in.l SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 197 



as we will, the form of nature or the form of thought. 

 All these philosophies tell us, in their different languages, 

 that science is right to treat the living as the inert, and that 

 there is no difference of value, no distinction to be made 

 between the results which intellect arrives at in applying 

 its categories, whether it rests on inert matter or attacks 

 life. 



In many cases, however, we feel the frame cracking. 

 But as we did not begin by distinguishing between the 

 inert and the living, the one adapted in advance to the 

 frame in which we insert it, the other incapable of be- 

 ing held in the frame otherwise than by a convention 

 which eliminates from it all that is essential, we find our- 

 selves, in the end, reduced to regarding everything the 

 frame contains with equal suspicion. To a metaphysical 

 dogmatism, which has erected into an absolute the factitious 

 unity of science, there succeeds a skepticism or a relativism 

 that universalizes and extends to all the results of science 

 the artificial character of some among them. So philosophy 

 swings to and fro between the doctrine that regards ab- 

 solute reality as unknowable and that which, in the idea 

 it gives us of this reality, says nothing more than science 

 has said. For having wished to prevent all conflict be- 

 tween science and philosophy, we have sacrificed philosophy 

 without any appreciable gain to science. And for having 

 tried to avoid the seeming vicious circle which consists 

 in using the intellect to transcend the intellect, we find 

 ourselves turning in a real circle, that which consists in 

 laboriously rediscovering by metaphysics a unity that we 

 began by positing a priori, a unity that we admitted blindly 

 and unconsciously by the very act of abandoning the whole 

 of experience to science and the whole of reality to the 

 pure understanding. 



Let us begin, on the contrary, by tracing a line of de- 



