Chapter 8
THE CINEMATOGRAPHICAL MECHANISM OF THOUGHT AND THE MECHANISTIC ILLUSION--A GLANCE AT THE HISTORY OF SYSTEMS[96]--REAL BECOMING AND FALSE EVOLUTIONISM.
It remains for us to examine in themselves two theoretical illusions which we have frequently met with before, but whose consequences rather than principle have hitherto concerned us. Such is the object of the present chapter. It will afford us the opportunity of removing certain objections, of clearing up certain misunderstandings, and, above all, of defining more precisely, by contrasting it with others, a philosophy which sees in duration the very stuff of reality.
Matter or mind, reality has appeared to us as a perpetual becoming. It makes itself or it unmakes itself, but it is never something made. Such is the intuition that we have of mind when we draw aside the veil which is interposed between our consciousness and ourselves. This, also, is what our intellect and senses themselves would show us of matter, if they could obtain a direct and disinterested idea of it. But, preoccupied before everything with the necessities of action, the intellect, like the senses, is limited to taking, at intervals, views that are instantaneous and by that very fact immobile of the becoming of matter. Consciousness, being in its turn formed on the intellect, sees clearly of the inner life what is already made, and only feels confusedly the making. Thus, we pluck out of duration those moments that interest us, and that we have gathered along its course. These alone we retain. And we are right in so doing, while action only is in question. But when, in _speculating_ on the _nature_ of the real, we go on regarding it as our practical interest requires us to regard it, we become unable to perceive the true evolution, the radical becoming. Of becoming we perceive only states, of duration only instants, and even when we speak of duration and of becoming, it is of another thing that we are thinking. Such is the most striking of the two illusions we wish to examine. It consists in supposing that we can think the unstable by means of the stable, the moving by means of the immobile.
The other illusion is near akin to the first. It has the same origin, being also due to the fact that we import into speculation a procedure made for practice. All action aims at getting something that we feel the want of, or at creating something that does not yet exist. In this very special sense, it fills a void, and goes from the empty to the full, from an absence to a presence, from the unreal to the real. Now the unreality which is here in question is purely relative to the direction in which our attention is engaged, for we are immersed in realities and cannot pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the one we are seeking, we speak of the _absence_ of this sought-for reality wherever we find the _presence_ of another. We thus express what we have as a function of what we want. This is quite legitimate in the sphere of action. But, whether we will or no, we keep to this way of speaking, and also of thinking, when we speculate on the nature of things independently of the interest they have for us. Thus arises the second of the two illusions. We propose to examine this first. It is due, like the other, to the static habits that our intellect contracts when it prepares our action on things. Just as we pass through the immobile to go to the moving, so we make use of the void in order to think the full.
We have met with this illusion already in dealing with the fundamental problem of knowledge. The question, we then said, is to know why there is order, and not disorder, in things. But the question has meaning only if we suppose that disorder, understood as an absence of order, is possible, or imaginable, or conceivable. Now, it is only order that is real; but, as order can take two forms, and as the presence of the one may be said to consist in the absence of the other, we speak of disorder whenever we have before us that one of the two orders for which we are not looking. The idea of disorder is then entirely practical. It corresponds to the disappointment of a certain expectation, and it does not denote the absence of all order, but only the presence of that order which does not offer us actual interest. So that whenever we try to deny order completely, absolutely, we find that we are leaping from one kind of order to the other indefinitely, and that the supposed suppression of the one and the other implies the presence of the two. Indeed, if we go on, and persist in shutting our eyes to this movement of the mind and all it involves, we are no longer dealing with an idea; all that is left of disorder is a word. Thus the problem of knowledge is complicated, and possibly made insoluble, by the idea that order fills a void and that its actual presence is superposed on its virtual absence. We go from absence to presence, from the void to the full, in virtue of the fundamental illusion of our understanding. That is the error of which we noticed one consequence in our last chapter. As we then anticipated, we must come to close quarters with this error, and finally grapple with it. We must face it in itself, in the radically false conception which it implies of negation, of the void and of the nought.[97]
Philosophers have paid little attention to the idea of the nought. And yet it is often the hidden spring, the invisible mover of philosophical thinking. From the first awakening of reflection, it is this that pushes to the fore, right under the eyes of consciousness, the torturing problems, the questions that we cannot gaze at without feeling giddy and bewildered. I have no sooner commenced to philosophize than I ask myself why I exist; and when I take account of the intimate connection in which I stand to the rest of the universe, the difficulty is only pushed back, for I want to know why the universe exists; and if I refer the universe to a Principle immanent or transcendent that supports it or creates it, my thought rests on this principle only a few moments, for the same problem recurs, this time in its full breadth and generality: Whence comes it, and how can it be understood, that anything exists? Even here, in the present work, when matter has been defined as a kind of descent, this descent as the interruption of a rise, this rise itself as a growth, when finally a Principle of creation has been put at the base of things, the same question springs up: How--why does this principle exist rather than nothing?
Now, if I push these questions aside and go straight to what hides behind them, this is what I find:--Existence appears to me like a conquest over nought. I say to myself that there might be, that indeed there ought to be, nothing, and I then wonder that there is something. Or I represent all reality extended on nothing as on a carpet: at first was nothing, and being has come by superaddition to it. Or, yet again, if something has always existed, nothing must always have served as its substratum or receptacle, and is therefore eternally prior. A glass may have always been full, but the liquid it contains nevertheless fills a void. In the same way, being may have always been there, but the nought which is filled, and, as it were, stopped up by it, pre-exists for it none the less, if not in fact at least in right. In short, I cannot get rid of the idea that the full is an embroidery on the canvas of the void, that being is superimposed on nothing, and that in the idea of "nothing" there is _less_ than in that of "something." Hence all the mystery.
It is necessary that this mystery should be cleared up. It is more especially necessary, if we put duration and free choice at the base of things. For the disdain of metaphysics for all reality that endures comes precisely from this, that it reaches being only by passing through "not-being," and that an existence which endures seems to it not strong enough to conquer non-existence and itself posit itself. It is for this reason especially that it is inclined to endow true being with a _logical_, and not a psychological nor a physical existence. For the nature of a purely logical existence is such that it seems to be self-sufficient and to posit itself by the effect alone of the force immanent in truth. If I ask myself why bodies or minds exist rather than nothing, I find no answer; but that a logical principle, such as A=A, should have the power of creating itself, triumphing over the nought throughout eternity, seems to me natural. A circle drawn with chalk on a blackboard is a thing which needs explanation: this entirely physical existence has not by itself wherewith to vanquish non-existence. But the "logical essence" of the circle, that is to say, the possibility of drawing it according to a certain law--in short, its definition--is a thing which appears to me eternal: it has neither place nor date; for nowhere, at no moment, has the drawing of a circle begun to be possible. Suppose, then, that the principle on which all things rest, and which all things manifest possesses an existence of the same nature as that of the definition of the circle, or as that of the axiom A=A: the mystery of existence vanishes, for the being that is at the base of everything posits itself then in eternity, as logic itself does. True, it will cost us rather a heavy sacrifice: if the principle of all things exists after the manner of a logical axiom or of a mathematical definition, the things themselves must go forth from this principle like the applications of an axiom or the consequences of a definition, and there will no longer be place, either in the things nor in their principle, for efficient causality understood in the sense of a free choice. Such are precisely the conclusions of a doctrine like that of Spinoza, or even that of Leibniz, and such indeed has been their genesis.
Now, if we could prove that the idea of the nought, in the sense in which we take it when we oppose it to that of existence, is a pseudo-idea, the problems that are raised around it would become pseudo-problems. The hypothesis of an absolute that acts freely, that in an eminent sense endures, would no longer raise up intellectual prejudices. The road would be cleared for a philosophy more nearly approaching intuition, and which would no longer ask the same sacrifices of common sense.
Let us then see what we are thinking about when we speak of "Nothing." To represent "Nothing," we must either imagine it or conceive it. Let us examine what this image or this idea may be. First, the image.
