in.] THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 189 



along the same articulations. It is not indeed necessary 

 that they should separate it into bodies at all. In order to 

 follow the indications of instinct, there is no need to per- 

 ceive objects, it is enough to distinguish properties. In- 

 telligence, on the contrary, even in its humblest form, 

 already aims at getting matter to act on matter. If on 

 one side matter lends itself to a division into active and 

 passive bodies, or more simply into coexistent and distinct 

 fragments, it is from this side that intelligence will regard 

 it; and the more it busies itself with dividing, the more it 

 will spread out in space, in the form of extension adjoining 

 extension, a matter that undoubtedly itself has a tendency 

 to spatiality, but whose parts are yet in a state of reciprocal 

 implication and interpenet ration. Thus the same move- 

 ment by which the mind is brought to form itself into 

 intellect, that is to say, into distinct concepts, brings 

 matter to break itself up into objects excluding one another. 

 The more consciousness is intellectualized, the more is matter 

 spatialized. So that the evolutionist philosophy, when it 

 imagines in space a matter cut up on the very lines that 

 our action will follow, has given itself in advance, ready 

 made, the intelligence of which it claims to show the genesis. 

 Metaphysics applies itself to a work of the same kind, 

 though subtler and more self-conscious, when it deduces 

 a priori the categories of thought. It compresses intellect, 

 reduces it to its quintessence, holds it tight in a principle 

 so simple that it can be thought empty : from this principle 

 we then draw out what we have virtually put into it. In 

 this -way we may no doubt show the coherence of intelli- 

 gence, define intellect, give its formula, but we do not 

 trace its genesis. An enterprise like that of Fichte, al- 

 though more philosophical than that of Spencer, in that it 

 pays more respect to the true order of things, hardly leads 

 us any further. Fichte takes thought in a concentrated 



