376 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



with a certain part of nature and not with all of it. 

 We are thus led, sometimes to an &quot;epiphenomenalism&quot; 

 that associates consciousness with certain particular 

 vibrations and puts it here and there in the world in a 

 sporadic state, and sometimes to a &quot; monism &quot; that 

 scatters consciousness into as many tiny grains as there 

 are atoms ; but, in either case, it is to an incomplete 

 Spinozism or to an incomplete Leibnizianism that we 

 come back. Between this conception of nature and 

 Cartesianism we find, moreover, intermediate historical 

 stages. The medical philosophers of the eighteenth 

 century, with their cramped Cartesianism, have had a 

 great part in the genesis of the &quot; epiphenomenalism &quot; 

 and &quot; monism &quot; of the present day. 



These doctrines are thus found to fall short of the 

 Kantian criticism. Certainly, the philosophy of Kant 

 is also imbued with the belief in a science single and 

 complete, embracing the whole of the real. Indeed, 

 looked at from one aspect, it is only a continuation of 

 the metaphysics of the moderns and a transposition of 

 the ancient metaphysics. Spinoza and Leibniz had, 

 following Aristotle, hypostasized in God the unity of 

 knowledge. The Kantian criticism, on one side at 

 least, consists in asking whether the whole of this 

 hypothesis is necessary to modern science as it was to 

 ancient science, or if part of the hypothesis is not 

 sufficient. For the ancients, science applied to concepts, 

 that is to say, to kinds of things. In compressing all 

 concepts into one, they therefore necessarily arrived at 

 a being) which we may call Thought, but which was 

 rather thought -object than thought- subject. When 

 Aristotle defined God the vorjaews 1/0770-^9, it is probably 

 on i/o^Veo)?, and not on J/O^OY? that he put the emphasis. 