I am going to close my eyes, stop my ears, extinguish one by one the sensations that come to me from the outer world. Now it is done; all my perceptions vanish, the material universe sinks into silence and the night.--I subsist, however, and cannot help myself subsisting. I am still there, with the organic sensations which come to me from the surface and from the interior of my body, with the recollections which my past perceptions have left behind them--nay, with the impression, most positive and full, of the void I have just made about me. How can I suppress all this? How eliminate myself? I can even, it may be, blot out and forget my recollections up to my immediate past; but at least I keep the consciousness of my present reduced to its extremest poverty, that is to say, of the actual state of my body. I will try, however, to do away even with this consciousness itself. I will reduce more and more the sensations my body sends in to me: now they are almost gone; now they are gone, they have disappeared in the night where all things else have already died away. But no! At the very instant that my consciousness is extinguished, another consciousness lights up--or rather, it was already alight: it had arisen the instant before, in order to witness the extinction of the first; for the first could disappear only for another and in the presence of another. I see myself annihilated only if I have already resuscitated myself by an act which is positive, however involuntary and unconscious. So, do what I will, I am always perceiving something, either from without or from within. When I no longer know anything of external objects, it is because I have taken refuge in the consciousness that I have of myself. If I abolish this inner self, its very abolition becomes an object for an imaginary self which now perceives as an external object the self that is dying away. Be it external or internal, some object there always is that my imagination is representing. My imagination, it is true, can go from one to the other, I can by turns imagine a nought of external perception or a nought of internal perception, but not both at once, for the absence of one consists, at bottom, in the exclusive presence of the other. But, from the fact that two relative noughts are imaginable in turn, we wrongly conclude that they are imaginable together: a conclusion the absurdity of which must be obvious, for we cannot imagine a nought without perceiving, at least confusedly, that we are imagining it, consequently that we are acting, that we are thinking, and therefore that something still subsists.
The image, then, properly so called, of a suppression of everything is never formed by thought. The effort by which we strive to create this image simply ends in making us swing to and fro between the vision of an outer and that of an inner reality. In this coming and going of our mind between the without and the within, there is a point, at equal distance from both, in which it seems to us that we no longer perceive the one, and that we do not yet perceive the other: it is there that the image of "Nothing" is formed. In reality, we then perceive both, having reached the point where the two terms come together, and the image of Nothing, so defined, is an image full of things, an image that includes at once that of the subject and that of the object and, besides, a perpetual leaping from one to the other and the refusal ever to come to rest finally on either. Evidently this is not the nothing that we can oppose to being, and put before or beneath being, for it already includes existence in general.
But we shall be told that, if the representation of Nothing, visible or latent, enters into the reasonings of philosophers, it is not as an image, but as an idea. It may be agreed that we do not imagine the annihilation of everything, but it will be claimed that we can conceive it. We conceive a polygon with a thousand sides, said Descartes, although we do not see it in imagination: it is enough that we can clearly represent the possibility of constructing it. So with the idea of the annihilation of everything. Nothing simpler, it will be said, than the procedure by which we construct the idea of it. There is, in fact, not a single object of our experience that we cannot suppose annihilated. Extend this annihilation of a first object to a second, then to a third, and so on as long as you please: the nought is the limit toward which the operation tends. And the nought so defined is the annihilation of everything. That is the theory. We need only consider it in this form to see the absurdity it involves.
An idea constructed by the mind is an idea only if its pieces are capable of coexisting; it is reduced to a mere word if the elements that we bring together to compose it are driven away as fast as we assemble them. When I have defined the circle, I easily represent a black or a white circle, a circle in cardboard, iron, or brass, a transparent or an opaque circle--but not a square circle, because the law of the generation of the circle excludes the possibility of defining this figure with straight lines. So my mind can represent any existing thing whatever as annihilated;--but if the annihilation of anything by the mind is an operation whose mechanism implies that it works on a part of the whole, and not on the whole itself, then the extension of such an operation to the totality of things becomes self-contradictory and absurd, and the idea of an annihilation of everything presents the same character as that of a square circle: it is not an idea, it is only a word. So let us examine more closely the mechanism of the operation.
In fact, the object suppressed is either external or internal: it is a thing or it is a state of consciousness. Let us consider the first case. I annihilate in thought an external object: in the place where it was, there is no longer anything.--No longer anything of that object, of course, but another object has taken its place: there is no absolute void in nature. But admit that an absolute void is possible: it is not of that void that I am thinking when I say that the object, once annihilated, leaves its place unoccupied; for by the hypothesis it is a _place_, that is a void limited by precise outlines, or, in other words, a kind of _thing_. The void of which I speak, therefore, is, at bottom, only the absence of some definite object, which was here at first, is now elsewhere and, in so far as it is no longer in its former place, leaves behind it, so to speak, the void of itself. A being unendowed with memory or prevision would not use the words "void" or "nought;" he would express only what is and what is perceived; now, what is, and what is perceived, is the _presence_ of one thing or of another, never the _absence_ of anything. There is absence only for a being capable of remembering and expecting. He remembered an object, and perhaps expected to encounter it again; he finds another, and he expresses the disappointment of his expectation (an expectation sprung from recollection) by saying that he no longer finds anything, that he encounters "nothing." Even if he did not expect to encounter the object, it is a possible expectation of it, it is still the falsification of his eventual expectation that he expresses by saying that the object is no longer where it was. What he perceives in reality, what he will succeed in effectively thinking of, is the presence of the old object in a new place or that of a new object in the old place; the rest, all that is expressed negatively by such words as "nought" or the "void," is not so much thought as feeling, or, to speak more exactly, it is the tinge that feeling gives to thought. The idea of annihilation or of partial nothingness is therefore formed here in the course of the substitution of one thing for another, whenever this substitution is thought by a mind that would prefer to keep the old thing in the place of the new, or at least conceives this preference as possible. The idea implies on the subjective side a preference, on the objective side a substitution, and is nothing else but a combination of, or rather an interference between, this feeling of preference and this idea of substitution.
Such is the mechanism of the operation by which our mind annihilates an object and succeeds in representing in the external world a partial nought. Let us now see how it represents it within itself. We find in ourselves phenomena that are produced, and not phenomena that are not produced. I experience a sensation or an emotion, I conceive an idea, I form a resolution: my consciousness perceives these facts, which are so many _presences_, and there is no moment in which facts of this kind are not present to me. I can, no doubt, interrupt by thought the course of my inner life; I may suppose that I sleep without dreaming or that I have ceased to exist; but at the very instant when I make this supposition, I conceive myself, I imagine myself watching over my slumber or surviving my annihilation, and I give up perceiving myself from within only by taking refuge in the perception of myself from without. That is to say that here again the full always succeeds the full, and that an intelligence that was only intelligence, that had neither regret nor desire, whose movement was governed by the movement of its object, could not even conceive an absence or a void. The conception of a void arises here when consciousness, lagging behind itself, remains attached to the recollection of an old state when another state is already present. It is only a comparison between what is and what could or ought to be, between the full and the full. In a word, whether it be a void of matter or a void of consciousness, _the representation of the void is always a representation which is full and which resolves itself on analysis into two positive elements: the idea, distinct or confused, of a substitution, and the feeling, experienced or imagined, of a desire or a regret_.
It follows from this double analysis that the idea of the absolute nought, in the sense of the annihilation of everything, is a self-destructive idea, a pseudo-idea, a mere word. If suppressing a thing consists in replacing it by another, if thinking the absence of one thing is only possible by the more or less explicit representation of the presence of some other thing, if, in short, annihilation signifies before anything else substitution, the idea of an "annihilation of everything" is as absurd as that of a square circle. The absurdity is not obvious, because there exists no particular object that cannot be supposed annihilated; then, from the fact that there is nothing to prevent each thing in turn being suppressed in thought, we conclude that it is possible to suppose them suppressed altogether. We do not see that suppressing each thing in turn consists precisely in replacing it in proportion and degree by another, and therefore that the suppression of absolutely everything implies a downright contradiction in terms, since the operation consists in destroying the very condition that makes the operation possible.
But the illusion is tenacious. Though suppressing one thing consists _in fact_ in substituting another for it, we do not conclude, we are unwilling to conclude, that the annihilation of a thing _in thought_ implies the substitution in thought of a new thing for the old. We agree that a thing is always replaced by another thing, and even that our mind cannot think the disappearance of an object, external or internal, without thinking--under an indeterminate and confused form, it is true--that another object is substituted for it. But we add that the representation of a disappearance is that of a phenomenon that is produced in space or at least in time, that consequently it still implies the calling up of an image, and that it is precisely here that we have to free ourselves from the imagination in order to appeal to the pure understanding. "Let us therefore no longer speak," it will be said, "of disappearance or annihilation; these are physical operations. Let us no longer represent the object A as annihilated or absent. Let us say simply that we think it "non-existent." To annihilate it is to act on it in time and perhaps also in space; it is to accept, consequently, the condition of spatial and temporal existence, to accept the universal connection that binds an object to all others, and prevents it from disappearing without being at the same time replaced. But we can free ourselves from these conditions; all that is necessary is that by an effort of abstraction we should call up the idea of the object A by itself, that we should agree first to consider it as existing, and then, by a stroke of the intellectual pen, blot out the clause. The object will then be, by our decree, non-existent."
Very well, let us strike out the clause. We must not suppose that our pen-stroke is self-sufficient--that it can be isolated from the rest of things. We shall see that it carries with it, whether we will or no, all that we tried to abstract from. Let us compare together the two ideas--the object A supposed to exist, and the same object supposed "non-existent."
