364 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



all eternity, on the contrary, by following the new 

 conception to the end, we should come to see in 

 time a progressive growth of the absolute, and in the 

 evolution of things a continual invention of forms 

 eyerjiew^-. 



It is true that it would be to break with the meta 

 physics of the ancients. They saw only one way of 

 knowing definitely. Their science consisted m&quot;&quot;&quot;a 

 scattered and fragmentary metaphysics, tKeir meta- 

 physics in a concentrated and systematic science. Their 

 science and metaphysics were, at most, two species of 

 one and the same genus. In our hypothesis, on the 

 contrary, science and metaphysics are two opposed 

 . although complementary ways of knowing, the first 

 retaining only moments, that is to say, that which does 

 not endure, the second bearing on duration itself. Now, 

 &amp;lt; it was natural to hesitate between so novel a conception 

 of metaphysics and the traditional conception. The 

 temptation must have been strong to repeat with the 

 new science what had been tried on the old, to suppose 

 our scientific knowledge of nature completed at once, 

 to unify it entirely, and to give to this unification, as 

 the Greeks had already done, the name of metaphysics. 

 So, beside the new way that philosophy might have 

 prepared, the old remained open, that indeed which 

 physics trod. And, as physics retained of time only 

 what could as well be spread out all at once in space, 

 the metaphysics that chose the same direction had 

 necessarily to proceed as if time created and annihilated 

 V nothing, as if duration had no efficacy. Bound, like 

 the physics of the moderns and the metaphysics of 

 the ancients, to the cinematographical method, it 

 ended with the conclusion, implicitly admitted at the 

 start and immanent in the method itself : -yill is given. 



