218 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



and mathematical order are one with this very interruption. 



It is this merely negative tendency that the particular 

 laws of the physical world express. None of them, taken 

 separately, has objective reality; each is the work of an 

 investigator who has regarded things from a certain bias, 

 isolated certain variables, applied certain conventional 

 units of measurement. And yet there is an order ap- 

 proximately mathematical immanent in matter, an ob- 

 jective order, which our science approaches in proportion 

 to its progress. For if matter is a relaxation of the in- 

 extensive into the extensive and, thereby, of liberty into 

 necessity, it does not indeed wholly coincide with pure 

 homogeneous space, yet is constituted by the movement 

 which leads to space, and is therefore on the way to ge- 

 ometry. It is true that laws of mathematical form will 

 never apply to it completely. For that, it would have to be 

 pure space and step out of duration. 



We cannot insist too strongly that there is something 

 artificial in the mathematical form of a physical law, 

 and consequently in our scientific knowledge of things. 1 

 Our standards of measurement are conventional, and, 

 so to say, foreign to the intentions of nature: can we 

 suppose that nature has related all the modalities of heat 

 to the expansion of the same mass of mercury, or to the 

 change of pressure of the same mass of air kept at a 

 constant volume? But we may go further. In a general 

 way, measuring is a wholly human operation, which 

 implies that we really or ideally superpose two objects 

 one on another a certain number of times. Nature did 

 not dream of this superposition. It does not measure, 

 nor does it count. Yet physics counts, measures, re- 

 lates "quantitative" variations to one another to obtain 

 laws, and it succeeds. Its success would be inexplicable, 



1 Cf . especially the profound studies of M. Ed. Le Roy in the Revue 

 de m&aph. et de morale. 



