242 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



Kepler and of Galileo have remained for it the ideal and 

 unique type of all knowledge. Now, a law is a relation 

 between things or between facts. More precisely, a 

 law of mathematical form expresses the fact that a 

 certain magnitude is a function of one or several other 

 variables appropriately chosen. Now, the choice of the 

 variable magnitudes, the distribution of nature into 

 objects and into facts, has already something of the 

 contingent and the conventional. But, admitting that 

 the choice is hinted at, if not prescribed, by experience, 

 the law remains none the less a relation, and a relation 

 is essentially a comparison ; it has objective reality only 

 for an intelligence that represents to itself several terms 

 at the same time. This intelligence may be neither 

 mine nor yours : a science which bears on laws may 

 therefore be an objective science, which experience 

 contains in advance and which we simply make it 

 disgorge ; but it is none the less true that a comparison 

 of some kind must be effected here, impersonally if not 

 by any one in particular, and that an experience made 

 of laws, that is, of terms related to other terms, is an 

 experience made of comparisons, which, before we 

 receive it, has already had to pass through an atmo 

 sphere of intellectuality. The idea of a science and of 

 an experience entirely relative to the human under 

 standing was therefore implicitly contained in the 

 conception of a science one and integral, composed 

 of laws : Kant only brought it to light. But this 

 conception is the result of an arbitrary confusion 

 between the generality of laws and that of genera. 

 Though an intelligence be necessary to condition terms 

 by relation to each other, we may conceive that in 

 certain cases the terms themselves may exist inde 

 pendently. And if, beside relations of term to term, 



