44 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



manent in life should be rejected as a whole, or it must 

 undergo a treatment very different from pulverization. 



The error of radical finalism, as also that of radical 

 mechanism, is to extend too far the application of certain 

 concepts that are natural to our intellect. Originally, 

 we think only in order to act. Our intellect has been 

 cast in the mold of action. Speculation is a luxury, while 

 action is a necessity. Now, in order to act, we begin by 

 proposing an end; we make a plan, then we go on to the 

 detail of the mechanism which will bring it to pass. This 

 latter operation is possible only if we know what we can 

 reckon on. We must therefore have managed to extract 

 resemblances from nature, which enable us to anticipate 

 the future. Thus we must, consciously or unconsciously, 

 have made use of the law of causality. Moreover, the 

 more sharply the idea of efficient causality is defined in 

 our mind, the more it takes the form of a mechanical 

 causality. And this scheme, in its turn, is the more 

 mathematical according as it expresses a more rigorous 

 necessity. That is why we have only to follow the bent 

 of our mind to become mathematicians. But, on the 

 other hand, this natural mathematics is only the rigid 

 unconscious skeleton beneath our conscious supple habit 

 of linking the same causes to the same effects; and the usual 

 object of this habit is to guide actions inspired by in- 

 tentions, or, what comes to the same, to direct movements 

 combined with a view to reproducing a pattern. We are 

 born artisans as we are born geometricians, and indeed 

 we are geometricians only because we are artisans. Thus 

 the human intellect, inasmuch as it is fashioned for the 

 needs of human action, is an intellect which proceeds at 

 the same time by intention and by calculation, by adapt- 

 ing means to ends and by thinking out mechanisms of 



