ON THE MEANING OF LIFE--THE ORDER OF NATURE AND THE FORM OF INTELLIGENCE
In the course of our first chapter we traced a line of demarcation
between the inorganic and the organized, but we pointed out that the
division of unorganized matter into separate bodies is relative to our
senses and to our intellect, and that matter, looked at as an undivided
whole, must be a flux rather than a thing. In this we were preparing the
way for a reconciliation between the inert and the living.
On the other side, we have shown in our second chapter that the same
opposition is found again between instinct and intelligence, the one
turned to certain determinations of life, the other molded on the
configuration of matter. But instinct and intelligence, we have also
said, stand out from the same background, which, for want of a better
name, we may call consciousness in general, and which must be
coextensive with universal life. In this way, we have disclosed the
possibility of showing the genesis of intelligence in setting out from
general consciousness, which embraces it.
We are now, then, to attempt a genesis of intellect at the same time as
a genesis of material bodies--two enterprises that are evidently
correlative, if it be true that the main lines of our intellect mark out
the general form of our action on matter, and that the detail of matter
is ruled by the requirements of our action. Intellectuality and
materiality have been constituted, in detail, by reciprocal adaptation.
Both are derived from a wider and higher form of existence. It is there
that we must replace them, in order to see them issue forth.
Such an attempt may appear, at first, more daring than the boldest
speculations of metaphysicians. It claims to go further than psychology,
further than cosmology, further than traditional metaphysics; for
psychology, cosmology and metaphysics take intelligence, in all that is
essential to it, as given, instead of, as we now propose, engendering it
in its form and in its matter. The enterprise is in reality much more
modest, as we are going to show. But let us first say how it differs
from others.
To begin with psychology, we are not to believe that it _engenders_
intelligence when it follows the progressive development of it through
the animal series. Comparative psychology teaches us that the more an
animal is intelligent, the more it tends to reflect on the actions by
which it makes use of things, and thus to approximate to man. But its
actions have already by themselves adopted the principal lines of human
action; they have made out the same general directions in the material
world as we have; they depend upon the same objects bound together by
the same relations; so that animal intelligence, although it does not
form concepts properly so called, already moves in a conceptual
atmosphere. Absorbed at every instant by the actions it performs and the
attitudes it must adopt, drawn outward by them and so externalized in
relation to itself, it no doubt plays rather than thinks its ideas; this
play none the less already corresponds, in the main, to the general plan
of human intelligence.[78] To explain the intelligence of man by that of
the animal consists then simply in following the development of an
embryo of humanity into complete humanity. We show how a certain
direction has been followed further and further by beings more and more
intelligent. But the moment we admit the direction, intelligence is
given.
In a cosmogony like that of Spencer, intelligence is taken for granted,
as matter also at the same time. We are shown matter obeying laws,
objects connected with objects and facts with facts by constant
relations, consciousness receiving the imprint of these relations and
laws, and thus adopting the general configuration of nature and shaping
itself into intellect. But how can we fail to see that intelligence is
supposed when we admit objects and facts? _A priori_ and apart from any
hypothesis on the nature of the matter, it is evident that the
materiality of a body does not stop at the point at which we touch it: a
body is present wherever its influence is felt; its attractive force, to
speak only of that, is exerted on the sun, on the planets, perhaps on
the entire universe. The more physics advances, the more it effaces the
individuality of bodies and even of the particles into which the
scientific imagination began by decomposing them: bodies and corpuscles
tend to dissolve into a universal interaction. Our perceptions give us
the plan of our eventual action on things much more than that of things
themselves. The outlines we find in objects simply mark what we can
attain and modify in them. The lines we see traced through matter are
just the paths on which we are called to move. Outlines and paths have
declared themselves in the measure and proportion that consciousness has
prepared for action on unorganized matter--that is to say, in the
measure and proportion that intelligence has been formed. It is doubtful
whether animals built on a different plan--a mollusc or an insect, for
instance--cut matter up along the same articulations. It is not indeed
necessary that they should separate it into bodies at all. In order to
follow the indications of instinct, there is no need to perceive
_objects_, it is enough to distinguish _properties_. Intelligence, on
the contrary, even in its humblest form, already aims at getting matter
to act on matter. If on one side matter lends itself to a division into
active and passive bodies, or more simply into coexistent and distinct
fragments, it is from this side that intelligence will regard it; and
the more it busies itself with dividing, the more it will spread out in
space, in the form of extension adjoining extension, a matter that
undoubtedly itself has a tendency to spatiality, but whose parts are yet
in a state of reciprocal implication and interpenetration. Thus the same
movement by which the mind is brought to form itself into intellect,
that is to say, into distinct concepts, brings matter to break itself up
into objects excluding one another. _The more consciousness is
intellectualized, the more is matter spatialized._ So that the
evolutionist philosophy, when it imagines in space a matter cut up on
the very lines that our action will follow, has given itself in advance,
ready made, the intelligence of which it claims to show the genesis.
Metaphysics applies itself to a work of the same kind, though subtler
and more self-conscious, when it deduces _a priori_ the categories of
thought. It compresses intellect, reduces it to its quintessence, holds
it tight in a principle so simple that it can be thought empty: from
this principle we then draw out what we have virtually put into it. In
this way we may no doubt show the coherence of intelligence, define
intellect, give its formula, but we do not trace its genesis. An
enterprise like that of Fichte, although more philosophical than that of
Spencer, in that it pays more respect to the true order of things,
hardly leads us any further. Fichte takes thought in a concentrated
state, and expands it into reality; Spencer starts from external
reality, and condenses it into intellect. But, in the one case as in the
other, the intellect must be taken at the beginning as given--either
condensed or expanded, grasped in itself by a direct vision or perceived
by reflection in nature, as in a mirror.
The agreement of most philosophers on this point comes from the fact
that they are at one in affirming the unity of nature, and in
representing this unity under an abstract and geometrical form. Between
the organized and the unorganized they do not see and they will not see
the cleft. Some start from the inorganic, and, by compounding it with
itself, claim to form the living; others place life first, and proceed
towards matter by a skilfully managed _decrescendo_; but, for both,
there are only differences of _degree_ in nature--degrees of complexity
in the first hypothesis, of intensity in the second. Once this principle
is admitted, intelligence becomes as vast as reality; for it is
unquestionable that whatever is geometrical in things is entirely
accessible to human intelligence, and if the continuity between geometry
and the rest is perfect, all the rest must indeed be equally
intelligible, equally intelligent. Such is the postulate of most
systems. Any one can easily be convinced of this by comparing doctrines
that seem to have no common point, no common measure, those of Fichte
and Spencer for instance, two names that we happen to have just brought
together.
At the root of these speculations, then, there are the two convictions
correlative and complementary, that nature is one and that the function
of intellect is to embrace it in its entirety. The faculty of knowing
being supposed coextensive with the whole of experience, there can no
longer be any question of engendering it. It is already given, and we
merely have to use it, as we use our sight to take in the horizon. It
is true that opinions differ as to the value of the result. For some, it
is reality itself that the intellect embraces; for others, it is only a
phantom. But, phantom or reality, what intelligence grasps is thought to
be all that can be attained.
Hence the exaggerated confidence of philosophy in the powers of the
individual mind. Whether it is dogmatic or critical, whether it admits
the relativity of our knowledge or claims to be established within the
absolute, a philosophy is generally the work of a philosopher, a single
and unitary vision of the whole. It is to be taken or left.
