230 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



human understanding was therefore implicitly contained 

 in the conception of a science one and integral, composed 

 of laws: Kant only brought it to light. But this con- 

 ception is the result of an arbitrary confusion between the 

 generality of laws and that of genera. Though an in- 

 telligence be necessary to condition terms by relation to 

 each other, we may conceive that in certain cases the terms 

 themselves may exist independently. And if, beside 

 relations of term to term, experience also presents to us 

 independent terms, the living genera being something 

 quite different from systems of laws, one half, at least, 

 of our knowledge bears on the "thing-in-itself," the very 

 reality. This knowledge may be very difficult, just be- 

 cause it no longer builds up its own object and is obliged, 

 on the contrary, to submit to it ; but, however little it cuts 

 into its object, it is into the absolute itself that it bites. 

 We may go further: the other half of knowledge is no 

 longer so radically, so definitely relative as certain philoso- 

 phers say, if we can establish that it bears on a reality 

 of inverse order, a reality which we always express in 

 mathematical laws, that is to say in relations that imply 

 comparisons, but which lends itself to this work only 

 because it is weighted with spatiality and consequently 

 with geometry. Be that as it may, it is the confusion of 

 two kinds of order that lies behind the relativism of the 

 moderns, as it lay behind the dogmatism of the ancients. 

 We have said enough to mark the origin of this con- 

 fusion. It is due to the fact that the "vital" order, which 

 is essentially creation, is manifested to us less in its essence 

 than in some of its accidents, those which imitate the 

 physical and geometrical order; like it, they present to 

 us repetitions that make generalization possible, and in 

 that we have all that interests us. There is no doubt 

 that life as a whole is an evolution, that is, an unceasing 



