m.j THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 193 



tellect has detached itself from a vastly wider reality, 

 but that there has never been a clean cut between the two; 

 all around conceptual thought there remains an indistinct 

 fringe which recalls its origin. And further we compared 

 the intellect to a solid nucleus formed by means of con- 

 densation. This nucleus does not differ radically from the 

 fluid surrounding it. It can only be reabsorbed in it be- 

 cause it is made of the same substance. He who throws 

 himself into the water, having known only the resistance 

 of the solid earth, will immediately be drowned if he does 

 not struggle against the fluidity of the new environment: 

 he must perforce still cling to that solidity, so to speak, 

 which even water presents. Only on this condition can 

 he get used to the fluid's fluidity. So of our thought, 

 when it has decided to make the leap. 



But leap it must, that is, leave its own environment. 

 Reason, reasoning on its powers, will never succeed in 

 extending them, though the extension would not appear 

 at all unreasonable once it were accomplished. Thousands 

 and thousands of variations on the theme of walking 

 will never yield a rule for swimming: come, enter the 

 water, and when you know how to swim, you will under- 

 stand how the mechanism of swimming is connected 

 with that of walking. Swimming is an extension of walk- 

 ing, but walking would never have pushed you on to 

 swimming. So you may speculate as intelligently as you 

 will on the mechanism of intelligence; you will never, by 

 this method, succeed in going beyond it, You may get 

 something more complex, but not something higher nor 

 even something different. You must take things by storm : 

 you must thrust intelligence outside itself by an act of will. 



So the vicious circle is only apparent. It is, on the 

 contrary, real, we think, in every other method of philoso- 

 phy. This we must try to show in a few words, if only 