More modest, and also alone capable of being completed and perfected, is
the philosophy we advocate. Human intelligence, as we represent it, is
not at all what Plato taught in the allegory of the cave. Its function
is not to look at passing shadows nor yet to turn itself round and
contemplate the glaring sun. It has something else to do. Harnessed,
like yoked oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the play of our muscles and
joints, the weight of the plow and the resistance of the soil. To act
and to know that we are acting, to come into touch with reality and even
to live it, but only in the measure in which it concerns the work that
is being accomplished and the furrow that is being plowed, such is the
function of human intelligence. Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence
we draw the very force to labor and to live. From this ocean of life, in
which we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, and we feel
that our being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has been
formed therein by a kind of local concentration. Philosophy can only be
an effort to dissolve again into the Whole. Intelligence, reabsorbed
into its principle, may thus live back again its own genesis. But the
enterprise cannot be achieved in one stroke; it is necessarily
collective and progressive. It consists in an interchange of impressions
which, correcting and adding to each other, will end by expanding the
humanity in us and making us even transcend it.
But this method has against it the most inveterate habits of the mind.
It at once suggests the idea of a vicious circle. In vain, we shall be
told, you claim to go beyond intelligence: how can you do that except by
intelligence? All that is clear in your consciousness is intelligence.
You are inside your own thought; you cannot get out of it. Say, if you
like, that the intellect is capable of progress, that it will see more
and more clearly into a greater and greater number of things; but do not
speak of engendering it, for it is with your intellect itself that you
would have to do the work.
The objection presents itself naturally to the mind. But the same
reasoning would prove also the impossibility of acquiring any new habit.
It is of the essence of reasoning to shut us up in the circle of the
given. But action breaks the circle. If we had never seen a man swim, we
might say that swimming is an impossible thing, inasmuch as, to learn to
swim, we must begin by holding ourselves up in the water and,
consequently, already know how to swim. Reasoning, in fact, always nails
us down to the solid ground. But if, quite simply, I throw myself into
the water without fear, I may keep myself up well enough at first by
merely struggling, and gradually adapt myself to the new environment: I
shall thus have learnt to swim. So, in theory, there is a kind of
absurdity in trying to know otherwise than by intelligence; but if the
risk be frankly accepted, action will perhaps cut the knot that
reasoning has tied and will not unloose.
Besides, the risk will appear to grow less, the more our point of view
is adopted. We have shown that intellect has detached itself from a
vastly wider reality, but that there has never been a clean cut between
the two; all around conceptual thought there remains an indistinct
fringe which recalls its origin. And further we compared the intellect
to a solid nucleus formed by means of condensation. This nucleus does
not differ radically from the fluid surrounding it. It can only be
reabsorbed in it because it is made of the same substance. He who throws
himself into the water, having known only the resistance of the solid
earth, will immediately be drowned if he does not struggle against the
fluidity of the new environment: he must perforce still cling to that
solidity, so to speak, which even water presents. Only on this condition
can he get used to the fluid's fluidity. So of our thought, when it has
decided to make the leap.
But leap it must, that is, leave its own environment. Reason, reasoning
on its powers, will never succeed in extending them, though the
extension would not appear at all unreasonable once it were
accomplished. Thousands and thousands of variations on the theme of
walking will never yield a rule for swimming: come, enter the water, and
when you know how to swim, you will understand how the mechanism of
swimming is connected with that of walking. Swimming is an extension of
walking, but walking would never have pushed you on to swimming. So you
may speculate as intelligently as you will on the mechanism of
intelligence; you will never, by this method, succeed in going beyond
it. You may get something more complex, but not something higher nor
even something different. You must take things by storm: you must thrust
intelligence outside itself by an act of will.
So the vicious circle is only apparent. It is, on the contrary, real, we
think, in every other method of philosophy. This we must try to show in
a few words, if only to prove that philosophy cannot and must not
accept the relation established by pure intellectualism between the
theory of knowledge and the theory of the known, between metaphysics and
science.
* * * * *
At first sight, it may seem prudent to leave the consideration of facts
to positive science, to let physics and chemistry busy themselves with
matter, the biological and psychological sciences with life. The task of
the philosopher is then clearly defined. He takes facts and laws from
the scientists' hand; and whether he tries to go beyond them in order to
reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to go
further and even proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge, in
both cases he has for the facts and relations, handed over by science,
the sort of respect that is due to a final verdict. To this knowledge he
adds a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks
proper, a metaphysic; but the _matter_ of knowledge he regards as the
affair of science and not of philosophy.
But how does he fail to see that the real result of this so-called
division of labor is to mix up everything and confuse everything? The
metaphysic or the critique that the philosopher has reserved for himself
he has to receive, ready-made, from positive science, it being already
contained in the descriptions and analyses, the whole care of which he
left to the scientists. For not having wished to intervene, at the
beginning, in questions of fact, he finds himself reduced, in questions
of principle, to formulating purely and simply in more precise terms the
unconscious and consequently inconsistent metaphysic and critique which
the very attitude of science to reality marks out. Let us not be
deceived by an apparent analogy between natural things and human things.
Here we are not in the judiciary domain, where the description of fact
and the judgment on the fact are two distinct things, distinct for the
very simple reason that above the fact, and independent of it, there is
a law promulgated by a legislator. Here the laws are internal to the
facts and relative to the lines that have been followed in cutting the
real into distinct facts. We cannot describe the outward appearance of
the object without prejudging its inner nature and its organization.
Form is no longer entirely isolable from matter, and he who has begun by
reserving to philosophy questions of principle, and who has thereby
tried to put philosophy above the sciences, as a "court of cassation" is
above the courts of assizes and of appeal, will gradually come to make
no more of philosophy than a registration court, charged at most with
wording more precisely the sentences that are brought to it, pronounced
and irrevocable.
Positive science is, in fact, a work of pure intellect. Now, whether our
conception of the intellect be accepted or rejected, there is one point
on which everybody will agree with us, and that is that the intellect is
at home in the presence of unorganized matter. This matter it makes use
of more and more by mechanical inventions, and mechanical inventions
become the easier to it the more it thinks matter as mechanism. The
intellect bears within itself, in the form of natural logic, a latent
geometrism that is set free in the measure and proportion that the
intellect penetrates into the inner nature of inert matter. Intelligence
is in tune with this matter, and that is why the physics and metaphysics
of inert matter are so near each other. Now, when the intellect
undertakes the study of life, it necessarily treats the living like the
inert, applying the same forms to this new object, carrying over into
this new field the same habits that have succeeded so well in the old;
and it is right to do so, for only on such terms does the living offer
to our action the same hold as inert matter. But the truth we thus
arrive at becomes altogether relative to our faculty of action. It is no
more than a _symbolic_ verity. It cannot have the same value as the
physical verity, being only an extension of physics to an object which
we are _a priori_ agreed to look at only in its external aspect. The
duty of philosophy should be to intervene here actively, to examine the
living without any reservation as to practical utility, by freeing
itself from forms and habits that are strictly intellectual. Its own
special object is to speculate, that is to say, to see; its attitude
toward the living should not be that of science, which aims only at
action, and which, being able to act only by means of inert matter,
presents to itself the rest of reality in this single respect. What must
the result be, if it leave biological and psychological facts to
positive science alone, as it has left, and rightly left, physical
facts? It will accept _a priori_ a mechanistic conception of all nature,
a conception unreflected and even unconscious, the outcome of the
material need. It will _a priori_ accept the doctrine of the simple
unity of knowledge and of the abstract unity of nature.