The idea of the object A, supposed existent, is the representation pure and simple of the object A, for we cannot represent an object without attributing to it, by the very fact of representing it, a certain reality. Between thinking an object and thinking it existent, there is absolutely no difference. Kant has put this point in clear light in his criticism of the ontological argument. Then, what is it to think the object A non-existent? To represent it non-existent cannot consist in withdrawing from the idea of the object A the idea of the attribute "existence," since, I repeat, the representation of the existence of the object is inseparable from the representation of the object, and indeed is one with it. To represent the object A non-existent can only consist, therefore, in _adding_ something to the idea of this object: we add to it, in fact, the idea of an _exclusion_ of this particular object by actual reality in general. To think the object A as non-existent is first to think the object and consequently to think it existent; it is then to think that another reality, with which it is incompatible, supplants it. Only, it is useless to represent this latter reality explicitly; we are not concerned with what it is; it is enough for us to know that it drives out the object A, which alone is of interest to us. That is why we think of the expulsion rather than of the cause which expels. But this cause is none the less present to the mind; it is there in the implicit state, that which expels being inseparable from the expulsion as the hand which drives the pen is inseparable from the pen-stroke. The act by which we declare an object unreal therefore posits the existence of the real in general. In other words, to represent an object as unreal cannot consist in depriving it of every kind of existence, since the representation of an object is necessarily that of the object existing. Such an act consists simply in declaring that the existence attached by our mind to the object, and inseparable from its representation, is an existence wholly ideal--that of a mere _possible_. But the "ideality" of an object, and the "simple possibility" of an object, have meaning only in relation to a reality that drives into the region of the ideal, or of the merely possible, the object which is incompatible with it. Suppose the stronger and more substantial existence annihilated: it is the attenuated and weaker existence of the merely possible that becomes the reality itself, and you will no longer be representing the object, then, as non-existent. In other words, and however strange our assertion may seem, _there is_ more, _and not_ less, _in the idea of an object conceived as "not existing" than in the idea of this same object conceived as "existing"; for the idea of the object "not existing" is necessarily the idea of the object "existing" with, in addition, the representation of an exclusion of this object by the actual reality taken in block_.
But it will be claimed that our idea of the non-existent is not yet sufficiently cut loose from every imaginative element, that it is not negative enough. "No matter," we shall be told, "though the unreality of a thing consist in its exclusion by other things; we want to know nothing about that. Are we not free to direct our attention where we please and how we please? Well then, after having called up the idea of an object, and thereby, if you will have it so, supposed it existent, we shall merely couple to our affirmation a 'not,' and that will be enough to make us think it non-existent. This is an operation entirely intellectual, independent of what happens outside the mind. So let us think of anything or let us think of the totality of things, and then write in the margin of our thought the 'not,' which prescribes the rejection of what it contains: we annihilate everything mentally by the mere fact of decreeing its annihilation."--Here we have it! The very root of all the difficulties and errors with which we are confronted is to be found in the power ascribed here to negation. We represent negation as exactly symmetrical with affirmation. We imagine that negation, like affirmation, is self-sufficient. So that negation, like affirmation, would have the power of creating ideas, with this sole difference that they would be negative ideas. By affirming one thing, and then another, and so on _ad infinitum_, I form the idea of "All;" so, by denying one thing and then other things, finally by denying All, I arrive at the idea of Nothing.--But it is just this assimilation which is arbitrary. We fail to see that while affirmation is a complete act of the mind, which can succeed in building up an idea, negation is but the half of an intellectual act, of which the other half is understood, or rather put off to an indefinite future. We fail to see that while affirmation is a purely intellectual act, there enters into negation an element which is not intellectual, and that it is precisely to the intrusion of this foreign element that negation owes its specific character.
To begin with the second point, let us note that to deny always consists in setting aside a possible affirmation.[98] Negation is only an attitude taken by the mind toward an eventual affirmation. When I say, "This table is black," I am speaking of the table; I have seen it black, and my judgment expresses what I have seen. But if I say, "This table is not white," I surely do not express something I have perceived, for I have seen black, and not an absence of white. It is therefore, at bottom, not on the table itself that I bring this judgment to bear, but rather on the judgment that would declare the table white. I judge a judgment and not the table. The proposition, "This table is not white," implies that you might believe it white, that you did believe it such, or that I was going to believe it such. I warn you or myself that this judgment is to be replaced by another (which, it is true, I leave undetermined). Thus, while affirmation bears directly on the thing, negation aims at the thing only indirectly, through an interposed affirmation. An affirmative proposition expresses a judgment on an object; a negative proposition expresses a judgment on a judgment. _Negation, therefore, differs from affirmation properly so called in that it is an affirmation of the second degree: it affirms something of an affirmation which itself affirms something of an object._
But it follows at once from this that negation is not the work of pure mind, I should say of a mind placed before objects and concerned with them alone. When we deny, we give a lesson to others, or it may be to ourselves. We take to task an interlocutor, real or possible, whom we find mistaken and whom we put on his guard. He was affirming something: we tell him he ought to affirm something else (though without specifying the affirmation which must be substituted). There is no longer then, simply, a person and an object; there is, in face of the object, a person speaking to a person, opposing him and aiding him at the same time; there is a beginning of society. Negation aims at some one, and not only, like a purely intellectual operation, at some thing. It is of a pedagogical and social nature. It sets straight or rather warns, the person warned and set straight being possibly, by a kind of doubling, the very person that speaks.
So much for the second point; now for the first. We said that negation is but the half of an intellectual act, of which the other half is left indeterminate. If I pronounce the negative proposition, "This table is not white," I mean that you ought to substitute for your judgment, "The table is white," another judgment. I give you an admonition, and the admonition refers to the necessity of a substitution. As to what you ought to substitute for your affirmation, I tell you nothing, it is true. This may be because I do not know the color of the table; but it is also, it is indeed even more, because the white color is that alone that interests us for the moment, so that I only need to tell you that some other color will have to be substituted for white, without having to say which. A negative judgment is therefore really one which indicates a need of substituting for an affirmative judgment another affirmative judgment, the nature of which, however, is not specified, sometimes because it is not known, more often because it fails to offer any actual interest, the attention bearing only on the substance of the first.
Thus, whenever I add a "not" to an affirmation, whenever I deny, I perform two very definite acts: (1) I interest myself in what one of my fellow-men affirms, or in what he was going to say, or in what might have been said by another _Me_, whom I anticipate; (2) I announce that some other affirmation, whose content I do not specify, will have to be substituted for the one I find before me. Now, in neither of these two acts is there anything but affirmation. The _sui generis_ character of negation is due to superimposing the first of these acts upon the second. It is in vain, then, that we attribute to negation the power of creating ideas _sui generis_, symmetrical with those that affirmation creates, and directed in a contrary sense. No idea will come forth from negation, for it has no other content than that of the affirmative judgment which it judges.
To be more precise, let us consider an existential, instead of an attributive, judgment. If I say, "The object A does not exist," I mean by that, first, that we might believe that the object A exists: how, indeed, can we think of the object A without thinking it existing, and, once again, what difference can there be between the idea of the object A existing and the idea pure and simple of the object A? Therefore, merely by saying "The object A," I attribute to it some kind of existence, though it be that of a mere _possible_, that is to say, of a pure idea. And consequently, in the judgment "The object A is not," there is at first an affirmation such as "The object A has been," or "The object A will be," or, more generally, "The object A exists at least as a mere _possible_." Now, when I add the two words "is not," I can only mean that if we go further, if we erect the possible object into a real object, we shall be mistaken, and that the possible of which I am speaking is excluded from the actual reality as incompatible with it. Judgments that posit the non-existence of a thing are therefore judgments that formulate a contrast between the possible and the actual (that is, between two kinds of _existence_, one thought and the other found), where a person, real or imaginary, wrongly believes that a certain possible is realized. Instead of this possible, there is a reality that differs from it and rejects it: the negative judgment expresses this contrast, but it expresses the contrast in an intentionally incomplete form, because it is addressed to a person who is supposed to be interested exclusively in the possible that is indicated, and is not concerned to know by what kind of reality the possible is replaced. The expression of the substitution is therefore bound to be cut short. Instead of affirming that a second term is substituted for the first, the attention which was originally directed to the first term will be kept fixed upon it, and upon it alone. And, without going beyond the first, we shall implicitly affirm that a second term replaces it in saying that the first "is not." We shall thus judge a judgment instead of judging a thing. We shall warn others or warn ourselves of a possible error instead of supplying positive information. Suppress every intention of this kind, give knowledge back its exclusively scientific or philosophical character, suppose in other words that reality comes itself to inscribe itself on a mind that cares only for things and is not interested in persons: we shall affirm that such or such a thing is, we shall never affirm that a thing is not.
