SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 205 



and relations, handed over by science, the sort of 

 respect that is due to a final verdict. To this Know 

 ledge he adds a critique of the faculty of knowing, 

 and also, if he thinks proper, a metaphysic fJ^t the 



^matter of knowledge he regards as the affair of science 



_ and not of philosophy. 



But lio^sTcLoes he Fail to^see that the real result of 

 this so-called division of labour is to mix up everything 

 and confuse everything ? The metaphysic or the critique 

 that the philosopher has reserved for himself he has 

 to receive, ready-made, from positive science, it being 

 already contained in the descriptions and analyses, the 

 whole care of which he left to the scientists. For 

 not having wished to intervene, at the beginning, in 

 questions of fact, he finds himself reduced, in questions 

 of principle, to formulating purely and simply in more 

 precise terms the unconscious and consequently incon 

 sistent metaphysic and critique which the very attitude of 

 .science to reality marks out. Let us not be deceived by 

 an apparent analogy between natural things and human 

 things. Here we are not in the judiciary domain, 

 where the description of fact and the judgment on 

 the fact are two distinct things, distinct for the very 

 simple reason that above the fact, and independent of it, 

 there is a law promulgated by a legislator. Here the 

 laws are internal to the facts and relative to the lines 

 that have been followed in cutting the real into distinct 

 facts. We cannot describe the outward appearance of 

 the object without prejudging its inner nature and its 

 organization. Form is no longer entirely isolable from 

 matter, and he who has begun by reserving to philo 

 sophy questions of principle, and who has thereby 

 tried to put philosophy above the sciences, as a &quot; court 

 of cassation &quot; is above the courts of assizes and of 



