

 I deeply repugnant to us. The history of philosophy is 

 \there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of 

 (systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the 

 /real into the ready-made garments of our ready-made 

 ) concepts, the necessity of making to measure. But, 

 j rather than go to this extremity, our reason prefers to 

 announce once for all, with a proud modesty, that it has 

 \ to do only with the relative, and that the absolute is not 

 in its province. This preliminary declaration enables 

 it to apply its habitual method of thought without 

 any scruple, and thus, under pretence that it does 

 not touch the absolute, to make absolute judgments 

 upon everything. Plato was the first to set up the 

 theory that to know the real consists in finding its Idea, 

 that is to say, in forcing it into a pre-existing frame 

 already at our disposal as if we implicitly possessed 

 universal knowledge. But this belief is natural to the 

 human intellect, always engaged as it is in determining 

 under what former heading it shall catalogue any new 

 object ; and it may be said that, in a certain sense, we 

 are all born Platonists. 



Nowhere is the inadequacy of this method so obvious 



