348 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



aside the means and consider only the end. What is 

 the essential object of science ? It is to enlaxge~pur&quot;~ 

 influence over things. Science may be speculative in 

 its form, disinterested in its immediate ends ; in other 

 words we may give it as long a credit as it wants. 

 But, however long the day of reckoning may be put 

 off, some time or other the payment must be made. 

 It is always then, in short, practical utility that _scignce 

 has in view. Even when it launches into theory, 

 it is bound to adapt its behaviour to the general 

 form of practice. However high it may rise, it must 

 be ready to fall back into the field of action, and at 

 once to get on its feet. This would not be possible 

 for it, if its rhythm differed absolutely from that of 

 action itself. Now action, we have said, proceeds by 

 leaps. To act is to re-adapt oneself. To know, that 

 is to say, to foresee in order to act, is then to go from 

 situation to situation, from arrangement to rearrange 

 ment. Science may consider rearrangements that come 

 closer and closer to each other ; it may thus increase 

 the number of moments that it isolates, but it always 

 isolates moments.^ As to what happens in the interval 

 between the moments, science is no more concerned 

 with that than are our common intelligence, our senses 

 and our language : it does not bear on the interval, but 

 only on the extremities. _ So the cinematographical 

 method forces itself upon our science, as it did already 

 on that of the ancients. 



Wherein, then, is the difference between the two 

 sciences ? We indicated it when we said that the ancients 

 reduced the physical order to the vital order, that is to 

 say, laws to genera, while the moderns try to resolve 

 genera into laws. But we have to look at it in another 

 aspect, which, moreover, is only a transposition of the 