How comes it, then, that affirmation and negation are so persistently put on the same level and endowed with an equal objectivity? How comes it that we have so much difficulty in recognizing that negation is subjective, artificially cut short, relative to the human mind and still more to the social life? The reason is, no doubt, that _both_ negation and affirmation are expressed in propositions, and that _any_ proposition, being formed of _words_, which symbolize _concepts_, is something relative to social life and to the human intellect. Whether I say "The ground is damp" or "The ground is not damp," in both cases the terms "ground" and "damp" are concepts more or less artificially created by the mind of man--extracted, by his free initiative, from the continuity of experience. In both cases the concepts are represented by the same conventional words. In both cases we can say indeed that the proposition aims at a social and pedagogical end, since the first would propagate a truth as the second would prevent an error. From this point of view, which is that of formal logic, to affirm and to deny are indeed two mutually symmetrical acts, of which the first establishes a relation of agreement and the second a relation of disagreement between a subject and an attribute. But how do we fail to see that the symmetry is altogether external and the likeness superficial? Suppose language fallen into disuse, society dissolved, every intellectual initiative, every faculty of self-reflection and of self-judgment atrophied in man: the dampness of the ground will subsist none the less, capable of inscribing itself automatically in sensation and of sending a vague idea to the deadened intellect. The intellect will still affirm, in implicit terms. And consequently, neither distinct concepts, nor words, nor the desire of spreading the truth, nor that of bettering oneself, are of the very essence of the affirmation. But this passive intelligence, mechanically keeping step with experience, neither anticipating nor following the course of the real, would have no wish to deny. It could not receive an imprint of negation; for, once again, that which exists may come to be recorded, but the non-existence of the non-existing cannot. For such an intellect to reach the point of denying, it must awake from its torpor, formulate the disappointment of a real or possible expectation, correct an actual or possible error--in short, propose to teach others or to teach itself.
It is rather difficult to perceive this in the example we have chosen, but the example is indeed the more instructive and the argument the more cogent on that account. If dampness is able automatically to come and record itself, it is the same, it will be said, with non-dampness; for the dry as well as the damp can give impressions to sense, which will transmit them, as more or less distinct ideas, to the intelligence. In this sense the negation of dampness is as objective a thing, as purely intellectual, as remote from every pedagogical intention, as affirmation.--But let us look at it more closely: we shall see that the negative proposition, "The ground is not damp," and the affirmative proposition, "The ground is dry," have entirely different contents. The second implies that we know the dry, that we have experienced the specific sensations, tactile or visual for example, that are at the base of this idea. The first requires nothing of the sort; it could equally well have been formulated by an intelligent fish, who had never perceived anything but the wet. It would be necessary, it is true, that this fish should have risen to the distinction between the real and the possible, and that he should care to anticipate the error of his fellow-fishes, who doubtless consider as alone possible the condition of wetness in which they actually live. Keep strictly to the terms of the proposition, "The ground is not damp," and you will find that it means two things: (1) that one might believe that the ground is damp, (2) that the dampness is replaced in fact by a certain quality _x_. This quality is left indeterminate, either because we have no positive knowledge of it, or because it has no actual interest for the person to whom the negation is addressed. To deny, therefore, always consists in presenting in an abridged form a system of two affirmations: the one determinate, which applies to a certain _possible_; the other indeterminate, referring to the unknown or indifferent reality that supplants this possibility. The second affirmation is virtually contained in the judgment we apply to the first, a judgment which is negation itself. And what gives negation its subjective character is precisely this, that in the discovery of a replacement it takes account only of the replaced, and is not concerned with what replaces. The replaced exists only as a conception of the mind. It is necessary, in order to continue to see it, and consequently in order to speak of it, to turn our back on the reality, which flows from the past to the present, advancing from behind. It is this that we do when we deny. We discover the change, or more generally the substitution, as a traveller would see the course of his carriage if he looked out behind, and only knew at each moment the point at which he had ceased to be; he could never determine his actual position except by relation to that which he had just quitted, instead of grasping it in itself.
To sum up, for a mind which should follow purely and simply the thread of experience, there would be no void, no nought, even relative or partial, no possible negation. Such a mind would see facts succeed facts, states succeed states, things succeed things. What it would note at each moment would be things existing, states appearing, events happening. It would live in the actual, and, if it were capable of judging, it would never affirm anything except the existence of the present.
Endow this mind with memory, and especially with the desire to dwell on the past; give it the faculty of dissociating and of distinguishing: it will no longer only note the present state of the passing reality; it will represent the passing as a change, and therefore as a contrast between what has been and what is. And as there is no essential difference between a past that we remember and a past that we imagine, it will quickly rise to the idea of the "possible" in general.
It will thus be shunted on to the siding of negation. And especially it will be at the point of representing a disappearance. But it will not yet have reached it. To represent that a thing has disappeared, it is not enough to perceive a contrast between the past and the present; it is necessary besides to turn our back on the present, to dwell on the past, and to think the contrast of the past with the present in terms of the past only, without letting the present appear in it.
The idea of annihilation is therefore not a pure idea; it implies that we regret the past or that we conceive it as regrettable, that we have some reason to linger over it. The idea arises when the phenomenon of substitution is cut in two by a mind which considers only the first half, because that alone interests it. Suppress all interest, all feeling, and there is nothing left but the reality that flows, together with the knowledge ever renewed that it impresses on us of its present state.
From annihilation to negation, which is a more general operation, there is now only a step. All that is necessary is to represent the contrast of what is, not only with what has been, but also with all that might have been. And we must express this contrast as a function of what might have been, and not of what is; we must affirm the existence of the actual while looking only at the possible. The formula we thus obtain no longer expresses merely a disappointment of the individual; it is made to correct or guard against an error, which is rather supposed to be the error of another. In this sense, negation has a pedagogical and social character.
Now, once negation is formulated, it presents an aspect symmetrical with that of affirmation; if affirmation affirms an objective reality, it seems that negation must affirm a non-reality equally objective, and, so to say, equally real. In which we are both right and wrong: wrong, because negation cannot be objectified, in so far as it is negative; right, however, in that the negation of a thing implies the latent affirmation of its replacement by something else, which we systematically leave on one side. But the negative form of negation benefits by the affirmation at the bottom of it. Bestriding the positive solid reality to which it is attached, this phantom objectifies itself. Thus is formed the idea of the void or of a partial nought, a thing being supposed to be replaced, not by another thing, but by a void which it leaves, that is, by the negation of itself. Now, as this operation works on anything whatever, we suppose it performed on each thing in turn, and finally on all things in block. We thus obtain the idea of absolute Nothing. If now we analyze this idea of Nothing, we find that it is, at bottom, the idea of Everything, together with a movement of the mind that keeps jumping from one thing to another, refuses to stand still, and concentrates all its attention on this refusal by never determining its actual position except by relation to that which it has just left. It is therefore an idea eminently comprehensive and full, as full and comprehensive as the idea of _All_, to which it is very closely akin.
How then can the idea of Nought be opposed to that of All? Is it not plain that this is to oppose the full to the full, and that the question, "Why does something exist?" is consequently without meaning, a pseudo-problem raised about a pseudo-idea? Yet we must say once more why this phantom of a problem haunts the mind with such obstinacy. In vain do we show that in the idea of an "annihilation of the real" there is only the image of all realities expelling one another endlessly, in a circle; in vain do we add that the idea of non-existence is only that of the expulsion of an imponderable existence, or a "merely possible" existence, by a more substantial existence which would then be the true reality; in vain do we find in the _sui generis_ form of negation an element which is not intellectual--negation being the judgment of a judgment, an admonition given to some one else or to oneself, so that it is absurd to attribute to negation the power of creating ideas of a new kind, viz. ideas without content;--in spite of all, the conviction persists that before things, or at least under things, there is "Nothing." If we seek the reason of this fact, we shall find it precisely in the feeling, in the social and, so to speak, practical element, that gives its specific form to negation. The greatest philosophic difficulties arise, as we have said, from the fact that the forms of human action venture outside of their proper sphere. We are made in order to act as much as, and more than, in order to think--or rather, when we follow the bent of our nature, it is in order to act that we think. It is therefore no wonder that the habits of action give their tone to those of thought, and that our mind always perceives things in the same order in which we are accustomed to picture them when we propose to act on them. Now, it is unquestionable, as we remarked above, that every human action has its starting-point in a dissatisfaction, and thereby in a feeling of absence. We should not act if we did not set before ourselves an end, and we seek a thing only because we feel the lack of it. Our action proceeds thus from "nothing" to "something," and its very essence is to embroider "something" on the canvas of "nothing." The truth is that the "nothing" concerned here is the absence not so much of a thing as of a utility. If I bring a visitor into a room that I have not yet furnished, I say to him that "there is nothing in it." Yet I know the room is full of air; but, as we do not sit on air, the room truly contains nothing that at this moment, for the visitor and for myself, counts for anything. In a general way, human work consists in creating utility; and, as long as the work is not done, there is "nothing"--nothing that we want. Our life is thus spent in filling voids, which our intellect conceives under the influence, by no means intellectual, of desire and of regret, under the pressure of vital necessities; and if we mean by void an absence of utility and not of things, we may say, in this quite relative sense, that we are constantly going from the void to the full: such is the direction which our action takes. Our speculation cannot help doing the same; and, naturally, it passes from the relative sense to the absolute sense, since it is exercised on things themselves and not on the utility they have for us. Thus is implanted in us the idea that reality fills a void, and that Nothing, conceived as an absence of everything, pre-exists before all things in right, if not in fact. It is this illusion that we have tried to remove by showing that the idea of Nothing, if we try to see in it that of an annihilation of all things, is self-destructive and reduced to a mere word; and that if, on the contrary, it is truly an idea, then we find in it as much matter as in the idea of All.
