212 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



telligence externalized in action resolves even before 

 reflective intelligence has appeared. The savage under- 

 stands better than the civilized man how to judge distances, 

 to determine a direction, to retrace by memory the often 

 complicated plan of the road he has traveled, and so to 

 return in a straight line to his starting-point. 1 If the 

 animal does not deduce explicitly, if he does not form 

 explicit concepts, neither does he form the idea of a homo- 

 geneous space. You cannot present this space to your- 

 self without introducing, in the same act, a virtual geometry 

 which will, of itself, degrade itself into logic. All the re- 

 pugnance that philosophers manifest towards this manner 

 of regarding things comes from this, that the logical work 

 of the intellect represents to their eyes a positive spiritual 

 effort. But, if we understand by spirituality a progress 

 to ever new creations, to conclusions incommensurable 

 with the premisses and indeterminable by relation to them, 

 we must say of an idea that moves among relations of 

 necessary determination, through premisses which contain 

 their conclusion in advance, that it follows the inverse 

 direction, that of materiality. What appears, from the 

 point of view of the intellect, as an effort, is in itself a 

 letting go. And while, from the point of view of the 

 intellect, there is a petitio prindpii in making geometry 

 arise automatically from space, and logic from geometry — 

 on the contrary, if space is the ultimate goal of the mind's 

 movement of detension, space cannot be given without 

 positing also logic and geometry, which are along the course 

 of the movement of which pure spatial intuition is the goal. 

 It has not been enough noticed how feeble is the reach 

 of deduction in the psychological and moral sciences. 

 From a proposition verified by facts, verifiable consequences 

 can here be drawn only up to a certain point, only in a 



1 Bastian, The Brain as an Organ of the Mind, pp. 214-16. 



