194 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



to prove that philosophy cannot and must not accept 

 the relation established by pure intellectualism between 

 the theory of knowledge and the theory of the known, 

 between metaphysics and science. 



At first sight, it may seem prudent to leave the consider- 

 ation of facts to positive science, to let physics and chemis- 

 try busy themselves with matter, the biological and psy- 

 chological sciences with life. The task of the philosopher 

 is then clearly defined. He takes facts and laws from the 

 scientists' hand; and whether he tries to go beyond them 

 in order to reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks 

 it impossible to go further and even proves it by the analysis 

 of scientific knowledge, in both cases he has for the facts 

 and relations, handed over by science, the sort of respect 

 that is due to a final verdict. To this knowledge he adds 

 a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks 

 proper, a metaphysic; but the matter of knowledge he 

 regards as the affair of science and not of philosophy. 



But how does he fail to see that the real result of this 

 so-called division of labor is to mix up everything and con- 

 fuse everything? The metaphysic or the critique that the 

 philosopher has reserved for himself he has to receive, 

 ready-made, from positive science, it being already con- 

 tained in the descriptions and analyses, the whole care 

 of which he left to the scientists. For not having wished 

 to intervene, at the beginning, in questions of fact, he finds 

 himself reduced, in questions of principle, to formulating 

 purely and simply in more precise terms the unconscious 

 and consequently inconsistent metaphysic and critique 

 which the very attitude of science to reality marks out. 

 Let us not be deceived by an apparent analogy between 

 natural things and human things. Here we are not in 

 the judiciary domain, where the description of fact and the 