* * * * *
This long analysis has been necessary to show that _a self-sufficient reality is not necessarily a reality foreign to duration_. If we pass (consciously or unconsciously) through the idea of the nought in order to reach that of being, the being to which we come is a logical or mathematical essence, therefore non-temporal. And, consequently, a static conception of the real is forced on us: everything appears given once for all, in eternity. But we must accustom ourselves to think being directly, without making a detour, without first appealing to the phantom of the nought which interposes itself between it and us. We must strive to see in order to see, and no longer to see in order to act. Then the Absolute is revealed very near us and, in a certain measure, in us. It is of psychological and not of mathematical nor logical essence. It lives with us. Like us, but in certain aspects infinitely more concentrated and more gathered up in itself, it _endures_.
But do we ever think true duration? Here again a direct taking possession is necessary. It is no use trying to approach duration: we must install ourselves within it straight away. This is what the intellect generally refuses to do, accustomed as it is to think the moving by means of the unmovable.
The function of the intellect is to preside over actions. Now, in action, it is the result that interests us; the means matter little provided the end is attained. Thence it comes that we are altogether bent on the end to be realized, generally trusting ourselves to it in order that the idea may become an act; and thence it comes also that only the goal where our activity will rest is pictured explicitly to our mind: the movements constituting the action itself either elude our consciousness or reach it only confusedly. Let us consider a very simple act, like that of lifting the arm. Where should we be if we had to imagine beforehand all the elementary contractions and tensions this act involves, or even to perceive them, one by one, as they are accomplished? But the mind is carried immediately to the end, that is to say, to the schematic and simplified vision of the act supposed accomplished. Then, if no antagonistic idea neutralizes the effect of the first idea, the appropriate movements come of themselves to fill out the plan, drawn in some way by the void of its gaps. The intellect, then, only represents to the activity ends to attain, that is to say, points of rest. And, from one end attained to another end attained, from one rest to another rest, our activity is carried by a series of leaps, during which our consciousness is turned away as much as possible from the movement going on, to regard only the anticipated image of the movement accomplished.
Now, in order that it may represent as unmovable the result of the act which is being accomplished, the intellect must perceive, as also unmovable, the surroundings in which this result is being framed. Our activity is fitted into the material world. If matter appeared to us as a perpetual flowing, we should assign no termination to any of our actions. We should feel each of them dissolve as fast as it was accomplished, and we should not anticipate an ever-fleeting future. In order that our activity may leap from an _act_ to an _act_, it is necessary that matter should pass from a _state_ to a _state_, for it is only into a state of the material world that action can fit a result, so as to be accomplished. But is it thus that matter presents itself?
_A priori_ we may presume that our perception manages to apprehend matter with this bias. Sensory organs and motor organs are in fact coördinated with each other. Now, the first symbolize our faculty of perceiving, as the second our faculty of acting. The organism thus evidences, in a visible and tangible form, the perfect accord of perception and action. So if our activity always aims at a _result_ into which it is momentarily fitted, our perception must retain of the material world, at every moment, only a _state_ in which it is provisionally placed. This is the most natural hypothesis. And it is easy to see that experience confirms it.
From our first glance at the world, before we even make our _bodies_ in it, we distinguish _qualities_. Color succeeds to color, sound to sound, resistance to resistance, etc. Each of these qualities, taken separately, is a state that seems to persist as such, immovable until another replaces it. Yet each of these qualities resolves itself, on analysis, into an enormous number of elementary movements. Whether we see in it vibrations or whether we represent it in any other way, one fact is certain, it is that every quality is change. In vain, moreover, shall we seek beneath the change the thing which changes: it is always provisionally, and in order to satisfy our imagination, that we attach the movement to a mobile. The mobile flies for ever before the pursuit of science, which is concerned with mobility alone. In the smallest discernible fraction of a second, in the almost instantaneous perception of a sensible quality, there may be trillions of oscillations which repeat themselves. The permanence of a sensible quality consists in this repetition of movements, as the persistence of life consists in a series of palpitations. The primal function of perception is precisely to grasp a series of elementary changes under the form of a quality or of a simple state, by a work of condensation. The greater the power of acting bestowed upon an animal species, the more numerous, probably, are the elementary changes that its faculty of perceiving concentrates into one of its instants. And the progress must be continuous, in nature, from the beings that vibrate almost in unison with the oscillations of the ether, up to those that embrace trillions of these oscillations in the shortest of their simple perceptions. The first feel hardly anything but movements; the others perceive quality. The first are almost caught up in the running-gear of things; the others react, and the tension of their faculty of acting is probably proportional to the concentration of their faculty of perceiving. The progress goes on even in humanity itself. A man is so much the more a "man of action" as he can embrace in a glance a greater number of events: he who perceives successive events one by one will allow himself to be led by them; he who grasps them as a whole will dominate them. In short, the qualities of matter are so many stable views that we take of its instability.
Now, in the continuity of sensible qualities we mark off the boundaries of bodies. Each of these bodies really changes at every moment. In the first place, it resolves itself into a group of qualities, and every quality, as we said, consists of a succession of elementary movements. But, even if we regard the quality as a stable state, the body is still unstable in that it changes qualities without ceasing. The body pre-eminently--that which we are most justified in isolating within the continuity of matter, because it constitutes a relatively closed system--is the living body; it is, moreover, for it that we cut out the others within the whole. Now, life is an evolution. We concentrate a period of this evolution in a stable view which we call a form, and, when the change has become considerable enough to overcome the fortunate inertia of our perception, we say that the body has changed its form. But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual _change of_ form: _form is only a snapshot view of a transition_. Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real. When the successive images do not differ from each other too much, we consider them all as the waxing and waning of a single _mean_ image, or as the deformation of this image in different directions. And to this mean we really allude when we speak of the _essence_ of a thing, or of the thing itself.
Finally things, once constituted, show on the surface, by their changes of situation, the profound changes that are being accomplished within the Whole. We say then that they _act_ on one another. This action appears to us, no doubt, in the form of movement. But from the mobility of the movement we turn away as much as we can; what interests us is, as we said above, the unmovable plan of the movement rather than the movement itself. Is it a simple movement? We ask ourselves _where_ it is going. It is by its direction, that is to say, by the position of its provisional end, that we represent it at every moment. Is it a complex movement? We would know above all _what_ is going on, _what_ the movement is doing--in other words, the _result_ obtained or the presiding _intention_. Examine closely what is in your mind when you speak of an action in course of accomplishment. The idea of change is there, I am willing to grant, but it is hidden in the penumbra. In the full light is the motionless plan of the act supposed accomplished. It is by this, and by this only, that the complex act is distinguished and defined. We should be very much embarrassed if we had to imagine the movements inherent in the actions of eating, drinking, fighting, etc. It is enough for us to know, in a general and indefinite way, that all these acts are movements. Once that side of the matter has been settled, we simply seek to represent the _general plan_ of each of these complex movements, that is to say the _motionless design_ that underlies them. Here again knowledge bears on a state rather than on a change. It is therefore the same with this third case as with the others. Whether the movement be qualitative or evolutionary or extensive, the mind manages to take stable views of the instability. And thence the mind derives, as we have just shown, three kinds of representations: (1) qualities, (2) forms of essences, (3) acts.
To these three ways of seeing correspond three categories of words: _adjectives_, _substantives_, and _verbs_, which are the primordial elements of language. Adjectives and substantives therefore symbolize _states_. But the verb itself, if we keep to the clear part of the idea it calls up, hardly expresses anything else.