The moment it does so, its fate is sealed. The philosopher has no longer
any choice save between a metaphysical dogmatism and a metaphysical
skepticism, both of which rest, at bottom, on the same postulate, and
neither of which adds anything to positive science. He may hypostasize
the unity of nature, or, what comes to the same thing, the unity of
science, in a being who is nothing since he does nothing, an ineffectual
God who simply sums up in himself all the given; or in an eternal Matter
from whose womb have been poured out the properties of things and the
laws of nature; or, again, in a pure Form which endeavors to seize an
unseizable multiplicity, and which is, as we will, the form of nature
or the form of thought. All these philosophies tell us, in their
different languages, that science is right to treat the living as the
inert, and that there is no difference of value, no distinction to be
made between the results which intellect arrives at in applying its
categories, whether it rests on inert matter or attacks life.
In many cases, however, we feel the frame cracking. But as we did not
begin by distinguishing between the inert and the living, the one
adapted in advance to the frame in which we insert it, the other
incapable of being held in the frame otherwise than by a convention
which eliminates from it all that is essential, we find ourselves, in
the end, reduced to regarding everything the frame contains with equal
suspicion. To a metaphysical dogmatism, which has erected into an
absolute the factitious unity of science, there succeeds a skepticism or
a relativism that universalizes and extends to all the results of
science the artificial character of some among them. So philosophy
swings to and fro between the doctrine that regards absolute reality as
unknowable and that which, in the idea it gives us of this reality, says
nothing more than science has said. For having wished to prevent all
conflict between science and philosophy, we have sacrificed philosophy
without any appreciable gain to science. And for having tried to avoid
the seeming vicious circle which consists in using the intellect to
transcend the intellect, we find ourselves turning in a real circle,
that which consists in laboriously rediscovering by metaphysics a unity
that we began by positing _a priori_, a unity that we admitted blindly
and unconsciously by the very act of abandoning the whole of experience
to science and the whole of reality to the pure understanding.
Let us begin, on the contrary, by tracing a line of demarcation between
the inert and the living. We shall find that the inert enters naturally
into the frames of the intellect, but that the living is adapted to
these frames only artificially, so that we must adopt a special attitude
towards it and examine it with other eyes than those of positive
science. Philosophy, then, invades the domain of experience. She busies
herself with many things which hitherto have not concerned her. Science,
theory of knowledge, and metaphysics find themselves on the same ground.
At first there may be a certain confusion. All three may think they have
lost something. But all three will profit from the meeting.
Positive science, indeed, may pride itself on the uniform value
attributed to its affirmations in the whole field of experience. But, if
they are all placed on the same footing, they are all tainted with the
same relativity. It is not so, if we begin by making the distinction
which, in our view, is forced upon us. The understanding is at home in
the domain of unorganized matter. On this matter human action is
naturally exercised; and action, as we said above, cannot be set in
motion in the unreal. Thus, of physics--so long as we are considering
only its general form and not the particular cutting out of matter in
which it is manifested--we may say that it touches the absolute. On the
contrary, it is by accident--chance or convention, as you please--that
science obtains a hold on the living analogous to the hold it has on
matter. Here the use of conceptual frames is no longer natural. I do not
wish to say that it is not legitimate, in the scientific meaning of the
term. If science is to extend our action on things, and if we can act
only with inert matter for instrument, science can and must continue to
treat the living as it has treated the inert. But, in doing so, it must
be understood that the further it penetrates the depths of _life_, the
more symbolic, the more relative to the contingencies of action, the
knowledge it supplies to us becomes. On this new ground philosophy ought
then to follow science, in order to superpose on scientific truth a
knowledge of another kind, which may be called metaphysical. Thus
combined, all our knowledge, both scientific and metaphysical, is
heightened. In the absolute we live and move and have our being. The
knowledge we possess of it is incomplete, no doubt, but not external or
relative. It is reality itself, in the profoundest meaning of the word,
that we reach by the combined and progressive development of science and
of philosophy.
Thus, in renouncing the factitious unity which the understanding imposes
on nature from outside, we shall perhaps find its true, inward and
living unity. For the effort we make to transcend the pure understanding
introduces us into that more vast something out of which our
understanding is cut, and from which it has detached itself. And, as
matter is determined by intelligence, as there is between them an
evident agreement, we cannot make the genesis of the one without making
the genesis of the other. An identical process must have cut out matter
and the intellect, at the same time, from a stuff that contained both.
Into this reality we shall get back more and more completely, in
proportion as we compel ourselves to transcend pure intelligence.
* * * * *
Let us then concentrate attention on that which we have that is at the
same time the most removed from externality and the least penetrated
with intellectuality. Let us seek, in the depths of our experience, the
point where we feel ourselves most intimately within our own life. It is
into pure duration that we then plunge back, a duration in which the
past, always moving on, is swelling unceasingly with a present that is
absolutely new. But, at the same time, we feel the spring of our will
strained to its utmost limit. We must, by a strong recoil of our
personality on itself, gather up our past which is slipping away, in
order to thrust it, compact and undivided, into a present which it will
create by entering. Rare indeed are the moments when we are
self-possessed to this extent: it is then that our actions are truly
free. And even at these moments we do not completely possess ourselves.
Our feeling of duration, I should say the actual coinciding of ourself
with itself, admits of degrees. But the more the feeling is deep and the
coincidence complete, the more the life in which it replaces us absorbs
intellectuality by transcending it. For the natural function of the
intellect is to bind like to like, and it is only facts that can be
repeated that are entirely adaptable to intellectual conceptions. Now,
our intellect does undoubtedly grasp the real moments of real duration
after they are past; we do so by reconstituting the new state of
consciousness out of a series of views taken of it from the outside,
each of which resembles as much as possible something already known; in
this sense we may say that the state of consciousness contains
intellectuality implicitly. Yet the state of consciousness overflows the
intellect; it is indeed incommensurable with the intellect, being itself
indivisible and new.
Now let us relax the strain, let us interrupt the effort to crowd as
much as possible of the past into the present. If the relaxation were
complete, there would no longer be either memory or will--which amounts
to saying that, in fact, we never do fall into this absolute passivity,
any more than we can make ourselves absolutely free. But, in the limit,
we get a glimpse of an existence made of a present which recommences
unceasingly--devoid of real duration, nothing but the instantaneous
which dies and is born again endlessly. Is the existence of matter of
this nature? Not altogether, for analysis resolves it into elementary
vibrations, the shortest of which are of very slight duration, almost
vanishing, but not nothing. It may be presumed, nevertheless, that
physical existence inclines in this second direction, as psychical
existence in the first.
Behind "spirituality" on the one hand, and "materiality" with
intellectuality on the other, there are then two processes opposite in
their direction, and we pass from the first to the second by way of
inversion, or perhaps even by simple interruption, if it is true that
inversion and interruption are two terms which in this case must be held
to be synonymous, as we shall show at more length later on. This
presumption is confirmed when we consider things from the point of view
of extension, and no longer from that of duration alone.
The more we succeed in making ourselves conscious of our progress in
pure duration, the more we feel the different parts of our being enter
into each other, and our whole personality concentrate itself in a
point, or rather a sharp edge, pressed against the future and cutting
into it unceasingly. It is in this that life and action are free. But
suppose we let ourselves go and, instead of acting, dream. At once the
self is scattered; our past, which till then was gathered together into
the indivisible impulsion it communicated to us, is broken up into a
thousand recollections made external to one another. They give up
interpenetrating in the degree that they become fixed. Our personality
thus descends in the direction of space. It coasts around it continually
in sensation. We will not dwell here on a point we have studied
elsewhere. Let us merely recall that extension admits of degrees, that
all sensation is extensive in a certain measure, and that the idea of
unextended sensations, artificially localized in space, is a mere view
of the mind, suggested by an unconscious metaphysic much more than by
psychological observation.
