216 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



system of to-day actually to be superimposed on that of 

 yesterday, the latter must have waited for the former, 

 time must have halted, and everything become simultane- 

 ous: that happens in geometry, but in geometry alone. 

 Induction therefore implies first that, in the world of the 

 physicist as in that of the geometrician, time does not 

 count. But it implies also that qualities can be superposed 

 on each other like magnitudes. If, in imagination, I 

 place the stove and fire of to-day on that of yesterday, I 

 find indeed that the form has remained the same; it suffices, 

 for that, that the surfaces and edges coincide; but what 

 is the coincidence of two qualities, and how can they be 

 superposed one on another in order to ensure that they 

 are identical? Yet I extend to the second order of reality 

 all that applies to the first. The physicist legitimates 

 this operation later on by reducing, as far as possible, 

 differences of quality to differences of magnitude; but, 

 prior to all science, I incline to liken qualities to quantities, 

 as if I perceived behind the qualities, as through a trans- 

 parency, a geometrical mechanism. 1 The more complete 

 this transparency, the more it seems to me that in the same 

 conditions there must be a repetition of the same fact. 

 Our inductions are certain, to our eyes, in, the exact degree 

 in which we make the qualitative differences melt into 

 the homogeneity of the space which subtends them, 

 so that geometry is the ideal limit of our inductions as 

 well as of our deductions. The movement at the end of 

 which is spatiality lays down along its course the faculty 

 of induction as well as that of deduction, in fact, intel- 

 lectuality entire. 



It creates them in the mind. But it creates also, in 

 things, the "order" which our induction, aided by de- 



1 Op. cit. chaps, i. and ii. passim. 



