344 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichaf. 



moment, at its apogee, we may say that there it just touches 

 its intelligible form. This intelligible form, this ideal and, 

 so to speak, limiting form, our science seizes upon. And 

 possessing in this the gold-piece, it holds eminently the 

 small money which we call becoming or change. This 

 change is less than being. The knowledge that would take 

 it for object, supposing such knowledge were possible, 

 would be less than science. 



But, for a science that places all the moments of time 

 in the same rank, that admits no essential moment, no 

 culminating point, no apogee, change is no longer a dimin- 

 ution of essence, duration is not a dilution of eternity. The 

 flux of time is the reality itself, and the things which we 

 study are the things which flow. It is true that of this 

 flowing reality we are limited to taking instantaneous 

 views. But, just because of this, scientific knowledge must 

 appeal to another knowledge to complete it. While the 

 ancient conception of scientific knowledge ended in making 

 time a degradation, and change the diminution of a form 

 given from all eternity — on the contrary, by following the 

 new conception to the end, we should come to see in time 

 a progressive growth of the absolute, and in the evolution 

 of things a continual invention of forms ever new. 



It is true that it would be to break with the metaphysics 

 of the ancients. They saw only one way of knowing defi- 

 nitely. Their science consisted in a scattered and frag- 

 mentary metaphysics, their metaphysics in a concentrated 

 and systematic science. Their science and metaphysics 

 were, at most, two species of one and the same genus. In 

 our hypothesis, on the contrary, science and metaphysics 

 are two opposed although complementary ways of knowing, 

 the first retaining only moments, that is to say, that which 

 does not endure, the second bearing on duration itself. 

 Now, it was natural to hesitate between so novel a con- 



