208 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



But as we did not begin by distinguishing between the 

 inert and the living, the one adapted in advance to the 

 frame in which we insert it, the other incapable of 

 being held in the frame otherwise than by a con 

 vention which eliminates from it all that is essential, 

 we find ourselves, in the end, reduced to regarding 

 everything the frame contains with equal suspicion. 

 To a metaphysical dogmatism, which has erected 

 into an absolute the factitious unity of science, there 

 succeeds a scepticism or a relativism that universalizes 

 and extends to all the results of science the artificial 

 character of some among them. So philosophy swings 

 to and fro between the doctrine that regards absolute 

 reality as unknowable and that which, in the idea it 

 gives us of this reality, says nothing more than science 

 has said. For having wished to prevent all conflict 

 between science and philosophy, we have sacrificed 

 philosophy without any appreciable gain to science. 

 And for having tried to avoid the seeming vicious 

 circle which consists in using the intellect to transcend 

 the intellect, we find ourselves turning in a real circle, 

 that which consists in laboriously rediscovering by 

 metaphysics a unity that we began by positing a priori^ 

 a unity that we admitted blindly and unconsciously 

 by the very act of abandoning the whole of experience 

 to science and the whole of reality to the pure 

 understanding. 



Let us begin, on the contrary, by tracing a line. o; 

 demarcation between the inert and the living.. We 

 shall find that the inert enters naturally into the frames 

 of the intellect, but that the living is adapted to these 

 frames only artificially, so that we must adopt a special 

 attitude towards it and examine it with other eyes than 

 those of positive science. Philosophy, then, invades the 



