206 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



seem to have occurred to Kant — in the first place because 

 he did not think that the mind overflowed the intellect, 

 and in the second place (and this is at bottom the same thing) 

 because he did not attribute to duration an absolute exist- 

 ence, having put time, a priori, on the same plane as space. 

 This alternative consists, first of all, in regarding the intel- 

 lect as a special function of the mind, essentially turned 

 toward inert matter; then in saying that neither does mat- 

 ter determine the form of the intellect, nor does the in- 

 tellect impose its form on matter, nor have matter and 

 intellect been regulated in regard to one another by we 

 know not what pre-established harmony, but that intellect 

 and matter have progressively adapted themselves one to 

 the other in order to attain at last a common form. This 

 adaptation has, moreover, been brought about quite naturally, 

 because it is the same inversion of the same movement which 

 creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality 

 of things. 



From this point of view the knowledge of matter that 

 our perception on one hand and science on the other 

 give to us appears, no doubt, as approximative, but not as 

 relative. Our perception, whose role it is to hold up a 

 light to our actions, works a dividing up of matter that is 

 always too sharply defined, always subordinated to practi- 

 cal needs, consequently always requiring revision. Our 

 science, which aspires to the mathematical form, over- 

 accentuates the spatiality of matter; its formulae are, 

 in general, too precise, and ever need remaking. For a 

 scientific theory to be final, the mind would have to em- 

 brace the totality of things in block and place each thing 

 in its exact relation to every other thing; but in reality 

 we are obliged to consider problems one by one, in terms 

 which are, for that very reason, provisional, so that the 

 solution of each problem will have to be corrected indefi- 



