204 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



extending them, though the extension would not appear 

 at all unreasonable once it were accomplished. Thousands 

 and thousands of variations on the theme of walking 

 will never yield a rule for swimming : come, enter the 

 water, and when you know how to swim, you will 

 understand how the mechanism of swimming is con 

 nected with that of walking. Swimming is an extension 

 of walking, but walking would never have pushed you 

 on to swimming. So you may speculate as intelligently 

 as you will on the mechanism of intelligence ; you will 

 never, by this method, succeed in going beyond it. 

 You may get something more complex, but not some 

 thing higher nor even something different. You must 

 take things by storm : you must thrust intelligence 

 outside itself by an act of will. 



So the vicious circle is only apparent. It is, on 

 the contrary, real, we think, in every other method 

 of philosophy. This we must try to show in a 

 few words, if only to prove that philosophy cannot 

 and must not accept the relation established by pure 

 intellectualism between the theory of knowledge and 

 the theory of the known, between metaphysics and 

 science. 



At first sight, it may seem prudent to leave the 

 consideration of facts to positive science, to let physics 

 and chemistry busy themselves with matter, the bio 

 logical and psychological sciences with life. The task 

 of the philosopher is then clearly defined. He takes 

 facts and laws from the scientist s hand ; and whether 

 he tries to go beyond them in order to reach their 

 deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to 

 go further and even proves it by the analysis of 

 scientific knowledge, in both cases he has for the facts 