No doubt we make only the first steps in the direction of the extended,
even when we let ourselves go as much as we can. But suppose for a
moment that matter consists in this very movement pushed further, and
that physics is simply psychics inverted. We shall now understand why
the mind feels at its ease, moves about naturally in space, when matter
suggests the more distinct idea of it. This space it already possessed
as an implicit idea in its own eventual _detension_, that is to say, of
its own possible _extension_. The mind finds space in things, but could
have got it without them if it had had imagination strong enough to push
the inversion of its own natural movement to the end. On the other hand,
we are able to explain how matter accentuates still more its
materiality, when viewed by the mind. Matter, at first, aided mind to
run down its own incline; it gave the impulsion. But, the impulsion once
received, mind continues its course. The idea that it forms of _pure_
space is only the _schema_ of the limit at which this movement would
end. Once in possession of the form of space, mind uses it like a net
with meshes that can be made and unmade at will, which, thrown over
matter, divides it as the needs of our action demand. Thus, the space of
our geometry and the spatiality of things are mutually engendered by the
reciprocal action and reaction of two terms which are essentially the
same, but which move each in the direction inverse of the other. Neither
is space so foreign to our nature as we imagine, nor is matter as
completely extended in space as our senses and intellect represent it.
We have treated of the first point elsewhere. As to the second, we will
limit ourselves to pointing out that perfect spatiality would consist in
a perfect externality of parts in their relation to one another, that is
to say, in a complete reciprocal independence. Now, there is no material
point that does not act on every other material point. When we observe
that a thing really is there where it _acts_, we shall be led to say (as
Faraday[79] was) that all the atoms interpenetrate and that each of them
fills the world. On such a hypothesis, the atom or, more generally, the
material point, becomes simply a view of the mind, a view which we come
to take when we continue far enough the work (wholly relative to our
faculty of acting) by which we subdivide matter into bodies. Yet it is
undeniable that matter lends itself to this subdivision, and that, in
supposing it breakable into parts external to one another, we are
constructing a science sufficiently representative of the real. It is
undeniable that if there be no entirely isolated system, yet science
finds means of cutting up the universe into systems relatively
independent of each other, and commits no appreciable error in doing so.
What else can this mean but that matter _extends_ itself in space
without being absolutely _extended_ therein, and that in regarding
matter as decomposable into isolated systems, in attributing to it quite
distinct elements which change in relation to each other without
changing in themselves (which are "displaced," shall we say, without
being "altered"), in short, in conferring on matter the properties of
pure space, we are transporting ourselves to the terminal point of the
movement of which matter simply indicates the direction?
What the _Transcendental Aesthetic_ of Kant appears to have established
once for all is that extension is not a material attribute of the same
kind as others. We cannot reason indefinitely on the notions of heat,
color, or weight: in order to know the modalities of weight or of heat,
we must have recourse to experience. Not so of the notion of space.
Supposing even that it is given empirically by sight and touch (and Kant
has not questioned the fact) there is this about it that is remarkable
that our mind, speculating on it with its own powers alone, cuts out in
it, _a priori_, figures whose properties we determine _a priori_:
experience, with which we have not kept in touch, yet follows us through
the infinite complications of our reasonings and invariably justifies
them. That is the fact. Kant has set it in clear light. But the
explanation of the fact, we believe, must be sought in a different
direction to that which Kant followed.
Intelligence, as Kant represents it to us, is bathed in an atmosphere of
spatiality to which it is as inseparably united as the living body to
the air it breathes. Our perceptions reach us only after having passed
through this atmosphere. They have been impregnated in advance by our
geometry, so that our faculty of thinking only finds again in matter the
mathematical properties which our faculty of perceiving has already
deposed there. We are assured, therefore, of seeing matter yield itself
with docility to our reasonings; but this matter, in all that it has
that is intelligible, is our own work; of the reality "in itself" we
know nothing and never shall know anything, since we only get its
refraction through the forms of our faculty of perceiving. So that if we
claim to affirm something of it, at once there rises the contrary
affirmation, equally demonstrable, equally plausible. The ideality of
space is proved directly by the analysis of knowledge indirectly by the
antinomies to which the opposite theory leads. Such is the governing
idea of the Kantian criticism. It has inspired Kant with a peremptory
refutation of "empiricist" theories of knowledge. It is, in our opinion,
definitive in what it denies. But, in what it affirms, does it give us
the solution of the problem?
With Kant, space is given as a ready-made form of our perceptive
faculty--a veritable _deus ex machina_, of which we see neither how it
arises, nor why it is what it is rather than anything else.
"Things-in-themselves" are also given, of which he claims that we can
know nothing: by what right, then, can he affirm their existence, even
as "problematic"? If the unknowable reality projects into our perceptive
faculty a "sensuous manifold" capable of fitting into it exactly, is it
not, by that very fact, in part known? And when we examine this exact
fitting, shall we not be led, in one point at least, to suppose a
pre-established harmony between things and our mind--an idle hypothesis,
which Kant was right in wishing to avoid? At bottom, it is for not
having distinguished degrees in spatiality that he has had to take space
ready-made as given--whence the question how the "sensuous manifold" is
adapted to it. It is for the same reason that he has supposed matter
wholly developed into parts absolutely external to one another;--whence
antinomies, of which we may plainly see that the thesis and antithesis
suppose the perfect coincidence of matter with geometrical space, but
which vanish the moment we cease to extend to matter what is true only
of pure space. Whence, finally, the conclusion that there are three
alternatives, and three only, among which to choose a theory of
knowledge: either the mind is determined by things, or things are
determined by the mind, or between mind and things we must suppose a
mysterious agreement.
But the truth is that there is a fourth, which does not seem to have
occurred to Kant--in the first place because he did not think that the
mind overflowed the intellect, and in the second place (and this is at
bottom the same thing) because he did not attribute to duration an
absolute existence, having put time, _a priori_, on the same plane as
space. This alternative consists, first of all, in regarding the
intellect as a special function of the mind, essentially turned toward
inert matter; then in saying that neither does matter determine the form
of the intellect, nor does the intellect impose its form on matter, nor
have matter and intellect been regulated in regard to one another by we
know not what pre-established harmony, but that intellect and matter
have progressively adapted themselves one to the other in order to
attain at last a common form. _This adaptation has, moreover, been
brought about quite naturally, because it is the same inversion of the
same movement which creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the
materiality of things._
From this point of view the knowledge of matter that our perception on
one hand and science on the other give to us appears, no doubt, as
approximative, but not as relative. Our perception, whose rôle it is to
hold up a light to our actions, works a dividing up of matter that is
always too sharply defined, always subordinated to practical needs,
consequently always requiring revision. Our science, which aspires to
the mathematical form, over-accentuates the spatiality of matter; its
formulae are, in general, too precise, and ever need remaking. For a
scientific theory to be final, the mind would have to embrace the
totality of things in block and place each thing in its exact relation
to every other thing; but in reality we are obliged to consider problems
one by one, in terms which are, for that very reason, provisional, so
that the solution of each problem will have to be corrected
indefinitely by the solution that will be given to the problems that
will follow: thus, science as a whole is relative to the particular
order in which the problems happen to have been put. It is in this
meaning, and to this degree, that science must be regarded as
conventional. But it is a conventionality of fact so to speak, and not
of right. In principle, positive science bears on reality itself,
provided it does not overstep the limits of its own domain, which is
inert matter.
