354 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



ready-made — the former above the sensible, the latter 

 within the sensible — a science one and complete, with 

 which any reality that the sensible may contain is believed 

 to coincide. For both, reality as well as truth are integrally 

 given in eternity. Both are opposed to the idea of a reality 

 that creates itself gradually, that is, at bottom, to an ab- 

 solute duration. 



Now, it might easily be shown that the conclusions of 

 this metaphysic, springing from science, have rebounded 

 upon science itself, as it were, by ricochet. They penetrate 

 the whole of our so-called empiricism. Physics and chem- 

 istry study only inert matter; biology, when it treats the 

 living being physically and chemically, considers only 

 the inert side of the living: hence the mechanistic expla- 

 nations, in spite of their development, include only a small 

 part of the real. To suppose a priori that the whole of 

 the real is resolvable into elements of this kind, or at least 

 that mechanism can give a complete translation of what 

 happens in the world, is to pronounce for a certain meta- 

 physic — the very metaphysic of which Spinoza and Leib- 

 niz have laid down the principles and drawn the conse- 

 quences. Certainly, the psycho-physiologist who affirms 

 the exact equivalence of the cerebral and the psychical 

 state, who imagines the possibility, for some superhuman 

 intellect, of reading in the brain what is going on in con- 

 sciousness, believes himself very far from the metaphysi- 

 cians of the seventeenth century, and very near to experi- 

 ence. Yet experience pure and simple tells us nothing of the 

 kind. It shows us the interdependence of the mental and 

 the physical, the necessity of a certain cerebral substratum 

 for the psychical state — nothing more. From the fact 

 that two things are mutually dependent, it does not follow 

 that they are equivalent. Because a certain screw is 