* * * * *
Now, if we try to characterize more precisely our natural attitude towards Becoming, this is what we find. Becoming is infinitely varied. That which goes from yellow to green is not like that which goes from green to blue: they are different _qualitative_ movements. That which goes from flower to fruit is not like that which goes from larva to nymph and from nymph to perfect insect: they are different _evolutionary_ movements. The action of eating or of drinking is not like the action of fighting: they are different _extensive_ movements. And these three kinds of movement themselves--qualitative, evolutionary, extensive--differ profoundly. The trick of our perception, like that of our intelligence, like that of our language, consists in extracting from these profoundly different becomings the single representation of becoming _in general_, undefined becoming, a mere abstraction which by itself says nothing and of which, indeed, it is very rarely that we think. To this idea, always the same, and always obscure or unconscious, we then join, in each particular case, one or several clear images that represent _states_ and which serve to distinguish all becomings from each other. It is this composition of a specified and definite state with change general and undefined that we substitute for the specific change. An infinite multiplicity of becomings variously colored, so to speak, passes before our eyes: we manage so that we see only differences of color, that is to say, differences of state, beneath which there is supposed to flow, hidden from our view, a becoming always and everywhere the same, invariably colorless.
Suppose we wish to portray on a screen a living picture, such as the marching past of a regiment. There is one way in which it might first occur to us to do it. That would be to cut out jointed figures representing the soldiers, to give to each of them the movement of marching, a movement varying from individual to individual although common to the human species, and to throw the whole on the screen. We should need to spend on this little game an enormous amount of work, and even then we should obtain but a very poor result: how could it, at its best, reproduce the suppleness and variety of life? Now, there is another way of proceeding, more easy and at the same time more effective. It is to take a series of snapshots of the passing regiment and to throw these instantaneous views on the screen, so that they replace each other very rapidly. This is what the cinematograph does. With photographs, each of which represents the regiment in a fixed attitude, it reconstitutes the mobility of the regiment marching. It is true that if we had to do with photographs alone, however much we might look at them, we should never see them animated: with immobility set beside immobility, even endlessly, we could never make movement. In order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement somewhere. The movement does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus. It is because the film of the cinematograph unrolls, bringing in turn the different photographs of the scene to continue each other, that each actor of the scene recovers his mobility; he strings all his successive attitudes on the invisible movement of the film. The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, _movement in general_, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the _mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind_.
Of the altogether practical character of this operation there is no possible doubt. Each of our acts aims at a certain insertion of our will into the reality. There is, between our body and other bodies, an arrangement like that of the pieces of glass that compose a kaleidoscopic picture. Our activity goes from an arrangement to a rearrangement, each time no doubt giving the kaleidoscope a new shake, but not interesting itself in the shake, and seeing only the new picture. Our knowledge of the operation of nature must be exactly symmetrical, therefore, with the interest we take in our own operation. In this sense we may say, if we are not abusing this kind of illustration, that _the cinematographical character of our knowledge of things is due to the kaleidoscopic character of our adaptation to them_.
The cinematographical method is therefore the only practical method, since it consists in making the general character of knowledge form itself on that of action, while expecting that the detail of each act should depend in its turn on that of knowledge. In order that action may always be enlightened, intelligence must always be present in it; but intelligence, in order thus to accompany the progress of activity and ensure its direction, must begin by adopting its rhythm. Action is discontinuous, like every pulsation of life; discontinuous, therefore, is knowledge. The mechanism of the faculty of knowing has been constructed on this plan. Essentially practical, can it be of use, such as it is, for speculation? Let us try with it to follow reality in its windings, and see what will happen.
I take of the continuity of a particular becoming a series of views, which I connect together by "becoming in general." But of course I cannot stop there. What is not determinable is not representable: of "becoming in general" I have only a verbal knowledge. As the letter _x_ designates a certain unknown quantity, whatever it may be, so my "becoming in general," always the same, symbolizes here a certain transition of which I have taken some snapshots; of the transition itself it teaches me nothing. Let me then concentrate myself wholly on the transition, and, between any two snapshots, endeavor to realize what is going on. As I apply the same method, I obtain the same result; a third view merely slips in between the two others. I may begin again as often as I will, I may set views alongside of views for ever, I shall obtain nothing else. The application of the cinematographical method therefore leads to a perpetual recommencement, during which the mind, never able to satisfy itself and never finding where to rest, persuades itself, no doubt, that it imitates by its instability the very movement of the real. But though, by straining itself to the point of giddiness, it may end by giving itself the illusion of mobility, its operation has not advanced it a step, since it remains as far as ever from its goal. In order to advance with the moving reality, you must replace yourself within it. Install yourself within change, and you will grasp at once both change itself and the successive states in which _it might_ at any instant be immobilized. But with these successive states, perceived from without as real and no longer as potential immobilities, you will never reconstitute movement. Call them _qualities_, _forms_, _positions_, or _intentions_, as the case may be, multiply the number of them as you will, let the interval between two consecutive states be infinitely small: before the intervening movement you will always experience the disappointment of the child who tries by clapping his hands together to crush the smoke. The movement slips through the interval, because every attempt to reconstitute change out of states implies the absurd proposition, that movement is made of immobilities.
Philosophy perceived this as soon as it opened its eyes. The arguments of Zeno of Elea, although formulated with a very different intention, have no other meaning.
Take the flying arrow. At every moment, says Zeno, it is motionless, for it cannot have time to move, that is, to occupy at least two successive positions, unless at least two moments are allowed it. At a given moment, therefore, it is at rest at a given point. Motionless in each point of its course, it is motionless during all the time that it is moving.
Yes, if we suppose that the arrow can ever _be_ in a point of its course. Yes again, if the arrow, which is moving, ever coincides with a position, which is motionless. But the arrow never _is_ in any point of its course. The most we can say is that it might be there, in this sense, that it passes there and might stop there. It is true that if it did stop there, it would be at rest there, and at this point it is no longer movement that we should have to do with. The truth is that if the arrow leaves the point A to fall down at the point B, its movement AB is as simple, as indecomposable, in so far as it is movement, as the tension of the bow that shoots it. As the shrapnel, bursting before it falls to the ground, covers the explosive zone with an indivisible danger, so the arrow which goes from A to B displays with a single stroke, although over a certain extent of duration, its indivisible mobility. Suppose an elastic stretched from A to B, could you divide its extension? The course of the arrow is this very extension; it is equally simple and equally undivided. It is a single and unique bound. You fix a point C in the interval passed, and say that at a certain moment the arrow was in C. If it had been there, it would have been stopped there, and you would no longer have had a flight from A to B, but _two_ flights, one from A to C and the other from C to B, with an interval of rest. A single movement is entirely, by the hypothesis, a movement between two stops; if there are intermediate stops, it is no longer a single movement. At bottom, the illusion arises from this, that the movement, _once effected_, has laid along its course a motionless trajectory on which we can count as many immobilities as we will. From this we conclude that the movement, _whilst being effected_, lays at each instant beneath it a position with which it coincides. We do not see that the trajectory is created in one stroke, although a certain time is required for it; and that though we can divide at will the trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation, which is an act in progress and not a thing. To suppose that the moving body _is_ at a point of its course is to cut the course in two by a snip of the scissors at this point, and to substitute two trajectories for the single trajectory which we were first considering. It is to distinguish two successive acts where, by the hypothesis, there is only one. In short, it is to attribute to the course itself of the arrow everything that can be said of the interval that the arrow has traversed, that is to say, to admit _a priori_ the absurdity that movement coincides with immobility.
We shall not dwell here on the three other arguments of Zeno. We have examined them elsewhere. It is enough to point out that they all consist in applying the movement to the line traversed, and supposing that what is true of the line is true of the movement. The line, for example, may be divided into as many parts as we wish, of any length that we wish, and it is always the same line. From this we conclude that we have the right to suppose the movement articulated as we wish, and that it is always the same movement. We thus obtain a series of absurdities that all express the same fundamental absurdity. But the possibility of applying the movement _to_ the line traversed exists only for an observer who keeping outside the movement and seeing at every instant the possibility of a stop, tries to reconstruct the real movement with these possible immobilities. The absurdity vanishes as soon as we adopt by thought the continuity of the real movement, a continuity of which every one of us is conscious whenever he lifts an arm or advances a step. We feel then indeed that the line passed over between two stops is described with a single indivisible stroke, and that we seek in vain to practice on the movement, which traces the line, divisions corresponding, each to each, with the divisions arbitrarily chosen of the line once it has been traced. The line traversed by the moving body lends itself to any kind of division, because it has no internal organization. But all movement is articulated inwardly. It is either an indivisible bound (which may occupy, nevertheless, a very long duration) or a series of indivisible bounds. Take the articulations of this movement into account, or give up speculating on its nature.
