in THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 199 



we are called to move. Outlines and paths have 

 declared themselves in the measure and proportion 

 that consciousness has prepared for action on un 

 organized matter that is to say, in the measure and 

 proportion that intelligence has been formed. It is 

 doubtful whether animals built on a different plan a 

 mollusc or an insect, for instance, cut matter up along 

 the same articulations. It is not indeed necessary that 

 they should separate it into bodies at all. In order to 

 follow the indications of instinct, there is no need to 

 perceive objects, it is enough to distinguish properties. 

 Intelligence, on the contrary, even in its humblest form, 

 already aims at getting matter to act on matter. If on 

 one side matter lends itself to a division into active 

 and passive bodies, or more simply into coexistent and 

 distinct fragments, it is from this side that intelligence 

 will regard it ; and the more it busies itself with dividing, 

 the more it will spread out in space, in the form of 

 extension adjoining extension, a matter that undoubtedly 

 itself has a tendency to spatiality, but whose parts are 

 yet in a state of reciprocal implication and interpenetra- 

 tion. Thus the same movement by which the mind is 

 brought to form itself into intellect, that is to say, into 

 distinct concepts, brings matter to break itself up into 

 objects excluding one another. The more consciousness is 

 intellectualized, the more is mailer spatialized. So that 

 the evolutionist philosophy, when it imagines in space 

 a matter cut up on the very lines that our action 

 will follow, has given itself in advance, reajdjjmade^ jhe 

 intelligence of which it claims to showthe^genesis. 



Metaphysics applies -itself &quot;&quot;tcT&quot;lTlvork of the same 

 kind, though subtler and more self-conscious, when it 

 deduces a priori the categories of thought. It com 

 presses intellect, reduces it to its quintessence, holds 



