366 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



would no longer be determinable by the present ; at 

 most we might say that, once realized, it can be 

 found again in its antecedents, as the sounds of a new 

 language can be expressed with the letters of an old 

 alphabet if we agree to enlarge the value of the letters 

 and to attribute to them, retro-actively, sounds which 

 no combination of the old sounds could have pro 

 duced beforehand. Finally, the mechanistic explana 

 tion might have remained universal in this, that it 

 can indeed be extended to as many systems as we 

 choose to cut out in the continuity of the universe ; 

 but mechanism would then have become a method 

 rather than a doctrine. It would have expressed 

 the fact that science must proceed after the cine- 

 matographical manner, that the function of science 

 is to scan the rhythm of the flow of things and 

 not to fit itself into that flow. Such were the two 

 opposite conceptions of metaphysics which were offered 

 to philosophy. 



It chose the first. The reason of this choice is 

 undoubtedly the mind s tendency to follow the cine- 

 matographical method, a method so natural to our 

 intellect, and so well adjusted also to the require 

 ments of our science, that we must feel doubly sure 

 of its speculative impotence to renounce it in meta 

 physics. But ancient philosophy also influenced the 

 choice. Artists for ever admirable, the Greeks created 

 a type of suprasensible truth, as of sensible beauty, 

 whose attraction is hard to resist. As soon as we 

 incline to make metaphysics a systematization of 

 science, we glide in the direction of Plato and of 

 Aristotle. And, once in the zone of attraction in 

 which the Greek philosophers moved, we are drawn 

 along in their orbit. 