When Achilles pursues the tortoise, each of his steps must be treated as indivisible, and so must each step of the tortoise. After a certain number of steps, Achilles will have overtaken the tortoise. There is nothing more simple. If you insist on dividing the two motions further, distinguish both on the one side and on the other, in the course of Achilles and in that of the tortoise, the _sub-multiples_ of the steps of each of them; but respect the natural articulations of the two courses. As long as you respect them, no difficulty will arise, because you will follow the indications of experience. But Zeno's device is to reconstruct the movement of Achilles according to a law arbitrarily chosen. Achilles with a first step is supposed to arrive at the point where the tortoise was, with a second step at the point which it has moved to while he was making the first, and so on. In this case, Achilles would always have a new step to take. But obviously, to overtake the tortoise, he goes about it in quite another way. The movement considered by Zeno would only be the equivalent of the movement of Achilles if we could treat the movement as we treat the interval passed through, decomposable and recomposable at will. Once you subscribe to this first absurdity, all the others follow.[99]
Nothing would be easier, now, than to extend Zeno's argument to qualitative becoming and to evolutionary becoming. We should find the same contradictions in these. That the child can become a youth, ripen to maturity and decline to old age, we understand when we consider that vital evolution is here the reality itself. Infancy, adolescence, maturity, old age, are mere views of the mind, _possible stops_ imagined by us, from without, along the continuity of a progress. On the contrary, let childhood, adolescence, maturity and old age be given as integral parts of the evolution, they become _real stops_, and we can no longer conceive how evolution is possible, for rests placed beside rests will never be equivalent to a movement. How, with what is made, can we reconstitute what is being made? How, for instance, from childhood once posited as a _thing_, shall we pass to adolescence, when, by the hypothesis, childhood only is given? If we look at it closely, we shall see that our habitual manner of speaking, which is fashioned after our habitual manner of thinking, leads us to actual logical dead-locks--dead-locks to which we allow ourselves to be led without anxiety, because we feel confusedly that we can always get out of them if we like: all that we have to do, in fact, is to give up the cinematographical habits of our intellect. When we say "The child becomes a man," let us take care not to fathom too deeply the literal meaning of the expression, or we shall find that, when we posit the subject "child," the attribute "man" does not yet apply to it, and that, when we express the attribute "man," it applies no more to the subject "child." The reality, which is the _transition_ from childhood to manhood, has slipped between our fingers. We have only the imaginary stops "child" and "man," and we are very near to saying that one of these stops _is_ the other, just as the arrow of Zeno _is_, according to that philosopher, at all the points of the course. The truth is that if language here were molded on reality, we should not say "The child becomes the man," but "There is becoming from the child to the man." In the first proposition, "becomes" is a verb of indeterminate meaning, intended to mask the absurdity into which we fall when we attribute the state "man" to the subject "child." It behaves in much the same way as the movement, always the same, of the cinematographical film, a movement hidden in the apparatus and whose function it is to superpose the successive pictures on one another in order to imitate the movement of the real object. In the second proposition, "becoming" is a subject. It comes to the front. It is the reality itself; childhood and manhood are then only possible stops, mere views of the mind; we now have to do with the objective movement itself, and no longer with its cinematographical imitation. But the first manner of expression is alone conformable to our habits of language. We must, in order to adopt the second, escape from the cinematographical mechanism of thought.
We must make complete abstraction of this mechanism, if we wish to get rid at one stroke of the theoretical absurdities that the question of movement raises. All is obscure, all is contradictory when we try, with states, to build up a transition. The obscurity is cleared up, the contradiction vanishes, as soon as we place ourselves along the transition, in order to distinguish states in it by making cross cuts therein in thought. The reason is that there is _more_ in the transition than the series of states, that is to say, the possible cuts--_more_ in the movement than the series of positions, that is to say, the possible stops. Only, the first way of looking at things is conformable to the processes of the human mind; the second requires, on the contrary, that we reverse the bent of our intellectual habits. No wonder, then, if philosophy at first recoiled before such an effort. The Greeks trusted to nature, trusted the natural propensity of the mind, trusted language above all, in so far as it naturally externalizes thought. Rather than lay blame on the attitude of thought and language toward the course of things, they preferred to pronounce the course of things itself to be wrong.
Such, indeed, was the sentence passed by the philosophers of the Eleatic school. And they passed it without any reservation whatever. As becoming shocks the habits of thought and fits ill into the molds of language, they declared it unreal. In spatial movement and in change in general they saw only pure illusion. This conclusion could be softened down without changing the premisses, by saying that the reality changes, but that it _ought not_ to change. Experience confronts us with becoming: that is _sensible_ reality. But the _intelligible_ reality, that which _ought_ to be, is more real still, and that reality does not change. Beneath the qualitative becoming, beneath the evolutionary becoming, beneath the extensive becoming, the mind must seek that which defies change, the definable quality, the form or essence, the end. Such was the fundamental principle of the philosophy which developed throughout the classic age, the philosophy of Forms, or, to use a term more akin to the Greek, the philosophy of Ideas.
The word [Greek: eidos], which we translate here by "Idea," has, in fact, this threefold meaning. It denotes (1) the quality, (2) the form or essence, (3) the end or _design_ (in the sense of _intention_) of the act being performed, that is to say, at bottom, the _design_ (in the sense of _drawing_) of the act supposed accomplished. _These three aspects are those of the adjective, substantive and verb, and correspond to the three essential categories of language._ After the explanations we have given above, we might, and perhaps we ought to, translate [Greek: eidos] by "view" or rather by "moment." For [Greek: eidos] is the stable view taken of the instability of things: the _quality_, which is a moment of becoming; the _form_, which is a moment of evolution; the _essence_, which is the mean form above and below which the other forms are arranged as alterations of the mean; finally, the intention or _mental design_ which presides over the action being accomplished, and which is nothing else, we said, than the _material design_, traced out and contemplated beforehand, of the action accomplished. To reduce things to Ideas is therefore to resolve becoming into its principal moments, each of these being, moreover, by the hypothesis, screened from the laws of time and, as it were, plucked out of eternity. That is to say that we end in the philosophy of Ideas when we apply the cinematographical mechanism of the intellect to the analysis of the real.
But, when we put immutable Ideas at the base of the moving reality, a whole physics, a whole cosmology, a whole theology follows necessarily. We must insist on the point. Not that we mean to summarize in a few pages a philosophy so complex and so comprehensive as that of the Greeks. But, since we have described the cinematographical mechanism of the intellect, it is important that we should show to what idea of reality the play of this mechanism leads. It is the very idea, we believe, that we find in the ancient philosophy. The main lines of the doctrine that was developed from Plato to Plotinus, passing through Aristotle (and even, in a certain measure, through the Stoics), have nothing accidental, nothing contingent, nothing that must be regarded as a philosopher's fancy. They indicate the vision that a systematic intellect obtains of the universal becoming when regarding it by means of snapshots, taken at intervals, of its flowing. So that, even to-day, we shall philosophize in the manner of the Greeks, we shall rediscover, without needing to know them, such and such of their general conclusions, in the exact proportion that we trust in the cinematographical instinct of our thought.
* * * * *
We said there is _more_ in a movement than in the successive positions attributed to the moving object, _more_ in a becoming than in the forms passed through in turn, _more_ in the evolution of form than the forms assumed one after another. Philosophy can therefore derive terms of the second kind from those of the first, but not the first from the second: from the first terms speculation must take its start. But the intellect reverses the order of the two groups; and, on this point, ancient philosophy proceeds as the intellect does. It installs itself in the immutable, it posits only Ideas. Yet becoming exists: it is a fact. How, then, having posited immutability alone, shall we make change come forth from it? Not by the addition of anything, for, by the hypothesis, there exists nothing positive outside Ideas. It must therefore be by a diminution. So at the base of ancient philosophy lies necessarily this postulate: that there is more in the motionless than in the moving, and that we pass from immutability to becoming by way of diminution or attenuation.
It is therefore something negative, or zero at most, that must be added to Ideas to obtain change. In that consists the Platonic "non-being," the Aristotelian "matter"--a metaphysical zero which, joined to the Idea, like the arithmetical zero to unity, multiplies it in space and time. By it the motionless and simple Idea is refracted into a movement spread out indefinitely. In right, there ought to be nothing but immutable Ideas, immutably fitted to each other. In fact, matter comes to add to them its void, and thereby lets loose the universal becoming. It is an elusive nothing, that creeps between the Ideas and creates endless agitation, eternal disquiet, like a suspicion insinuated between two loving hearts. Degrade the immutable Ideas: you obtain, by that alone, the perpetual flux of things. The Ideas or Forms are the whole of intelligible reality, that is to say, of truth, in that they represent, all together, the theoretical equilibrium of Being. As to sensible reality, it is a perpetual oscillation from one side to the other of this point of equilibrium.
