iii.I THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 191 



take in the horizon. It is true that opinions differ as to 

 the value of the result. For some, it is reality itself that 

 the intellect embraces; for others, it is only a phantom. 

 But, phantom or reality, what intelligence grasps is thought 

 to be all that can be attained. 



Hence the exaggerated confidence of philosophy in 

 the powers of the individual mind. Whether it is dog- 

 matic or critical, whether it admits the relativity of our 

 knowledge or claims to be established within the absolute, 

 a philosophy is generally the work of a philosopher, a 

 single and unitary vision of the whole. It is to be taken 

 or left. 



More modest, and also alone capable of being completed 

 and perfected, is the philosophy we advocate. Human 

 intelligence, as we represent it, is not at all what Plato 

 taught in the allegory of the cave. Its function is not to 

 look at passing shadows nor yet to turn itself round and 

 contemplate the glaring sun. It has something else to do. 

 Harnessed, like yoked oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the 

 play of our muscles and joints, the weight of the plow 

 and the resistance of the soil. To act and to know that 

 we are acting, to come into touch with reality and even to 

 live it, but only in the measure in which it concerns the 

 work that is being accomplished and the furrow that is 

 being plowed, such is the function of human intelligence. 

 Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence we draw the very 

 force to labor and to live. From this ocean of life, in which 

 we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, 

 and we feel that our being, or at least the intellect that 

 guides it, has been formed therein by a kind of local con- 

 centration. Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve 

 again into the Whole. Intelligence, reabsorbed into its 

 principle, may thus live back again its own genesis. But 

 the enterprise cannot be achieved in one stroke; it is 



