. fonnula, we may say that the object of metaphysics is to perform qualitative dif-
^- ferentiatioHS and integrations.
VIII. The reason why this object has
been lost sight of, and why science its
has been mistaken in the origin of the |
Metaphysics 73
cesses it employs, is that intuition, once
attained, must find a mode of expression
and of application which conforms to the
habits of our thought, and one which fur-
nishes us, in the shape of well-defined con-
cepts, with the solid points of support which
we so greatly need. In that lies the con-
dition of what we call exactitude and pre-
cision, and also the condition of the
unlimited extension of a general method to
particular cases. Now this extension and
this work of logical improvement can be
continued for centuries, whilst the act
ghich creates the method lasts but for a
moment. T hat is why we so often take the
logical equipment of science for science it-
self,^ forgetting the metaphysical intuition
from which all the rest has sprung.
From the overlooking of this intuition
proceeds all that has been said by phi-
losophers and by men of science themselves
1 On this point as on several other questions treated
in the present essay, see the interesting articles by
MM. Le Roy, Vincent, and Wilbois, which have
appeared in the Revtie de Mitaphysique et de Morale.
^^P about the " relativity " of scientific kuoi^^^^l '^-. edee. What is relative is the sumboUn '
about the " relativity " of scientific knoi
edge. What is relative is the symbolic
knowledge by pre-existing concepts, which
proceeds from the fixed to the moving, and
not the intuitive knowledge which instaUs
itself in that which is moving and adopts^
the very life of things. This intuition aA
tains the absolute.
L Science and metaphysics therefore come
together in intuition, A truly intuitive
philosophy would realize the much-desired
union of science and metaphysics. While
it would make of metaphysics a positive
Bcience— that is, a progressive and indel
nitely perfectil)le one — it would at the
time lead the positive sciences, properly so-
called, to become conscious of their true
scope, often far greater than they imagine.
It would put more science into meti
physics, and more metaphysics into 8cien«
It would result in restoring the continuity
between the intuitions which the various
sciences have obtained here and there in
the course of their history, and whicl
Ib
le I
ve
■d
le
sitive I
udeft^^^l
sam^^^l
I- so- ^^
cue
ne. ^^^ :ta^^|
ity^n
Metaphysics
[they have obtained only by strokes of [eniuB. -^^
IX. That there are not two difEerent
" ways of knowing things fundamentally, that
the various sciences have their root in
metaphysics, is what the ancient p hi loBO-_ '>l
phers generally thought. Their error did
not lie there. It consisted in their being
I always dominated by the belief, so natural
to the human mind, that a variation can \
only be the expresaion and development of I
what is invariable. Whence it followed
that action was an enfeebled contemplation,
duration a deceptive and shifting image of
immobile eternity, the 8oul a fall from the
Idea. The whole of the philosophy which
begins with Plato and culminates in Ploti-
nuB is the development of a principle which -
I may be formulated thus : " There is more
I in the immutable than in the moving, and
■ we pass from the stable to the unstable by
\ a mere diminution." Now it is the contrary
I which is true.
Modern science dates from the day when
An Introduction to
/mobility was set up as an independent
I'eality. It dates from the day wUen
Galileo, setting a ball rolling down an in-
clined plane, finnly resolved to study this
movement from top to bottom for itself, in
itself, instead of seeking its principle in
the concepts of high and low, two im-
'' mobilities by which Aristotle believed he
could adequately explain the mobility. And
this is not an isolated fact in the history
of science. Several of the great discoveries,
of those at least which have transformed
the positive sciences or which have created
new ones, have been so many soundings
in the depths of pure duration. The more
living the reality touched, the deeper was
the sounding.
