in.] SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 199 



depths of life, the more symbolic, the more relative to 

 the contingencies of action, the knowledge it supplies 

 to us becomes. On this new ground philosophy ought 

 then to follow science, in order to superpose on scientific 

 truth a knowledge of another kind, which may be called 

 metaphysical. Thus combined, all our knowledge, both 

 scientific and metaphysical, is heightened. In the absolute 

 we live and move and have our being. The knowledge 

 we possess of it is incomplete, no doubt, but not external 

 or relative. It is reality itself, in the profoundest meaning 

 of the word, that we reach by the combined and pro- 

 gressive development of science and of philosophy. 



Thus, in renouncing the factitious unity which the 

 understanding imposes on nature from outside, we shall 

 perhaps find its true, inward and living unity. For the 

 effort we make to transcend the pure understanding in- 

 troduces us into that more vast something out of which 

 our understanding is cut, and from which it has detached 

 itself. And, as matter is determined by intelligence, as 

 there is between them an evident agreement, we cannot 

 make the genesis of the one without making the genesis 

 of the other. An identical process must have cut out 

 matter and the intellect, at the same time, from a stuff 

 that contained both. Into this reality we shall get back 

 more and more completely, in proportion as we compel 

 ourselves to transcend pure intelligence. 



Let us then concentrate attention on that which we 

 have that is at the same time the most removed from 

 externality and the least penetrated with intellectuality. 

 Let us seek, in the depths of our experience, the point 

 where we feel ourselves most intimately within our own 

 life. It is into pure duration that we then plunge back, 

 a duration in which the past, always moving on, is swelling 