Scientific knowledge, thus regarded, rises to a higher plane. In return,
the theory of knowledge becomes an infinitely difficult enterprise, and
which passes the powers of the intellect alone. It is not enough to
determine, by careful analysis, the categories of thought; we must
engender them. As regards space, we must, by an effort of mind _sui
generis_, follow the progression or rather the regression of the
extra-spatial degrading itself into spatiality. When we make ourselves
self-conscious in the highest possible degree and then let ourselves
fall back little by little, we get the feeling of extension: we have an
extension of the self into recollections that are fixed and external to
one another, in place of the tension it possessed as an indivisible
active will. But this is only a beginning. Our consciousness, sketching
the movement, shows us its direction and reveals to us the possibility
of continuing it to the end; but consciousness itself does not go so
far. Now, on the other hand, if we consider matter, which seems to us at
first coincident with space, we find that the more our attention is
fixed on it, the more the parts which we said were laid side by side
enter into each other, each of them undergoing the action of the whole,
which is consequently somehow present in it. Thus, although matter
stretches itself out in the direction of space, it does not completely
attain it; whence we may conclude that it only carries very much
further the movement that consciousness is able to sketch within us in
its nascent state. We hold, therefore, the two ends of the chain, though
we do not succeed in seizing the intermediate links. Will they always
escape us? We must remember that philosophy, as we define it, has not
yet become completely conscious of itself. Physics understands its rôle
when it pushes matter in the direction of spatiality; but has
metaphysics understood its rôle when it has simply trodden in the steps
of physics, in the chimerical hope of going further in the same
direction? Should not its own task be, on the contrary, to remount the
incline that physics descends, to bring back matter to its origins, and
to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to speak, a
reversed psychology? All that which seems _positive_ to the physicist
and to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an
interruption or inversion of the true positivity, which would have to be
defined in psychological terms.
* * * * *
When we consider the admirable order of mathematics, the perfect
agreement of the objects it deals with, the immanent logic in numbers
and figures, our certainty of always getting the same conclusion,
however diverse and complex our reasonings on the same subject, we
hesitate to see in properties apparently so positive a system of
negations, the absence rather than the presence of a true reality. But
we must not forget that our intellect, which finds this order and
wonders at it, is directed in the same line of movement that leads to
the materiality and spatiality of its object. The more complexity the
intellect puts into its object by analyzing it, the more complex is the
order it finds there. And this order and this complexity necessarily
appear to the intellect as a positive reality, since reality and
intellectuality are turned in the same direction.
When a poet reads me his verses, I can interest myself enough in him to
enter into his thought, put myself into his feelings, live over again
the simple state he has broken into phrases and words. I sympathize then
with his inspiration, I follow it with a continuous movement which is,
like the inspiration itself, an undivided act. Now, I need only relax my
attention, let go the tension that there is in me, for the sounds,
hitherto swallowed up in the sense, to appear to me distinctly, one by
one, in their materiality. For this I have not to do anything; it is
enough to withdraw something. In proportion as I let myself go, the
successive sounds will become the more individualized; as the phrases
were broken into words, so the words will scan in syllables which I
shall perceive one after another. Let me go farther still in the
direction of dream: the letters themselves will become loose and will be
seen to dance along, hand in hand, on some fantastic sheet of paper. I
shall then admire the precision of the interweavings, the marvelous
order of the procession, the exact insertion of the letters into the
syllables, of the syllables into the words and of the words into the
sentences. The farther I pursue this quite negative direction of
relaxation, the more extension and complexity I shall create; and the
more the complexity in its turn increases, the more admirable will seem
to be the order which continues to reign, undisturbed, among the
elements. Yet this complexity and extension represent nothing positive;
they express a deficiency of will. And, on the other hand, the order
must grow with the complexity, since it is only an aspect of it. The
more we perceive, symbolically, parts in an indivisible whole, the more
the number of the relations that the parts have between themselves
necessarily increases, since the same undividedness of the real whole
continues to hover over the growing multiplicity of the symbolic
elements into which the scattering of the attention has decomposed it. A
comparison of this kind will enable us to understand, in some measure,
how the same suppression of positive reality, the same inversion of a
certain original movement, can create at once extension in space and the
admirable order which mathematics finds there. There is, of course, this
difference between the two cases, that words and letters have been
invented by a positive effort of humanity, while space arises
automatically, as the remainder of a subtraction arises once the two
numbers are posited.[80] But, in the one case as in the other, the
infinite complexity of the parts and their perfect coördination among
themselves are created at one and the same time by an inversion which
is, at bottom, an interruption, that is to say, a diminution of positive
reality.
* * * * *
All the operations of our intellect tend to geometry, as to the goal
where they find their perfect fulfilment. But, as geometry is
necessarily prior to them (since these operations have not as their end
to construct space and cannot do otherwise than take it as given) it is
evident that it is a latent geometry, immanent in our idea of space,
which is the main spring of our intellect and the cause of its working.
We shall be convinced of this if we consider the two essential functions
of intellect, the faculty of deduction and that of induction.
Let us begin with deduction. The same movement by which I trace a figure
in space engenders its properties: they are visible and tangible in the
movement itself; I feel, I see in space the relation of the definition
to its consequences, of the premisses to the conclusion. All the other
concepts of which experience suggests the idea to me are only in part
constructible _a priori_; the definition of them is therefore imperfect,
and the deductions into which these concepts enter, however closely the
conclusion is linked to the premisses, participate in this imperfection.
But when I trace roughly in the sand the base of a triangle, as I begin
to form the two angles at the base, I know positively, and understand
absolutely, that if these two angles are equal the sides will be equal
also, the figure being then able to be turned over on itself without
there being any change whatever. I know it before I have learnt
geometry. Thus, prior to the science of geometry, there is a natural
geometry whose clearness and evidence surpass the clearness and evidence
of other deductions. Now, these other deductions bear on qualities, and
not on magnitudes purely. They are, then, likely to have been formed on
the model of the first, and to borrow their force from the fact that,
behind quality, we see magnitude vaguely showing through. We may notice,
as a fact, that questions of situation and of magnitude are the first
that present themselves to our activity, those which intelligence
externalized in action resolves even before reflective intelligence has
appeared. The savage understands better than the civilized man how to
judge distances, to determine a direction, to retrace by memory the
often complicated plan of the road he has traveled, and so to return in
a straight line to his starting-point.[81] If the animal does not deduce
explicitly, if he does not form explicit concepts, neither does he form
the idea of a homogeneous space. You cannot present this space to
yourself without introducing, in the same act, a virtual geometry which
will, of itself, degrade itself into logic. All the repugnance that
philosophers manifest towards this manner of regarding things comes from
this, that the logical work of the intellect represents to their eyes a
positive spiritual effort. But, if we understand by spirituality a
progress to ever new creations, to conclusions incommensurable with the
premisses and indeterminable by relation to them, we must say of an idea
that moves among relations of necessary determination, through premisses
which contain their conclusion in advance, that it follows the inverse
direction, that of materiality. What appears, from the point of view of
the intellect, as an effort, is in itself a letting go. And while, from
the point of view of the intellect, there is a _petitio principii_ in
making geometry arise automatically from space, and logic from
geometry--on the contrary, if space is the ultimate goal of the mind's
movement of _detension_, space cannot be given without positing also
logic and geometry, which are along the course of the movement of which
pure spatial intuition is the goal.
