378 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



that in Kant is not yet divine, but which tends to 

 become so. It became so, indeed, with Fichte. With 

 Kant, however, its principal role was to give to the whole 

 of our science a relative and human character, although 

 of a humanity already somewhat deified. From this 

 point of view, the criticism of Kant consisted chiefly in 

 limiting the dogmatism of his predecessors, accepting 

 their conception of science and reducing to a minimum 

 the metaphysic it implied. 



But it is otherwise with the Kantian distinction 

 between the matter of knowledge and its form. By 

 regarding intelligence as pre-eminently a faculty of estab 

 lishing relations, Kant attributed an extra-intellectual 

 origin to the terms between which the relations are 

 established. He affirmed, against his immediate pre 

 decessors, that knowledge is not entirely resolvable into 

 terms of intelligence. He brought back into philo 

 sophy while modifying it and carrying it on to 

 another plane that essential element of the philo 

 sophy of Descartes which had been abandoned by the 

 Cartesians. 



Thereby he prepared the way for a new philosophy, 

 which miirht have established itself in the extra- 



O 



intellectual matter of knowledge by a higher effort of 

 intuition. Coinciding with this matter, adopting the 

 same rhythm and the same movement, might not con 

 sciousness, by two efforts of opposite direction, raising 

 itself and lowering itself by turns, become able to grasp 

 from within, and no longer perceive only from without, 

 the two forms of reality, body and mind ? Would not 

 this twofold effort make us, as far as that is possible, 

 re-live the absolute ? Moreover, as, in the course of 

 this operation, we should see intellect spring up of itself, 

 cut itself out in the whole of mind, intellectual know- 