But the lead-line sunk to the sea bottom
brings up a fluid mass which the sun's heat
quickly dries into solid and discontinuous
grains of sand. And the intuition of dura:
tion, when it is exposed to the rays of the
understanding, in like manner quickly turns
into -fixed, distinct, and immobile concepts.
kletapnysics
[ In the living mobility of things the un-
I deratandiug is bent on marking real or
I virtual stations, it notes departures and
arrivals; for this is all that concerns the
I thought of man in so far as it is simply
human. It is more than human to grasp
what is happening in the interval. But
philosophy can only be an efEort to tran-
. Bcend the human condition,
I Men of science have fixed their attention
mainly on the concepts with which they
have marked out the pathway of intuition.
The more they laid stress on these residual
I products, which have turned into symbols,
* the more they attributed a symbolic char-
acter to every kind of science. And the
more they believed in the symbolic char-
acter of science, the more did they indeed
[•make science symbolical. Gradually they
have blotted out all difference, in positive
science, between the natural and the arti-
ficial, between the data of immediate intu-
ition, and the enormous work of analysis
which the understanding pursues round
An Introduction to
intuition. Thus they have prepared the way
for a doctrine which aflfirms the relativity
of all our knowledge.
But metaphysics has also labored to the Kame end.
^ow could the masters of modem philoso-
phy, who have been renovators of science
as well as of metaphysics, have had no sense
of the moving continuity of reality? How
could they have abstained from placing
themselves in what we call concrete dura-
tion? They have done so to a greater ex-
tent than they were aware ; above all, much
more than they said. If we endeavor to
link together, by a continuous connection,
the intuitions about which systems have
become organized, we find, together with
other convergent and divergent lines, one
very determinate direction of thought and
of feeling. What is this latent thought?
How shall we express the feeling? To
borrow once more the language of the
Platonists, we will say- — depriving the
words of their psychological sense, and g
Metaphysics 79
ing the name of Idea to a certain settling
down into easy intelligibility, and that of
Soul to a certain longing after the restless-
ness of life — that an invisible current
causes modem philosophy to place the Soul
above the Idea. It thus tends, like mod3rn
science, and even more so than modern
science, to advance in an opposite direc-
tion to ancient thought.
But this metaphysics, like this science, ^\
has enfolded its deeper life in a rich tissue ^
of symbols, forgetting something that, while . /
science needs symbols for its analytical de-
velopment, the main object of metaphysics
is to do away with symbols. Here, again,
the understanding has pursued its work of
fixing, dividing, and reconstructing. It has '
pursued this, it is true, under a rather dif- /
ferent form. Without insisting on a point
which we propose to develop elsewhere, it
is enough here to say that the understand- '^
ing, whose function it is to operate on stable
elements, may look for stability either in
relations or in things. In so far as it workw
An Introduction^i
on concepts of relations, it culminates in
scientific symbolism. In so far as it works
on concepts of things, it culminates in
metaphysical symbolism. But in both cases
the arrangement comes from the under-
standing. Hence, it would fain believe itself
independent. Rather than recognize at once
what it awes to an intuition of the depths
of reality, /it prefers exposing itself to the
danger that its whole work may \te looked
upon as nothing but an artificial arrange-
ment of symbols. So that if we were to hold
on to the letter of what metaphysicians and
scientists say, and also to the material
aspect of what they do, we might believe
that the metaphysicians have dug a deep
tunnel beneath reality, that the scientists
have thrown an elegant bridge over it, but
that the moving stream of things passes
between these two artificial constructions
without touching them.
One of the principal artifices of the
-Kantian criticism consisted in taking the
: metaphysician and the scientist literally,
Metaphysics
forcing both metaphysics and science to the
extreme limit of symbolism to which they
could go, and to which, moreover, they make
their way of their own accord as soon as
the understanding claims an independence
full of perils. Having once overlooked the-.
ties that bind science and metaphysics to
intellectual intuition, Kant has no diffi-
culty in showing that our science is wholly i
relative, and our metaphysics entirely arti-, |
ficial. Since he has exaggerated the ind((- i
pendence of the understanding in both
cases, since he has relieved both meta-
physics and science of the intellectual in-
tuition which served them as inward ballast,
science with its relations presents to him ""
no more than a film of form, and meta-
physics, with its things, no more than a
film of matter. Is it surprising that the
first, then, reveals to him only frames ,
packed within frames, and the second only
phantoms chasing phantoms?
