204 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



to have established once for all is that extension is not 

 a material attribute of the same kind as others. We 

 cannot reason indefinitely on the notions of heat, color, 

 or weight: in order to know the modalities of weight or 

 of heat, we must have recourse to experience. Not so 

 of the notion of space. Supposing even that it is given 

 empirically by sight and touch (and Kant has not questioned 

 the fact) there is this about it that is remarkable that our 

 mind, speculating on it with its own powers alone, cuts 

 out in it, a priori, figures whose properties we determine 

 a priori: experience, with which we have not kept in touch, 

 yet follows us through the infinite complications of our 

 reasonings and invariably justifies them. That is the fact. 

 Kant has set it in clear light. But the explanation of the 

 fact, we believe, must be sought in a different direction 

 to that which Kant followed. 



Intelligence, as Kant represents it to us, is bathed 

 in an atmosphere of spatiality to which it is as inseparably 

 united as the living body to the air it breathes. Our 

 perceptions reach us only after having passed through 

 this atmosphere. They have been impregnated in ad- 

 vance by our geometry, so that our faculty of thinking only 

 finds again in matter the mathematical properties which 

 our faculty of perceiving has already deposed there. We 

 are assured, therefore, of seeing matter yield itself with 

 docility to our reasonings; but this matter, in all that it has 

 that is intelligible, is our own work; of the reality "in 

 itself" we know nothing and never shall know anything, 

 since we only get its refraction through the forms of our 

 faculty of perceiving. So that if we claim to affirm some- 

 thing of it, at once there rises the contrary affirmation, 

 equally demonstrable, equally plausible. The ideality 

 of space is proved directly by the analysis of knowledge 

 indirectly by the antinomies to which the opposite theory 



