348 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



was in this a methodological rule, a very natural rule — 

 so natural, indeed, that it was not even necessary to formu- 

 late it. For simple common sense tells us that when we 

 are possessed of an effective instrument of research, and 

 are ignorant of the limits of its applicability, we should 

 act as if its applicability were unlimited; there will always 

 be time to abate it. But the temptation must have been 

 great for the philosopher to hypostatize this hope, or rather 

 this impetus, of the new science, and to convert a general 

 rule of method into a fundamental law of things. So he 

 transported himself at once to the limit ; he supposed physics 

 to have become complete and to embrace the whole of the 

 sensible world. The universe became a system of points, 

 the position of which was rigorously determined at each 

 instant by relation to the preceding instant and theoretically 

 calculable for any moment whatever. The result, in short, 

 was universal mechanism. But it was not enough to 

 formulate this mechanism; what was required was to 

 found it, to give the reason for it and prove its necessity. 

 And the essential affirmation of mechanism being that of a 

 reciprocal mathematical dependence of all the points of 

 the universe, as also of all the moments of the universe, 

 the reason of mechanism had to be discovered in the unity 

 of a principle into which could be contracted all that is 

 juxtaposed in space and successive in time. Hence, the 

 whole of the real was supposed to be given at once. The 

 reciprocal determination of the juxtaposed appearances in 

 space was explained by the indivisibility of true being, and 

 the inflexible determinism of successive phenomena in time 

 simply expressed that the whole of being is given in the 

 eternal. 



The new philosophy was going, then, to be a recommence- 

 ment, or rather a transposition, of the old. The ancient 

 philosophy had taken each of the concepts into which a 



