196 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



terms does the living offer to our action the same hold as 

 inert matter. But the truth we thus arrive at becomes 

 altogether relative to our faculty of action. It is no more 

 than a symbolic verity. It cannot have the same value 

 as the physical verity, being only an extension of physics 

 to an object which we are a priori agreed to look at only 

 in its external aspect. The duty of philosophy should be 

 to intervene here actively, to examine the living without 

 any reservation as to practical utility, by freeing itself 

 from forms and habits that are strictly intellectual. 

 Its own special object is to speculate, that is to say, to 

 see; its attitude toward the living should not be that of 

 science, which aims only at action, and which, being able 

 to act only by means of inert matter, presents to itself 

 the rest of reality in this single respect. What must the 

 result be, if it leave biological and psychological facts 

 to positive science alone, as it has left, and rightly left, 

 physical facts? It will accept a priori a mechanistic 

 conception of all nature, a conception unreflected and even 

 unconscious, the outcome of the material need. It will 

 a priori accept the doctrine of the simple unity of know- 

 ledge and of the abstract unity of nature. 



The moment it does so, its fate is sealed. The philoso- 

 pher has no longer any choice save between a metaphysical 

 dogmatism and a metaphysical skepticism, both of which 

 rest, at bottom, on the same postulate, and neither of which 

 adds anything to positive science. He may hypostasize 

 the unity of nature, or, what comes to the same thing, 

 the unity of science, in a being who is nothing since he 

 does nothing, an ineffectual God who simply sums up in 

 himself all the given; or in an eternal Matter from whose 

 womb have been poured out the properties of things and 

 the laws of nature; or, again, in a pure Form which en- 

 deavors to seize an unseizable multiplicity, and which is, 