It has not been enough noticed how feeble is the reach of deduction in
the psychological and moral sciences. From a proposition verified by
facts, verifiable consequences can here be drawn only up to a certain
point, only in a certain measure. Very soon appeal has to be made to
common sense, that is to say, to the continuous experience of the real,
in order to inflect the consequences deduced and bend them along the
sinuosities of life. Deduction succeeds in things moral only
metaphorically, so to speak, and just in the measure in which the moral
is transposable into the physical, I should say translatable into
spatial symbols. The metaphor never goes very far, any more than a curve
can long be confused with its tangent. Must we not be struck by this
feebleness of deduction as something very strange and even paradoxical?
Here is a pure operation of the mind, accomplished solely by the power
of the mind. It seems that, if anywhere it should feel at home and
evolve at ease, it would be among the things of the mind, in the domain
of the mind. Not at all; it is there that it is immediately at the end
of its tether. On the contrary, in geometry, in astronomy, in physics,
where we have to do with things external to us, deduction is
all-powerful! Observation and experience are undoubtedly necessary in
these sciences to arrive at the principle, that is, to discover the
aspect under which things must be regarded; but, strictly speaking, we
might, by good luck, have hit upon it at once; and, as soon as we
possess this principle, we may draw from it, at any length, consequences
which experience will always verify. Must we not conclude, therefore,
that deduction is an operation governed by the properties of matter,
molded on the mobile articulations of matter, implicitly given, in fact,
with the space that underlies matter? As long as it turns upon space or
spatialized time, it has only to let itself go. It is _duration_ that
puts spokes in its wheels.
* * * * *
Deduction, then, does not work unless there be spatial intuition behind
it. But we may say the same of induction. It is not necessary indeed to
think geometrically, nor even to think at all, in order to expect from
the same conditions a repetition of the same fact. The consciousness of
the animal already does this work, and indeed, independently of all
consciousness, the living body itself is so constructed that it can
extract from the successive situations in which it finds itself the
similarities which interest it, and so respond to the stimuli by
appropriate reactions. But it is a far cry from a mechanical expectation
and reaction of the body, to induction properly so called, which is an
intellectual operation. Induction rests on the belief that there are
causes and effects, and that the same effects follow the same causes.
Now, if we examine this double belief, this is what we find. It implies,
in the first place, that reality is decomposable into groups, which can
be practically regarded as isolated and independent. If I boil water in
a kettle on a stove, the operation and the objects that support it are,
in reality, bound up with a multitude of other objects and a multitude
of other operations; in the end, I should find that our entire solar
system is concerned in what is being done at this particular point of
space. But, in a certain measure, and for the special end I am pursuing,
I may admit that things happen as if the group _water-kettle-stove_ were
an independent microcosm. That is my first affirmation. Now, when I say
that this microcosm will always behave in the same way, that the heat
will necessarily, at the end of a certain time, cause the boiling of the
water, I admit that it is sufficient that a certain number of elements
of the system be given in order that the system should be complete; it
completes itself automatically, I am not free to complete it in thought
as I please. The stove, the kettle and the water being given, with a
certain interval of duration, it seems to me that the boiling, which
experience showed me yesterday to be the only thing wanting to complete
the system, will complete it to-morrow, no matter when to-morrow may be.
What is there at the base of this belief? Notice that the belief is more
or less assured, according as the case may be, but that it is forced
upon the mind as an absolute necessity when the microcosm considered
contains only magnitudes. If two numbers be given, I am not free to
choose their difference. If two sides of a triangle and the contained
angle are given, the third side arises of itself and the triangle
completes itself automatically. I can, it matters not where and it
matters not when, trace the same two sides containing the same angle: it
is evident that the new triangles so formed can be superposed on the
first, and that consequently the same third side will come to complete
the system. Now, if my certitude is perfect in the case in which I
reason on pure space determinations, must I not suppose that, in the
other cases, the certitude is greater the nearer it approaches this
extreme case? Indeed, may it not be the limiting case which is seen
through all the others and which colors them, accordingly as they are
more or less transparent, with a more or less pronounced tinge of
geometrical necessity?[82] In fact, when I say that the water on the
fire will boil to-day as it did yesterday, and that this is an absolute
necessity, I feel vaguely that my imagination is placing the stove of
yesterday on that of to-day, kettle on kettle, water on water, duration
on duration, and it seems then that the rest must coincide also, for the
same reason that, when two triangles are superposed and two of their
sides coincide, their third sides coincide also. But my imagination acts
thus only because it shuts its eyes to two essential points. For the
system of to-day actually to be superimposed on that of yesterday, the
latter must have waited for the former, time must have halted, and
everything become simultaneous: that happens in geometry, but in
geometry alone. Induction therefore implies first that, in the world of
the physicist as in that of the geometrician, time does not count. But
it implies also that qualities can be superposed on each other like
magnitudes. If, in imagination, I place the stove and fire of to-day on
that of yesterday, I find indeed that the form has remained the same; it
suffices, for that, that the surfaces and edges coincide; but what is
the coincidence of two qualities, and how can they be superposed one on
another in order to ensure that they are identical? Yet I extend to the
second order of reality all that applies to the first. The physicist
legitimates this operation later on by reducing, as far as possible,
differences of quality to differences of magnitude; but, prior to all
science, I incline to liken qualities to quantities, as if I perceived
behind the qualities, as through a transparency, a geometrical
mechanism.[83] The more complete this transparency, the more it seems to
me that in the same conditions there must be a repetition of the same
fact. Our inductions are certain, to our eyes, in the exact degree in
which we make the qualitative differences melt into the homogeneity of
the space which subtends them, so that geometry is the ideal limit of
our inductions as well as of our deductions. The movement at the end of
which is spatiality lays down along its course the faculty of induction
as well as that of deduction, in fact, intellectuality entire.
* * * * *
It creates them in the mind. But it creates also, in things, the "order"
which our induction, aided by deduction, finds there. This order, on
which our action leans and in which our intellect recognizes itself,
seems to us marvelous. Not only do the same general causes always
produce the same general effects, but beneath the visible causes and
effects our science discovers an infinity of infinitesimal changes which
work more and more exactly into one another, the further we push the
analysis: so much so that, at the end of this analysis, matter becomes,
it seems to us, geometry itself. Certainly, the intellect is right in
admiring here the growing order in the growing complexity; both the one
and the other must have a positive reality for it, since it looks upon
itself as positive. But things change their aspect when we consider the
whole of reality as an undivided advance forward to successive
creations. It seems to us, then, that the complexity of the material
elements and the mathematical order that binds them together must arise
automatically when within the whole a partial interruption or inversion
is produced. Moreover, as the intellect itself is cut out of mind by a
process of the same kind, it is attuned to this order and complexity,
and admires them because it recognizes itself in them. But what is
admirable _in itself_, what really deserves to provoke wonder, is the
ever-renewed creation which reality, whole and undivided, accomplishes
in advancing; for no complication of the mathematical order with itself,
however elaborate we may suppose it, can introduce an atom of novelty
into the world, whereas this power of creation once given (and it
exists, for we are conscious of it in ourselves, at least when we act
freely) has only to be diverted from itself to relax its tension, only
to relax its tension to extend, only to extend for the mathematical
order of the elements so distinguished and the inflexible determinism
connecting them to manifest the interruption of the creative act: in
fact, inflexible determinism and mathematical order are one with this
very interruption.
It is this merely negative tendency that the particular laws of the
physical world express. None of them, taken separately, has objective
reality; each is the work of an investigator who has regarded things
from a certain bias, isolated certain variables, applied certain
conventional units of measurement. And yet there is an order
approximately mathematical immanent in matter, an objective order, which
our science approaches in proportion to its progress. For if matter is a
relaxation of the inextensive into the extensive and, thereby, of
liberty into necessity, it does not indeed wholly coincide with pure
homogeneous space, yet is constituted by the movement which leads to
space, and is therefore on the way to geometry. It is true that laws of
mathematical form will never apply to it completely. For that, it would
have to be pure space and step out of duration.
