156 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



languages which have no verb. Intelligence, therefore, 

 naturally makes use of relations of like with like, of 

 content to container, of cause to effect, etc., which 

 are implied in every phrase in which there is a 

 subject, an attribute and a verb, expressed or under 

 stood. May one say that it has innate knowledge 

 of each of these relations in particular ? It is for 

 logicians to discover whether they are so many 

 irreducible relations, or whether they can be resolved 

 into relations still more general. But, in whatever 

 way we make the analysis of thought, we always end 

 with one or several general categories, of which the 

 mind possesses innate knowledge since it makes a 

 natural use of them. Let us say, therefore, that what 

 ever^ in instinct and intelligence, is innate knowledge, bears 

 in the first case on things and in the second on relations. 



Philosophers distinguish between the matter of our 

 knowledge and its form. The matter is what is given 

 by the perceptive faculties taken in the elementary state. 

 The form is the totality of the relations set up between 

 these materials in order to constitute a systematic know 

 ledge. Can the form, without matter, be an object of 

 knowledge ? Yes, without doubt, provided that this 

 knowledge is not like a thing we possess so much as 

 like a habit we have contracted, a direction rather 

 than a state : it is, if we will, a certain natural bent of 

 attention. The schoolboy, who knows that the master 

 is going to dictate a fraction to him, draws a line before 

 he knows what numerator and what denominator are to 

 come ; he therefore has present to his mind the general 

 relation between the two terms although he does not 

 know either of them ; he knows the form without the 

 matter. So is it, prior to experience, with the categories 

 into which our experience comes to be inserted. Let us 



