368 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP 



convert a general rule of method into a fundamental 

 law of things. So he transported himself at once to 

 the limit ; he supposed physics to have become com 

 plete and to embrace the whole of the sensible world. 

 The universe became a system of points, the position 

 of which was rigorously determined at each instant by 

 relation to the preceding instant and theoretically 

 calculable for any moment whatever. The result, in 

 short, was universal mechanism. But it was not enough 

 to formulate this mechanism : what was required 

 was to found it, to give the reason for it and prove 

 its necessity. And the essential affirmation of mechan 

 ism being that of a reciprocal mathematical dependence 

 of all the points of the universe, as also of all the 

 moments of the universe, the reason of mechanism had 

 to be discovered in the unity of a principle into which 

 could be contracted all that is juxtaposed in space and 

 successive in time. Hence, the whole of the real was 

 supposed to be given at once. The reciprocal deter 

 mination of the juxtaposed appearances in space was 

 explained by the indivisibility of true being, and the 

 inflexible determinism of successive phenomena in time 

 simply expressed that the whole of being is given in 

 the eternal. 



The new philosophy was going, then, to be a 

 recommencement, or rather a transposition, of the old. 

 The ancient philosophy had taken each of the concepts 

 into which a becoming is concentrated or which mark its 

 apogee : it supposed them all known, and gathered them 

 up into a single concept, form of forms, idea of ideas, 

 like the God of Aristotle. The new philosophy was 

 going to take each of the laws which condition a becom 

 ing in relation to others and which are as the per 

 manent substratum of phenomena : it would suppose 



