330 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



when it launches into theory, it is bound to adapt its be- 

 havior to the general form of practice. However high 

 it may rise, it must be ready to fall back into the field of 

 action, and at once to get on its feet. This would not be 

 possible for it, if its rhythm differed absolutely from that 

 of action itself. Now action, we have said, proceeds by 

 leaps. To act is to re-adapt oneself. To know, that is to 

 say, to foresee in order to act, is then to go from situation 

 to situation, from arrangement to rearrangement. Science 

 may consider rearrangements that come closer and closer 

 to each other; it may thus increase the number of moments 

 that it isolates, but it always isolates moments. As to 

 what happens in the interval between the moments, science 

 is no more concerned with that than are our common in- 

 telligence, our senses and our language: it does not bear 

 on the interval, but only on the extremities. So the cine- 

 matographical method forces itself upon our science, as it 

 did already on that of the ancients. 



Wherein, then, is the difference between the two sciences? 

 We indicated it when we said that the ancients reduced the 

 physical order to the vital order, that is to say, laws to 

 genera, while the moderns try to resolve genera into laws. 

 But we have to look at it in another aspect, which, more- 

 over, is only a transposition, of the first. Wherein consists 

 the difference of attitude of the two sciences toward change? 

 We may formulate it by saying that ancient science thinks 

 it knows its object sufficiently when it has noted of it some 

 privileged moments, whereas modern science considers the 

 object at any moment whatever. 



The forms or ideas of Plato or of Aristotle correspond 

 to privileged or salient moments in the history of things — 

 those, in general, that have been fixed by language. They 

 are supposed, like the childhood or the old age of a living 

 being, to characterize a period of which they express the 



