52 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



anticipation of the future. It is a particular mode of 

 viewing the past in the light of the present. In short, 

 the classic conception of finality postulates at once too 

 much and too little: it is both too wide and too narrow. 

 In explaining life by intellect, it limits too much the mean- 

 ing of life: intellect, such at least as we find it in ourselves, 

 has been fashioned by evolution during the course of 

 progress; it is cut out of something larger, or, rather, 

 it is only the projection, necessarily on a plane, of a reality 

 that possesses both relief and depth. It is this more com- 

 prehensive reality that true finalism ought to reconstruct, 

 or, rather, if possible, embrace in one view. But, on the 

 other hand, just because it goes beyond intellect — the 

 faculty of connecting the same with the same, of per- 

 ceiving and also of producing repetitions — this reality is 

 undoubtedly creative, i. e. productive of effects in which 

 it expands and transcends its own being. These effects 

 were therefore not given in it in advance, and so it could 

 not take them for ends, although, when once produced, 

 they admit of a rational interpretation, like that of the 

 manufactured article that has reproduced a model. In 

 short, the theory of final causes does not go far enough when 

 it confines itself to ascribing some intelligence to nature, 

 and it goes too far when it supposes a pre-existence of 

 the future in the present in the form of idea. And the 

 second theory, which sins by excess, is the outcome of 

 the first, which sins by defect. In place of intellect proper 

 must be substituted the more comprehensive reality of 

 which intellect is only the contraction. The future then 

 appears as expanding the present: it was not, therefore, 

 contained in the present in the form of a represented end. 

 And yet, once realized, it will explain the present as much 

 as the present explains it, and even more; it must be viewed 

 as an end as much as, and more than, a result. Our in- 