We cannot insist too strongly that there is something artificial in the
mathematical form of a physical law, and consequently in our scientific
knowledge of things.[84] Our standards of measurement are conventional,
and, so to say, foreign to the intentions of nature: can we suppose that
nature has related all the modalities of heat to the expansion of the
same mass of mercury, or to the change of pressure of the same mass of
air kept at a constant volume? But we may go further. In a general way,
_measuring_ is a wholly human operation, which implies that we really or
ideally superpose two objects one on another a certain number of times.
Nature did not dream of this superposition. It does not measure, nor
does it count. Yet physics counts, measures, relates "quantitative"
variations to one another to obtain laws, and it succeeds. Its success
would be inexplicable, if the movement which constitutes materiality
were not the same movement which, prolonged by us to its end, that is to
say, to homogeneous space, results in making us count, measure, follow
in their respective variations terms that are functions one of another.
To effect this prolongation of the movement, our intellect has only to
let itself go, for it runs naturally to space and mathematics,
intellectuality and materiality being of the same nature and having been
produced in the same way.
If the mathematical order were a positive thing, if there were, immanent
in matter, laws comparable to those of our codes, the success of our
science would have in it something of the miraculous. What chances
should we have indeed of finding the standard of nature and of isolating
exactly, in order to determine their reciprocal relations, the very
variables which nature has chosen? But the success of a science of
mathematical form would be no less incomprehensible, if matter did not
already possess everything necessary to adapt itself to our formulae.
One hypothesis only, therefore, remains plausible, namely, that the
mathematical order is nothing positive, that it is the form toward which
a certain _interruption_ tends of itself, and that materiality consists
precisely in an interruption of this kind. We shall understand then why
our science is contingent, relative to the variables it has chosen,
relative to the order in which it has successively put the problems, and
why nevertheless it succeeds. It might have been, as a whole, altogether
different, and yet have succeeded. This is so, just because there is no
definite system of mathematical laws, at the base of nature, and because
mathematics in general represents simply the side to which matter
inclines. Put one of those little cork dolls with leaden feet in any
posture, lay it on its back, turn it up on its head, throw it into the
air: it will always stand itself up again, automatically. So likewise
with matter: we can take it by any end and handle it in any way, it will
always fall back into some one of our mathematical formulae, because it
is weighted with geometry.
* * * * *
But the philosopher will perhaps refuse to found a theory of knowledge
on such considerations. They will be repugnant to him, because the
mathematical order, being order, will appear to him to contain something
positive. It is in vain that we assert that this order produces itself
automatically by the interruption of the inverse order, that it is this
very interruption. The idea persists, none the less, that _there might
be no order at all_, and that the mathematical order of things, being a
conquest over disorder, possesses a positive reality. In examining this
point, we shall see what a prominent part the idea of _disorder_ plays
in problems relative to the theory of knowledge. It does not appear
explicitly, and that is why it escapes our attention. It is, however,
with the criticism of this idea that a theory of knowledge ought to
begin, for if the great problem is to know why and how reality submits
itself to an order, it is because the absence of every kind of order
appears possible or conceivable. It is this absence of order that
realists and idealists alike believe they are thinking of--the realist
when he speaks of the regularity that "objective" laws actually impose
on a virtual disorder of nature, the idealist when he supposes a
"sensuous manifold" which is coördinated (and consequently itself
without order) under the organizing influence of our understanding. The
idea of disorder, in the sense of _absence of order_, is then what must
be analyzed first. Philosophy borrows it from daily life. And it is
unquestionable that, when ordinarily we speak of disorder, we are
thinking of something. But of what?
It will be seen in the next chapter how hard it is to determine the
content of a negative idea, and what illusions one is liable to, what
hopeless difficulties philosophy falls into, for not having undertaken
this task. Difficulties and illusions are generally due to this, that we
accept as final a manner of expression essentially provisional. They are
due to our bringing into the domain of speculation a procedure made for
practice. If I choose a volume in my library at random, I may put it
back on the shelf after glancing at it and say, "This is not verse." Is
this what I have really seen in turning over the leaves of the book?
Obviously not. I have not seen, I never shall see, an absence of verse.
I have seen prose. But as it is poetry I want, I express what I find as
a function of what I am looking for, and instead of saying, "This is
prose," I say, "This is not verse." In the same way, if the fancy takes
me to read prose, and I happen on a volume of verse, I shall say, "This
is not prose," thus expressing the data of my perception, which shows me
verse, in the language of my expectation and attention, which are fixed
on the idea of prose and will hear of nothing else. Now, if Mons.
Jourdain heard me, he would infer, no doubt, from my two exclamations
that prose and poetry are two forms of language reserved for books, and
that these learned forms have come and overlaid a language which was
neither prose nor verse. Speaking of this thing which is neither verse
nor prose, he would suppose, moreover, that he was thinking of it: it
would be only a pseudo-idea, however. Let us go further still: the
pseudo-idea would create a pseudo-problem, if M. Jourdain were to ask
his professor of philosophy how the prose form and the poetry form have
been superadded to that which possessed neither the one nor the other,
and if he wished the professor to construct a theory of the imposition
of these two forms upon this formless matter. His question would be
absurd, and the absurdity would lie in this, that he was hypostasizing
as the substratum of prose and poetry the simultaneous negation of both,
forgetting that the negation of the one consists in the affirmation of
the other.
Now, suppose that there are two species of order, and that these two
orders are two contraries within one and the same genus. Suppose also
that the idea of disorder arises in our mind whenever, seeking one of
the two kinds of order, we find the other. The idea of disorder would
then have a clear meaning in the current practice of life: it would
objectify, for the convenience of language, the disappointment of a mind
that finds before it an order different from what it wants, an order
with which it is not concerned at the moment, and which, in this sense,
does not exist for it. But the idea would not admit a theoretical use.
So if we claim, notwithstanding, to introduce it into philosophy, we
shall inevitably lose sight of its true meaning. It denotes the absence
of a certain order, but _to the profit of another_ (with which we are
not concerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, and as
it even goes and comes continually between the two, we take it on the
way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock between two battledores,
and treat it as if it represented, not the absence of the one or other
order as the case may be, but the absence of both together--a thing that
is neither perceived nor conceived, a simple verbal entity. So there
arises the problem how order is imposed on disorder, form on matter. In
analyzing the idea of disorder thus subtilized, we shall see that it
represents nothing at all, and at the same time the problems that have
been raised around it will vanish.
It is true that we must begin by distinguishing, and even by opposing
one to the other, two kinds of order which we generally confuse. As
this confusion has created the principal difficulties of the problem of
knowledge, it will not be useless to dwell once more on the marks by
which the two orders are distinguished.
