in THE GEOMETRICAL ORDER 219 



degree and then let ourselves fall back little by 

 little, we get the feeling of extension : we have an 

 extension of the self into recollections that are fixed 

 and external to one another, in place of the tension 

 it possessed as an indivisible active will. But this 

 is only a beginning. Our consciousness, sketching 

 the movement, shows us its direction and reveals 

 to us the possibility of continuing it to the end ; but 

 consciousness itself does not go so far. Now, on the 

 other hand, if we consider matter, which seems to us 

 at first coincident with space, we find that the more 

 our attention is fixed on it, the more the parts which 

 we said were laid side by side enter into each other, 

 each of them undergoing the action of the whole, 

 which is consequently somehow present in it. Thus, 

 although matter stretches itself out in the direction 

 of space, it does not completely attain it ; whence 

 we may conclude that it only carries very much 

 further the movement that consciousness is able to 

 sketch within us in its nascent state. We hold, there 

 fore, the two ends of the chain, though we do not 

 succeed in seizing the intermediate links. Will 

 they always escape us ? We must remember that 

 philosophy, as we define it, has not yet become 

 completely conscious of itself. Physics understands 

 its role when it pushes matter in the direction of 

 spatiality ; but has metaphysics understood its role 

 when it has simply trodden in the steps of physics, 

 in the chimerical hope of going further in the same 

 direction ? Should not its own task be, on the con 

 trary, to remount the incline that physics descends, 

 to bring back matter to its origins, and to build up 

 progressively a cosmology which would be, so to 

 speak, a reversed psychology ? All that which seems 



