iv THE KANTIAN CRITICISM 383 



adding to them something new, and is explained by 

 them as much as it explains them ; but to deduce this 

 form directly from one complete Being which it is 

 supposed to manifest, is to return to Spinozism. It 

 is, like Leibniz and Spinoza, to deny to duration all 

 efficient action. The post-Kantian philosophy, severe 

 as it may have been on the mechanistic theories, accepts 

 from mechanism the idea of a science that is one and 

 the same for all kinds of reality. And it is nearer to 

 mechanism than it imagines ; for though, in the con 

 sideration of matter, of life and of thought, it replaces 

 the successive degrees of complexity that mechanism 

 supposed by degrees of the realization of an Idea or by 

 degrees of the objectification of a Will, it still speaks of 

 degrees, and these degrees are those of a scale which 

 Being traverses in a single direction. In short, it 

 makes out the same articulations in nature that 

 mechanism does. Of mechanism it retains the whole 

 design ; it merely gives it a different colouring. But 

 it is the design itself, or at least one half of the design, 

 that needs to be re-made. 



If we are to do that, we must give up the method 

 of construction, which was that of Kant s successors. 

 We must appeal to experience an experience purified, 

 or, in other words, released, where necessary, from the 

 moulds that our intellect has formed in the degree and 

 proportion of the progress of our action on things. 

 An experience of this kind is not a non-temporal 

 experience. It only seeks, beyond the spatialized time 

 in which we believe we see continual rearrangements 

 between the parts, that concrete duration in which a 

 radical recasting of the whole is always going on. It 

 follows the real in all its sinuosities. It does not lead 

 us, like the method of construction, to higher and 



