bergson's philosophy of the organism. 31 



Intellectual knowledge is therefore necessarily 

 knowledge of a mechanism. Of all tests, that of the 

 power of prediction is the surest test of the truth of a 

 scientific proposition, and of all knowledge that which 

 enables us to predict is the most useful. But this kind 

 of knowledge is that of something where everything is 

 already given, where the future is only a function of 

 that which already exists, a future re-arrangement or 

 assembling of elements now arranged in a different 

 manner. It is, therefore, the knowledge of determined 

 events only — of matter and energy and natural law. 

 If it were capable of describing all that our sense- 

 impressions enable us to feel it would be sufficient, but 

 we have seen that our mental concepts fail to describe 

 fully our perceptions. But our life is mainly that of a 

 struggle with the inorganic environment, and practical 

 things are of vastly more importance than speculative 

 knowledge. And so, whether we will or not, the 

 tendency to force all that we can observe into the modes 

 of thinking marked out by our modes of acting becomes 

 almost irresistible; and therefore just because we can 

 experiment upon it, and because our experiments have 

 utility, we conceive of life as mechanism. 



Indeed all that we can possibly discover about it 

 intellectually must be mechanistic : we ishall never 

 describe it in any other way than in terms of matter and 

 energy. Neither do we describe mathematically a curve 

 in any other way than as a series of tangents : we can 

 make the tangents infinitesimal in length so that the 

 figure which they make is indistinguishable from a 

 curve, nevertheless it is not a curve. We can make a 

 series of photographs of a motion and by combining these 

 by a cinematograph produce all the appearance of the 

 motion, but the picture is something entirely different 

 from the reality. We can subject the structure and 



