346 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap 



reality. When he places himself at this second point of 

 view, Descartes speaks of movement, even spatial, as of an 

 absolute. 1 



He therefore entered both roads one after the other, hav- 

 ing resolved to follow neither of them to the end. The 

 first would have led him to the denial of free will in man 

 and of real will in God. It was the suppression of all 

 efficient duration, the likening of the universe to a thing 

 given, which a superhuman intelligence would embrace 

 at once in a moment or in eternity. In following the second, 

 on the contrary, he would have been led to all the conse- 

 quences which the intuition of true duration implies. Cre- 

 ation would have appeared not simply as continued, but 

 also as continuous. The universe, regarded as a whole, 

 would really evolve. The future would no longer be deter- 

 minable by the present; at most we might say that, once 

 realized, it can be found again in its antecedents, as the 

 sounds of a new language can be expressed with the letters 

 of an old alphabet if we agree to enlarge the value of the 

 letters and to attribute to them, retro-actively, sounds 

 which no combination of the old sounds could have pro- 

 duced beforehand. Finally, the mechanistic explanation 

 might have remained universal in this, that it can indeed 

 be extended to as many systems as we choose to cut out 

 in the continuity of the universe; but mechanism would 

 then have become a method rather than a doctrine. It 

 would have expressed the fact that science must proceed 

 after the cinematographical manner, that the function of 

 science is to scan the rhythm of the flow of things and not 

 to fit itself into that flow. — Such were the two opposite con- 

 ceptions of metaphysics which were offered to philosophy. 



It chose the first. The reason of this choice is undoubt- 

 edly the mind's tendency to follow the cinematographical 



1 Descartes, Principes, ii. §§36 ff. 



