190 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



state, and expands it into reality; Spencer starts from 

 external reality, and condenses it into intellect. But, 

 in the one case as in the other, the intellect must be taken 

 at the beginning as given — either condensed or expanded, 

 grasped in itself by a direct vision or perceived by reflection 

 in nature, as in a mirror. 



The agreement of most philosophers on this point 

 comes from the fact that they are at one in affirming 

 the unity of nature, and in representing this unity under 

 an abstract and geometrical form. Between the organized 

 and the unorganized they do not see and they will not see 

 the cleft. Some start from the inorganic, and, by com- 

 pounding it with itself, claim to form the living; others 

 place life first, and proceed towards matter by a skilfully 

 managed decrescendo; but, for both, there are only dif- 

 ferences of degree in nature — degrees of complexity in the 

 first hypothesis, of intensity in the second, Once this 

 principle is admitted, intelligence becomes as vast as reality; 

 for it is unquestionable that whatever is geometrical in 

 things is entirely accessible to human intelligence, and 

 if the continuity between geometry and the rest is per- 

 fect, all the rest must indeed be equally intelligible, 

 equally intelligent. Such is the postulate of most systems. 

 Any one can easily be convinced of this by comparing 

 doctrines that seem to have no common point, no common 

 measure, those of Fichte and Spencer for instance, two 

 names that we happen to have just brought together. 



At the root of these speculations, then, there are the 

 two convictions correlative and complementary, that 

 nature is one and that the function of intellect is to embrace 

 it in its entirety. The faculty of knowing being supposed 

 coextensive with the whole of experience, there can no 

 longer be any question of engendering it. It is already 

 given, and we merely have to use it, as we use our sight to 



