326 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



to deduce it from a simple principle. 1 But if everything 

 that has come from poetry, religion, social life and a still 

 rudimentary physics and biology be removed from it, if 

 we take away all the light material that may have been 

 used in the construction of the stately building, a solid 

 framework remains, and this framework marks out the 

 main lines of a metaphysic which is, we believe, the natural 

 metaphysic of the human intellect. We come to a philoso- 

 phy of this kind, indeed, whenever we follow to the end, 

 the cinematographical tendency of perception and thought. 

 Our perception and thought begin by substituting for the 

 continuity of evolutionary change a series of unchangeable 

 forms which are turn by turn, " caught on the wing," like 

 the rings at a merry-go-round, which the children unhook 

 with their little stick as they are passing. Now, how can 

 the forms be passing, and on what " stick" are they strung? 

 As the stable forms have been obtained by extracting from 

 change everything that is definite, there is nothing left, 

 to characterize the instability on which the forms are laid, 

 but a negative attribute, which must be indetermination 

 itself. Such is the first proceeding of our thought: it 

 dissociates each change into two elements — the one stable, 

 definable for each particular case, to wit, the Form; the 

 other indefinable and always the same, Change in general. 

 And such, also, is the essential operation of language. 

 Forms are all that it is capable of expressing. It is reduced 

 to taking as understood or is limited to suggesting a mo- 

 bility which, just because it is always unexpressed, is 

 thought to remain in all cases the same. — Then comes in a 

 philosophy that holds the dissociation thus effected by 

 thought and language to be legitimate. What can it do, 



1 Especially have we left almost entirely on one side those admirable 

 but somewhat fugitive intuitions that Plotinus was later to seize, to 

 study and to fix. 



