368 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



to be where it is, each street to run as it does. Now, the 

 cardinal error of Spencer is to take experience already 

 allotted as given, whereas the true problem is to know 

 how the allotment was worked. I agree that the laws of 

 thought are only the integration of relations between 

 facts. But, when I posit the facts with the shape they 

 have for me to-day, I suppose my faculties of perception 

 and intellection such as they are in me to-day; for it is 

 they that portion the real into lots, they that cut the facts 

 out in the whole of reality. Therefore, instead of saying 

 that the relations between facts have generated the laws 

 of thought, I can as well claim that it is the form of thought 

 that has determined the shape of the facts perceived, and 

 consequently their relations among themselves: the two 

 ways of expressing oneself are equivalent; they say at 

 bottom the same thing. With the second, it is true, we 

 give up speaking of evolution. But, with the first, we 

 only speak of it, we do not think of it any the more. For 

 a true evolutionism would propose to discover by what 

 modus vivendi, gradually obtained, the intellect has adopted 

 its plan of structure, and matter its mode of subdivision. 

 This structure and this subdivision work into each other; 

 they are mutually complementary; they must have pro- 

 gressed one with the other. And, whether we posit the 

 present structure of mind or the present subdivision of 

 matter, in either case we remain in the evolved: we are 

 told nothing of what evolves, nothing of evolution. 



And yet it is this evolution that we must discover. Al- 

 ready, in the field of physics itself, the scientists who are 

 pushing the study of their science furthest incline to believe 

 that we cannot reason about the parts as we reason about 

 the whole; that the same principles are not applicable 

 to the origin and to the end of a progress; that neither 

 creation nor annihilation, for instance, is inadmissible 



