i6o Science Religion and Reality 



of the unforeseeable. The one is the world of homogeneous 

 quantity, the other is the world of heterogeneous qualities, because 

 evolution has no sense of the purely quantitative point of view, in 

 which nothing new ever arises, but implies stages of development 

 which are qualitatively different. The one is the world con- 

 sidered in its objectivity, where all facts are on the same level as 

 terms of fixed relations and of the same laws which explain equally 

 the fall of a stone and the birth of a man. The other is the world 

 of a hierarchy of beings ascending higher, which presupposes a 

 criterion of subjective valuation, a term of comparison which is 

 considered as the highest step in the evolutionary scale, and in 

 relation to which the lower steps are arranged. This difference 

 was to finish towards the close of the nineteenth century with the 

 triumph of the world of heterogeneous quality and subjective 

 valuation over that of quantity, of the historic vision over the 

 mechanical conception. In the system of Spencer we find the 

 welding of the two worlds and the attempt to make the historical 

 process of development fit into the Procrustean bed of the formulae 

 of universal mechanics. In this welding of two opposite concep- 

 tions which are ill-fitted for lying together, lies the crisis of scien- 

 tific intellectualism, which finds its expression in agnosticism. At 

 bottom it is a confession of the impossibility of enclosing within 

 mechanical schemes the life of the experience in its richness, and 

 of comprehending and exhausting in one finite concept the in- 

 exhaustible dynamic infinity of the spirit and of the universe. This 

 is fatal to every kind of intellectualism. Let us try to consider it. 



How does intellectualism advance ? Its method is conceptual 

 abstraction. To explain, says Spencer, means to collect similarities 

 of fact, to include them in more and more general classes, until 

 we obtain a law, a principle common to all. This law is for 

 Spencer the law of the conservation of energy. Now, in such a 

 way, by abstracting from the experience of concrete facts the 

 common and persistent elements, we eliminate the variable aspects, 

 the singular physiognomy of events. That which is enclosed in 

 our formulae is not the whole reality, but only some fragments of it. 

 The living continuity of experience is broken when we engrave 

 upon it, with precise limits, stable things exactly determined, which 

 can be fixed by means of equal concepts for all. This purpose is 

 served quite well by the quantitative consideration, which cancels 

 the differences and reduces everything to a texture homogeneous 



