48 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



its goal. The free act is incommensurable with the idea, 

 and its "rationality" must be defined by this very in- 

 commensurability, which admits the discovery of as much 

 intelligibility within it as we will. Such is the character 

 of our own evolution; and such also, without doubt, that 

 of the evolution of life. 



Our reason, incorrigibly presumptuous, imagines itself 

 possessed, by right of birth or by right of conquest, innate 

 or acquired, of all the essential elements of the knowledge 

 of truth. Even where it confesses that it does not know 

 the object presented to it, it believes that its ignorance 

 consists only in not knowing which one of its time-honored 

 categories suits the new object. In what drawer, ready 

 to open, shall we put it? In what garment, already cut 

 out, shall we clothe it? Is it this, or that, or the other 

 thing? And "this," and "that," and "the other thing" 

 are always something already conceived, already known. 

 The idea that for a new object we might have to create a 

 new concept, perhaps a new method of thinking, is deeply 

 repugnant to us. The history of philosophy is there, how- 

 ever, and shows us the eternal conflict of systems, the im- 

 possibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the ready- 

 made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity 

 of making to measure. But, rather than go to this ex- 

 tremity, our reason prefers to announce once for all, with 

 a proud modesty, that it has to do only with the relative, 

 and that the absolute is not in its province. This pre- 

 liminary declaration enables it to apply its habitual method 

 of thought without any scruple, and thus, under pretense 

 that it does not touch the absolute, to make absolute 

 judgments upon everything. Plato was the first to set up 

 the theory that to know the real consists in finding its 

 Idea, that is to say, in forcing it into a pre-existing frame 

 already at our disposal — as if we implicitly possessed uni- 



