206 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



appeal, will gradually come to make no more of 

 philosophy than a registration court, charged at most 

 with wording more precisely the sentences that are 

 brought to it, pronounced and irrevocable. 



Positive science is, in fact, a work of pure intellect. 

 Now, whether our conception of the intellect be 

 accepted or rejected, there is one point on which 

 everybody will agree with us, and that is that the 

 intellect is at home in the presence of unorganized 

 matter. This matter it makes use of more and more 

 by mechanical inventions, and mechanical inventions 

 become the easier to it the more it thinks matter as 

 mechanism. The intellect bears within itself, in the 

 form of natural logic, a latent geometrism that is set 

 free in the measure and proportion that the intellect 

 penetrates into the inner nature of inert matter. In 

 telligence is in tune with this matter, and that is why 

 the physics and metaphysics of inert matter are so near 

 each other. Now, when the intellect undertakes the 

 study of life, it necessarily treats the living like the 

 inert, applying the same forms to this new object, 

 carrying over into this new field. -thje same habits that 

 have succeeded so well in the old ; and it is right to 

 do so, for only on such terms does the living .offer to 

 our action the same hold as inert matter. But__tl 

 truthr-we thus arrive at becomes altogether relative to 

 jiur.jfaculty of action. It is no more than a sym^trc 

 It cannot have the same value as the physical 



beifig only an extension of physics to an object^ 

 wjiich_w^jire a^pnorr^greoS~io look at only in its 

 ext^nmJN;^ should be to 



intervene- here actively, to examine the living without 

 any reservation as to practical utility, by freeing itself 

 from forms and habits that are strictly intellectual. 