He has struck such telling blows at our science and our metaphysic that they have
An Introduction to
not even yet quite recovered from their
bewilderment. Our mind would readily re-
sign itself to seeing in science a knowledge
that is wholly relative, and in metaphysics a
speculation that is entirely empty. It seems
to us, even at this present date, that the
Kantian criticism applies to all meta-
physics and to all science. In reality, it
applies more especially to the philosophy
of the ancients, as also to the form — itself
borrowed from the ancients — in which the
moderns have most often left their thought.
It is valid against a metaphysic which
claims to give us a single and completed
system of things, against a science profess-
ing to he a single system of relations; in
short, against a science and a metaphysic
presenting themselves with the architec-
tural simplicity of the Platonic theory of
ideas op of a Greek temple. If meta-
physics claims to he made up of concepts
which were ours before its advent, if it con-
sists in an ingenious arrangement of pre-
existing ideas which we utilize as building
Metaphysics
Bciei
material for an edifice, if, in short, it is
anything else but the constant expansion
of our mind, the ever-renewed effort to
transcend our actual ldea« and perhaps
also our elementary logic, it is but too evi-
dent that, like all the works of pure under-
standing, it becomes artificial. And if
Bcieuce is wholly and entirely a work of
.lysis or of conceptual representation,
experience is only to serve therein as a
verification for " clear ideas," if, instead of
starting from multiple and diverse intu-
ition — which insert themselves in the par-
icular movement of each reality, hut do not
.ways dovetail into each other, — it pro-
fesses to be a vast mathematic, a single
and closed-in system of relations, imprison-
ing the whole of reality in a network pre-
pared in advance,-^it becomes a knowledge
purely relative to human understanding. If
we look carefully into the Critique of Pure
Reason, we see that science for Kant did
indeed mean this kind of universal matfie-
matic, and metaphysics this practically un-
\n Introduction to
altpred Platonism, In truth, the drt
a universal mathematic is itself but a sur-
vival nf Platonism, TJniversai mathematic
is what the world of ideas becomes when
we suppose that the Idea consists in a
relation or in a law, and no Icmger in a
thing. Kant ^ took this dream of a few
modem philosophers for a reality; more
than this, he believed that all scientific
knowledge was only a detached fragment
of, or rather a stepping-stone to, universal
mathematics, Henr-e the main task of the
Critique was to lay the foundation of this
mathematic — that is, to determine what the
intellect must be, and what the object,
in order that an uninterrupted mathe-
matic may bind them together. And of
necessity, if all possible experience can be
made to enter thus into the rigid and al-
ready formed framework of our understand-
ing, it is (unless we assume a pre-established
' See on thia subject a very interesting article by
Radulescu-Motru, " Zur Entwickelung von Kant'a
Theorie der Nature a uaali tat," in Wundt's Fhiloao-
pkwehe Studien (vol, ix., 1894).
Metaphysics 85
harmony) because our understanding itself
organizes nature, and finds itself again
therein as in a mirror. Hence the possi-
bility of science, which owes all its efficacy
to its relativity, and the impossibility of
metaphysics, since the latter finds nothing
more to do than to parody with phantoms of
things the work of conceptual arrangement
which science practises seriously on rela-
tions. Briefly, the whole Critique of Pure
Reason ends in establishing that Platonism,
illegitimate if Ideas are things, becomes le-
gitimate if Ideas are relations, and that the
ready-made idea, once brought down in this
way from heaven to earth, is in fact, as Plato
held, the common basis alike of thought and
of nature. But the whole of the Critique of
Pure Reason also rests on this postulate,
that our intellect is incapable of anything
but Platonizing — ^that is, of pouring all pos-
sible experience into pre-existing moulds.
On this the whole question depends. If
scientific knowledge is indeed what Ksmt
supposed, then there is one simple science,