in.] THE IDEA OF DISORDER 223 



which we generally confuse. As this confusion has created 

 the principal difficulties of the problem of knowledge, 

 it will not be useless to dwell once more on the marks by 

 which the two orders are distinguished. 



In a general way, reality is ordered exactly to the 

 degree in which it satisfies our thought. Order is there- 

 fore a certain agreement between subject and object. 

 It is the mind finding itself again in things. But the 

 mind, we said, can go in two opposite ways. Sometimes 

 it follows its natural direction: there is then progress in 

 the form of tension, continuous creation, free activity. 

 Sometimes it inverts it, and this inversion, pushed to 

 the end, leads to extension, to the necessary reciprocal 

 determination of elements externalized each by relation 

 to the others, in short, to geometrical mechanism. Now, 

 whether experience seems to us to adopt the first direction 

 or whether it is drawn in the direction of the second, in 

 both cases we say there is order, for in the two processes 

 the mind finds itself again. The confusion between them 

 is therefore natural. To escape it, different names would 

 have to be given to the two kinds of order, and that is not 

 easy, because of the variety and variability of the forms 

 they take. The order of the second kind may be defined 

 as geometry, which is its extreme limit; more generally, 

 it is that kind of order that is concerned whenever a relation 

 of necessary determination is found between causes and 

 effects. It evokes ideas of inertia, of passivity, of automa- 

 tism. As to the first kind of order, it oscillates no doubt 

 around finality; and yet we cannot define it as finality, 

 for it is sometimes above, sometimes below. In its highest 

 forms, it is more than finality, for of a free action or a work 

 of art we may say that they show a perfect order, and yet 

 they can only be expressed in terms of ideas approximately, 

 and after the event. Life in its entirety, regarded as a 



