362 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



of which metaphysical dogmatism speaks, is there not 

 room for consciousness and for life? There is, unquestion- 

 ably. We perceive it when we place ourselves in duration 

 in order to go from that duration to moments, instead of 

 starting from moments in order to bind them again- and 

 to construct duration. 



Yet it was to a non-temporal intuition that the immediate 

 successors of Kant turned, in order to escape from the 

 Kantian relativism. Certainly, the ideas of becoming, 

 of progress, of evolution, seem to occupy a large place in 

 their philosophy. But does duration really play a part 

 in it? Real duration is that in which each form flows out 

 of previous forms, while adding to them something new, 

 and is explained by them as much as it explains them; 

 but to deduce this form directly from one complete Being 

 which it is supposed to manifest, is to return to Spinozism. 

 It is, like Leibniz and Spinoza, to deny to duration all 

 efficient action. The post-Kantian philosophy, severe 

 as it may have been on the mechanistic theories, accepts 

 from mechanism the idea of a science that is one and the 

 same for all kinds of reality. And it is nearer to mechanism 

 than it imagines; for though, in the consideration of matter, 

 of life and of thought, it replaces the successive degrees 

 of complexity, that mechanism supposed by degrees of the 

 realization of an Idea or by degrees of the objectification 

 of a Will, it still speaks of degrees, and these degrees are 

 those of a scale which Being traverses in a single direction. 

 In short, it makes out the same articulations in nature that 

 mechanism does. Of mechanism it retains the whole 

 design; it merely gives it a different coloring. But it 

 is the design itself, or at least one half of the design, that 

 needs to be re-made. 



If we are to do that, we must give up the method of 

 construction, which was that of Kant's successors. We 



