iv.i THE KANTIAN CRITICISM 363 



must appeal to experience — an experience purified, or, 

 in other words, released, where necessary, from the molds 

 that our intellect has formed in the degree and proportion 

 of the progress of our action on things. An experience 

 of this kind is not a non-temporal experience. It only 

 seeks, beyond the spatialized time in which we believe 

 we see continual rearrangements between the parts, that 

 concrete duration in which a radical recasting of the whole 

 is always going on. It follows the real in all its sinuosities. 

 It does not lead us, like the method of construction, to 

 higher and higher generalities — piled-up stories of a mag- 

 nificent building. But then it leaves no play between the 

 explanations it suggests and the objects it has to explain. 

 It is the detail of the real, and no longer only the whole 

 in a lump, that it claims to illumine. 



That the thought of the nineteenth century called for a 

 philosophy of this kind, rescued from the arbitrary, capable 

 of coming down to the detail of particular facts, is un- 

 questionable. Unquestionably, also, it felt that this 

 philosophy ought to establish itself in what we call con- 

 crete duration. The advent of the moral sciences, the 

 progress of psychology, the growing importance of embry- 

 ology among the biological sciences — all this was bound 

 to suggest the idea of a reality which endures inwardly, 

 which is duration itself. So, when a philosopher arose who 

 announced a doctrine of evolution, in which the progress 

 of matter toward perceptibility would be traced together 

 with the advance of the mind toward rationality, in which 

 the complication of correspondences between the external 

 and the internal would be followed step by step, in which 

 change would become the very substance of things — to 

 him all eyes were turned. The powerful attraction that 

 Spencerian evolutionism has exercised on contemporary 



