INTRODUCTION xi 



reconstruction of all things, even of life. True, it hurtles 

 in its course against such formidable difficulties, it sees 

 its logic end in such strange contradictions, that it very 

 speedily renounces its first ambition. "It is no longer 

 reality itself," it says, "that it will reconstruct, but only 

 an imitation of the real, or rather a symbolical image; the 

 essence of things escapes us, and will escape us always; 

 we move among relations; the absolute is not in our prov- 

 ince; we are brought to a stand before the Unknowable." — 

 But for the human intellect, after too much pride, this is 

 really an excess of humility. If the intellectual form of 

 the living being has been gradually modeled on the recip- 

 rocal actions and reactions of certain bodies and their 

 material environment, how should it not reveal to us some- 

 thing of the very essence of which these bodies are made? 

 Action cannot move in the unreal. A mind born to specu- 

 late or to dream, I admit, might remain outside reality, 

 might deform or transform the real, perhaps even create 

 it — as we create the figures of men and animals that our 

 imagination cuts out of the passing cloud. But an in- 

 tellect bent upon the act to be performed and the reaction 

 to follow, feeling its object so as to get its mobile impression 

 at every instant, is an intellect that touches something 

 of the absolute. Would the idea ever have occurred to 

 us to doubt this absolute value of our knowledge if philoso- 

 phy had not shown us what contradictions our speculation 

 meets, what dead-locks it ends in? But these difficulties 

 and contradictions all arise from trying to apply the usual 

 forms of our thought to objects with which our industry 

 has nothing to do, and for which, therefore, our molds 

 are not made. Intellectual knowledge, in so far as it 

 relates to a certain aspect of inert matter, ought, on the 

 contrary, to give us a faithful imprint of it, having been 

 stereotyped on this particular object. It becomes relative* 



