iv.] THE EVOLUTIONISM OF SPENCER 369 



when we are concerned with the constituent corpuscles 

 of the atom. Thereby they tend to place themselves 

 in the concrete duration, in which alone there is true 

 generation and not only a composition of parts. It is 

 true that the creation and annihilation of which they speak 

 concern the movement or the energy, and not the imponder- 

 able medium through which the energy and the movement 

 are supposed to circulate. But what can remain of matter 

 when you take away everything that determines it, that 

 is to say, just energy and movement themselves? The 

 philosopher must go further than the scientist. Making 

 a clean sweep of everything that is only an imaginative 

 symbol, he will see the material world melt back into a 

 simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming. And he 

 will thus be prepared to discover real duration there where 

 it is still more useful to find it, in the realm of life and of 

 consciousness. For, so far as inert matter is concerned, 

 we may neglect the flowing without committing a serious 

 error: matter, we have said, is weighted with geometry; 

 and matter, the reality which descends, endures only by 

 its connection with that which ascends. But life and con- 

 sciousness are this very ascension. When once we have 

 grasped them in their essence by adopting their movement, 

 we understand how the rest of reality is derived from them. 

 Evolution appears and, within this evolution, the pro- 

 gressive determination of materiality and intellectuality 

 by the gradual consolidation of the one and of the other. 

 But, then, it is within the evolutionary movement that 

 we place ourselves, in order to follow it to its present re- 

 sults, instead of recomposing these results artificially with 

 fragments of themselves. Such seems to us to be the true 

 function of philosophy. So understood, philosophy is 

 not only the turning of the mind homeward, the coincidence 

 of human consciousness with the living principle whence 



