iv.] DESCARTES 345 



ception of metaphysics and the traditional conception. 

 The temptation must have been strong to repeat with the 

 new science what had been tried on the old, to suppose 

 our scientific knowledge of nature completed at once, to 

 unify it entirely, and to give to this unification, as the 

 Greeks had already done, the name of metaphysics. So, 

 beside the new way that philosophy might have prepared, 

 the old remained open, that indeed which physics trod. 

 And, as physics retained of time only what could as well be 

 spread out all at once in space, the metaphysics that chose 

 the same direction had necessarily to proceed as if time 

 created and annihilated nothing, as if duration had no 

 efficacy. Bound, like the physics of the moderns and the 

 metaphysics of the ancients, to the cinematographical 

 method, it ended with the conclusion, implicitly admitted 

 at the start and immanent in the method itself: All is 

 given. 



That metaphysics hesitated at first between the two paths 

 seems to us unquestionable. . The indecision is visible in 

 Cartesianism. On the one hand, Descartes affirms uni- 

 versal mechanism: from this point of view movement 

 would be relative, 1 and, as time has just as much reality 

 as movement, it would follow that past, present and future 

 are given from all eternity. But, on the other hand (and 

 that is why the philosopher has not gone to these extreme 

 consequences), Descartes believes in the free will of man. 

 He superposes on the determinism of physical phenomena 

 the indeterminism of human actions, and, consequently, on 

 time-length a time in which there is invention, creation, 

 true succession. This duration he supports on a God 

 who is unceasingly renewing the creative act, and who, 

 being thus tangent to time and becoming, sustains them, 

 communicates to them necessarily something of his absolute 

 1 Descartes, Principcs, ii. § 29. 



