344 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



manifold origins. It is connected by many invisible 

 threads to the soul of ancient Greece. Vain, therefore, 

 the effort to deduce it from a simple principle. 1 But if 

 everything that has come from poetry, religion, social 

 life and a still rudimentary physics and biology be 

 removed from it, if we take away all the light material 

 that may have been used in the construction of the 

 stately building, a solid framework remains, and this 

 framework marks out the main lines of a metaphysic 

 which is, we believe, the natural metaphysic of the 

 human intellect. We come to a philosophy of this 

 kind, indeed, whenever we follow to the end, the cine 

 matograph ical tendency of perception and thought. 

 Our perception and thought begin by substituting for 

 the continuity of evolutionary change a series of un 

 changeable forms which are, turn by turn, caught &quot; on 

 the wing,&quot; like the rings at a merry-go-round, which 

 the children unhook with their little stick as they are 

 passing. Now, how can the forms be passing, and on 

 what &quot; stick &quot; are they strung ? As the stable forms 

 have been obtained by extracting from change everything 

 that is definite, there is nothing left, to characterize the 

 instability on which the forms are laid, but a negative 

 attribute, which must be indetermination itself. Such 

 is the first proceeding of our thought : it dissociates each 

 change into two elements the one stable, definable for 

 each particular case, to wit, the Form ; the other indefin 

 able and always the same, Change in general. And such, 

 also, is the essential operation of language. Forms are 

 all that it is capable of expressing. It is reduced to 

 taking as understood or is limited to suggesting a 



1 Especially have we left almost entirely on one side those admirable 

 but somewhat fugitive intuitions that Plotinus was later to seize, to study 

 and to fix. 



