356 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



nizianism that we come back. Between this conception 

 of nature and Cartesianism we find, moreover, intermediate 

 historical stages. The medical philosophers of the eight- 

 eenth century, with their cramped Cartesianism, have had a 

 great part in the genesis of the " epiphenomenalism" and 

 "monism" of the present day. 



These doctrines are thus found to fall short of the Kantian 

 criticism. Certainly, the philosophy of Kant is also im- 

 bued with the belief in a science single and complete, em- 

 bracing the whole of the real. Indeed, looked at from one 

 aspect, it is only a continuation of the metaphysics of the 

 moderns and a transposition of the ancient metaphysics. 

 Spinoza and Leibniz had, following Aristotle, hypostatized 

 in God the unity of knowledge. The Kantian criticism, 

 on one side at least, consists in asking whether the whole 

 of this hypothesis is necessary to modern science as it was 

 to ancient science, or if part of the hypothesis is not suf- 

 ficient. For the ancients, science applied to concepts, 

 that is to say, to kinds of things. In compressing all con- 

 cepts into one, they therefore necessarily arrived at a 

 being, which we may call Thought, but which was rather 

 thought-object than thought-subject. When Aristotle 

 defined God the vorjoecos vofjacs, it is probably on voifoecos, 

 and not on vo-qacs that he put the emphasis. God was 

 the synthesis of all concepts, the idea of ideas. But 

 modern science turns on laws, that is, on relations. Now, 

 a relation is a bond established by a mind between two 

 or more terms. A relation is nothing outside of the in- 

 tellect that relates. The universe, therefore, can only 

 be a system of laws if phenomena have passed beforehand 

 through the filter of an intellect. Of course, this intellect 

 might be that of a being infinitely superior to man, who 

 would found the materiality of things at the same time that 



