208 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



we may conclude that it only carries very much further 

 the movement that consciousness is able to sketch within 

 us in its nascent state. We hold, therefore, the two ends 

 of the chain, though we do not succeed in seizing the inter- 

 mediate links. Will they always escape us? We must 

 remember that philosophy, as we define it, has not yet be- 

 come completely conscious of itself. Physics understands 

 its role when it pushes matter in the direction of spatiality; 

 but has metaphysics understood its role when it has simply 

 trodden in the steps of physics, in the chimerical hope of 

 going further in the same direction? Should not its own 

 task be, on the contrary, to remount the incline that 

 physics descends, to bring back matter to its origins, and 

 to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, 

 so to speak, a reversed psychology? All that which seems 

 positive to the physicist and to the geometrician would 

 become, from this new point of view, an interruption or 

 inversion of the true positivity, which would have to be 

 defined in psychological terms. 



When we consider the admirable order of mathematics, 

 the perfect agreement of the objects it deals with, the 

 immanent logic in numbers and figures, our certainty 

 of always getting the same conclusion, however diverse 

 and complex our reasonings on the same subject, we 

 hesitate to see in properties apparently so positive a system 

 of negations, the absence rather than the presence of a true 

 reality. But we must not forget that our intellect, which 

 finds this order and wonders at it, is directed in the same 

 line of movement that leads to the materiality and spatial- 

 ity of its object. The more complexity the intellect puts 

 into its object by analyzing it, the more complex is the order 

 it finds there. And this order and this complexity neces- 

 sarily appear to the intellect as a positive reality, since 