In a general way, reality is _ordered_ exactly to the degree in which it
satisfies our thought. Order is therefore a certain agreement between
subject and object. It is the mind finding itself again in things. But
the mind, we said, can go in two opposite ways. Sometimes it follows its
natural direction: there is then progress in the form of tension,
continuous creation, free activity. Sometimes it inverts it, and this
inversion, pushed to the end, leads to extension, to the necessary
reciprocal determination of elements externalized each by relation to
the others, in short, to geometrical mechanism. Now, whether experience
seems to us to adopt the first direction or whether it is drawn in the
direction of the second, in both cases we say there is order, for in the
two processes the mind finds itself again. The confusion between them is
therefore natural. To escape it, different names would have to be given
to the two kinds of order, and that is not easy, because of the variety
and variability of the forms they take. The order of the second kind may
be defined as geometry, which is its extreme limit; more generally, it
is that kind of order that is concerned whenever a relation of necessary
determination is found between causes and effects. It evokes ideas of
inertia, of passivity, of automatism. As to the first kind of order, it
oscillates no doubt around finality; and yet we cannot define it as
finality, for it is sometimes above, sometimes below. In its highest
forms, it is more than finality, for of a free action or a work of art
we may say that they show a perfect order, and yet they can only be
expressed in terms of ideas approximately, and after the event. Life in
its entirety, regarded as a creative evolution, is something analogous;
it transcends finality, if we understand by finality the realization of
an idea conceived or conceivable in advance. The category of finality is
therefore too narrow for life in its entirety. It is, on the other hand,
often too wide for a particular manifestation of life taken separately.
Be that as it may, it is with the _vital_ that we have here to do, and
the whole present study strives to prove that the vital is in the
direction of the voluntary. We may say then that this first kind of
order is that of the _vital_ or of the _willed_, in opposition to the
second, which is that of the _inert_ and the _automatic_. Common sense
instinctively distinguishes between the two kinds of order, at least in
the extreme cases; instinctively, also, it brings them together. We say
of astronomical phenomena that they manifest an admirable order, meaning
by this that they can be foreseen mathematically. And we find an order
no less admirable in a symphony of Beethoven, which is genius,
originality, and therefore unforeseeability itself.
But it is exceptional for order of the first kind to take so distinct a
form. Ordinarily, it presents features that we have every interest in
confusing with those of the opposite order. It is quite certain, for
instance, that if we could view the evolution of life in its entirety,
the spontaneity of its movement and the unforeseeability of its
procedures would thrust themselves on our attention. But what we meet in
our daily experience is a certain determinate living being, certain
special manifestations of life, which repeat, _almost_, forms and facts
already known; indeed, the similarity of structure that we find
everywhere between what generates and what is generated--a similarity
that enables us to include any number of living individuals in the same
group--is to our eyes the very type of the _generic_: the inorganic
genera seem to us to take living genera as models. Thus the vital order,
such as it is offered to us piecemeal in experience, presents the same
character and performs the same function as the physical order: both
cause experience to _repeat itself_, both enable our mind to
_generalize_. In reality, this character has entirely different origins
in the two cases, and even opposite meanings. In the second case, the
type of this character, its ideal limit, as also its foundation, is the
geometrical necessity in virtue of which the same components give the
same resultant. In the first case, this character involves, on the
contrary, the intervention of something which manages to obtain the same
total effect although the infinitely complex elementary causes may be
quite different. We insisted on this last point in our first chapter,
when we showed how identical structures are to be met with on
independent lines of evolution. But, without looking so far, we may
presume that the reproduction only of the type of the ancestor by his
descendants is an entirely different thing from the repetition of the
same composition of forces which yields an identical resultant. When we
think of the infinity of infinitesimal elements and of infinitesimal
causes that concur in the genesis of a living being, when we reflect
that the absence or the deviation of one of them would spoil everything,
the first impulse of the mind is to consider this army of little workers
as watched over by a skilled foreman, the "vital principle," which is
ever repairing faults, correcting effects of neglect or
absentmindedness, putting things back in place: this is how we try to
express the difference between the physical and the vital order, the
former making the same combination of causes give the same combined
effect, the latter securing the constancy of the effect even when there
is some wavering in the causes. But that is only a comparison; on
reflection, we find that there can be no foreman, for the very simple
reason that there are no workers. The causes and elements that
physico-chemical analysis discovers are real causes and elements, no
doubt, as far as the facts of organic destruction are concerned; they
are then limited in number. But vital phenomena, properly so called, or
facts of organic creation open up to us, when we analyze them, the
perspective of an analysis passing away to infinity: whence it may be
inferred that the manifold causes and elements are here only views of
the mind, attempting an ever closer and closer imitation of the
operation of nature, while the operation imitated is an indivisible act.
The likeness between individuals of the same species has thus an
entirely different meaning, an entirely different origin, to that of the
likeness between complex effects obtained by the same composition of the
same causes. But in the one case as in the other, there is _likeness_,
and consequently possible generalization. And as that is all that
interests us in practice, since our daily life is and must be an
expectation of the same things and the same situations, it is natural
that this common character, essential from the point of view of our
action, should bring the two orders together, in spite of a merely
internal diversity between them which interests speculation only. Hence
the idea of a _general order of nature_, everywhere the same, hovering
over life and over matter alike. Hence our habit of designating by the
same word and representing in the same way the existence of _laws_ in
the domain of inert matter and that of _genera_ in the domain of life.
Now, it will be found that this confusion is the origin of most of the
difficulties raised by the problem of knowledge, among the ancients as
well as among the moderns. The generality of laws and that of genera
having been designated by the same word and subsumed under the same
idea, the geometrical order and the vital order are accordingly confused
together. According to the point of view, the generality of laws is
explained by that of genera, or that of genera by that of laws. The
first view is characteristic of ancient thought; the second belongs to
modern philosophy. But in both ancient and modern philosophy the idea of
"generality" is an equivocal idea, uniting in its denotation and in its
connotation incompatible objects and elements. In both there are grouped
under the same concept two kinds of order which are alike only in the
facility they give to our action on things. We bring together the two
terms in virtue of a quite external likeness, which justifies no doubt
their designation by the same word for practice, but which does not
authorize us at all, in the speculative domain, to confuse them in the
same definition.
The ancients, indeed, did not ask why nature submits to laws, but why it
is ordered according to genera. The idea of genus corresponds more
especially to an objective reality in the domain of life, where it
expresses an unquestionable fact, heredity. Indeed, there can only be
genera where there are individual objects; now, while the organized
being is cut out from the general mass of matter by his very
organization, that is to say naturally, it is our perception which cuts
inert matter into distinct bodies. It is guided in this by the interests
of action, by the nascent reactions that our body indicates--that is, as
we have shown elsewhere,[85] by the potential genera that are trying to
gain existence. In this, then, genera and individuals determine one
another by a semi-artificial operation entirely relative to our future
action on things. Nevertheless the ancients did not hesitate to put all
genera in the same rank, to attribute the same absolute existence to
all of them. Reality thus being a system of genera, it is to the
generality of the genera (that is, in effect, to the generality
expressive of the vital order) that the generality of laws itself had to
be brought. It is interesting, in this respect, to compare the
Aristotelian theory of the fall of bodies with the explanation furnished
by Galileo. Aristotle is concerned solely with the concepts "high" and
"low," "own proper place" as distinguished from "place occupied,"
"natural movement" and "forced movement;"[86] the physical law in virtue
of which the stone falls expresses for him that the stone regains the
"natural place" of all stones, to wit, the earth. The stone, in his
view, is not quite stone so long as it is not in its normal place; in
falling back into this place it aims at completing itself, like a living
being that grows, thus realizing fully the essence of the genus
stone.[87] If this conception of the physical law were exact, the law
would no longer be a mere relation established by the mind; the
subdivision of matter into bodies would no longer be relative to our
faculty of perceiving; all bodies would have the same individuality as
living bodies, and the laws of the physical universe would express
relations of real kinship between real genera. We know what kind of
physics grew out of this, and how, for having believed in a science
unique and final, embracing the totality of the real and at one with the
absolute, the ancients were confined, in fact, to a more or less clumsy
interpretation of the physical in terms of the vital.