Hence, throughout the whole philosophy of Ideas there is a certain conception of duration, as also of the relation of time to eternity. He who installs himself in becoming sees in duration the very life of things, the fundamental reality. The Forms, which the mind isolates and stores up in concepts, are then only snapshots of the changing reality. They are moments gathered along the course of time; and, just because we have cut the thread that binds them to time, they no longer endure. They tend to withdraw into their own definition, that is to say, into the artificial reconstruction and symbolical expression which is their intellectual equivalent. They enter into eternity, if you will; but what is eternal in them is just what is unreal. On the contrary, if we treat becoming by the cinematographical method, the Forms are no longer snapshots taken of the change, they are its constitutive elements, they represent all that is positive in Becoming. Eternity no longer hovers over time, as an abstraction; it underlies time, as a reality. Such is exactly, on this point, the attitude of the philosophy of Forms or Ideas. It establishes between eternity and time the same relation as between a piece of gold and the small change--change so small that payment goes on for ever without the debt being paid off. The debt could be paid at once with the piece of gold. It is this that Plato expresses in his magnificent language when he says that God, unable to make the world eternal, gave it Time, "a moving image of eternity."[100]
Hence also arises a certain conception of extension, which is at the base of the philosophy of Ideas, although it has not been so explicitly brought out. Let us imagine a mind placed alongside becoming, and adopting its movement. Each successive state, each quality, each form, in short, will be seen by it as a mere cut made by thought in the universal becoming. It will be found that form is essentially extended, inseparable as it is from the extensity of the becoming which has materialized it in the course of its flow. Every form thus occupies space, as it occupies time. But the philosophy of Ideas follows the inverse direction. It starts from the Form; it sees in the Form the very essence of reality. It does not take Form as a snapshot of becoming; it posits Forms in the eternal; of this motionless eternity, then, duration and becoming are supposed to be only the degradation. Form thus posited, independent of time, is then no longer what is found in a perception; it is a _concept_. And, as a reality of the conceptual order occupies no more of extension than it does of duration, the Forms must be stationed outside space as well as above time. Space and time have therefore necessarily, in ancient philosophy, the same origin and the same value. The same diminution of being is expressed both by extension in space and detention in time. Both of these are but the distance between what is and what ought to be. From the standpoint of ancient philosophy, space and time can be nothing but the field that an incomplete reality, or rather a reality that has gone astray from itself, needs in order to run in quest of itself. Only it must be admitted that the field is created as the hunting progresses, and that the hunting in some way deposits the field beneath it. Move an imaginary pendulum, a mere mathematical point, from its position of equilibrium: a perpetual oscillation is started, along which points are placed next to points, and moments succeed moments. The space and time which thus arise have no more "positivity" than the movement itself. They represent the remoteness of the position artificially given to the pendulum from its normal position, _what it lacks_ in order to regain its natural stability. Bring it back to its normal position: space, time and motion shrink to a mathematical point. Just so, human reasonings are drawn out into an endless chain, but are at once swallowed up in the truth seized by intuition, for their extension in space and time is only the distance, so to speak, between thought and truth.[101] So of extension and duration in relation to pure Forms or Ideas. The sensible forms are before us, ever about to recover their ideality, ever prevented by the matter they bear in them, that is to say, by their inner void, by the interval between what they are and what they ought to be. They are for ever on the point of recovering themselves, for ever occupied in losing themselves. An inflexible law condemns them, like the rock of Sisyphus, to fall back when they are almost touching the summit, and this law, which has projected them into space and time, is nothing other than the very constancy of their original insufficiency. The alternations of generation and decay, the evolutions ever beginning over and over again, the infinite repetition of the cycles of celestial spheres--this all represents merely a certain fundamental deficit, in which materiality consists. Fill up this deficit: at once you suppress space and time, that is to say, the endlessly renewed oscillations around a stable equilibrium always aimed at, never reached. Things re-enter into each other. What was extended in space is contracted into pure Form. And past, present, and future shrink into a single moment, which is eternity.
This amounts to saying that physics is but logic spoiled. In this proposition the whole philosophy of Ideas is summarized. And in it also is the hidden principle of the philosophy that is innate in our understanding. If immutability is more than becoming, form is more than change, and it is by a veritable fall that the logical system of Ideas, rationally subordinated and coördinated among themselves, is scattered into a physical series of objects and events accidentally placed one after another. The generative idea of a poem is developed in thousands of imaginations which are materialized in phrases that spread themselves out in words. And the more we descend from the motionless idea, wound on itself, to the words that unwind it, the more room is left for contingency and choice. Other metaphors, expressed by other words, might have arisen; an image is called up by an image, a word by a word. All these words run now one after another, seeking in vain, by themselves, to give back the simplicity of the generative idea. Our ear only hears the words: it therefore perceives only accidents. But our mind, by successive bounds, leaps from the words to the images, from the images to the original idea, and so gets back, from the perception of words--accidents called up by accidents--to the conception of the Idea that posits its own being. So the philosopher proceeds, confronted with the universe. Experience makes to pass before his eyes phenomena which run, they also, one behind another in an accidental order determined by circumstances of time and place. This physical order--a degeneration of the logical order--is nothing else but the fall of the logical into space and time. But the philosopher, ascending again from the percept to the concept, sees condensed into the logical all the positive reality that the physical possesses. His intellect, doing away with the materiality that lessens being, grasps being itself in the immutable system of Ideas. Thus Science is obtained, which appears to us, complete and ready-made, as soon as we put back our intellect into its true place, correcting the deviation that separated it from the intelligible. Science is not, then, a human construction. It is prior to our intellect, independent of it, veritably the generator of Things.
And indeed, if we hold the Forms to be simply snapshots taken by the mind of the continuity of becoming, they must be relative to the mind that thinks them, they can have no independent existence. At most we might say that each of these Ideas is an _ideal_. But it is in the opposite hypothesis that we are placing ourselves. Ideas must then exist by themselves. Ancient philosophy could not escape this conclusion. Plato formulated it, and in vain did Aristotle strive to avoid it. Since movement arises from the degradation of the immutable, there could be no movement, consequently no sensible world, if there were not, somewhere, immutability realized. So, having begun by refusing to Ideas an independent existence, and finding himself nevertheless unable to deprive them of it, Aristotle pressed them into each other, rolled them up into a ball, and set above the physical world a Form that was thus found to be the Form of Forms, the Idea of Ideas, or, to use his own words, the Thought of Thought. Such is the God of Aristotle--necessarily immutable and apart from what is happening in the world, since he is only the synthesis of all concepts in a single concept. It is true that no one of the manifold concepts could exist apart, such as it is in the divine unity: in vain should we look for the ideas of Plato within the God of Aristotle. But if only we imagine the God of Aristotle in a sort of refraction of himself, or simply inclining toward the world, at once the Platonic Ideas are seen to pour themselves out of him, as if they were involved in the unity of his essence: so rays stream out from the sun, which nevertheless did not contain them. It is probably this _possibility of an outpouring_ of Platonic Ideas from the Aristotelian God that is meant, in the philosophy of Aristotle, by the active intellect, the [Greek: nous] that has been called [Greek: poiêtikos]--that is, by what is essential and yet unconscious in human intelligence. The [Greek: nous poiêtikos] is Science entire, posited all at once, which the conscious, discursive intellect is condemned to reconstruct with difficulty, bit by bit. There is then within us, or rather behind us, a possible vision of God, as the Alexandrians said, a vision always virtual, never actually realized by the conscious intellect. In this intuition we should see God expand in Ideas. This it is that "does everything,"[102] playing in relation to the discursive intellect, which moves in time, the same rôle as the motionless Mover himself plays in relation to the movement of the heavens and the course of things.
There is, then, immanent in the philosophy of Ideas, a particular conception of causality, which it is important to bring into full light, because it is that which each of us will reach when, in order to ascend to the origin of things, he follows to the end the natural movement of the intellect. True, the ancient philosophers never formulated it explicitly. They confined themselves to drawing the consequences of it, and, in general, they have marked but points of view of it rather than presented it itself. Sometimes, indeed, they speak of an _attraction_, sometimes of an _impulsion_ exercised by the prime mover on the whole of the world. Both views are found in Aristotle, who shows us in the movement of the universe an aspiration of things toward the divine perfection, and consequently an ascent toward God, while he describes it elsewhere as the effect of a contact of God with the first sphere and as descending, consequently, from God to things. The Alexandrians, we think, do no more than follow this double indication when they speak of _procession_ and _conversion_. Everything is derived from the first principle, and everything aspires to return to it. But these two conceptions of the divine causality can only be identified together if we bring them, both the one and the other, back to a third, which we hold to be fundamental, and which alone will enable us to understand, not only why, in what sense, things move in space and time, but also why there is space and time, why there is movement, why there are things.
This conception, which more and more shows through the reasonings of the Greek philosophers as we go from Plato to Plotinus, we may formulate thus: _The affirmation of a reality implies the simultaneous affirmation of all the degrees of reality intermediate between it and nothing._ The principle is evident in the case of number: we cannot affirm the number 10 without thereby affirming the existence of the numbers 9, 8, 7, ..., etc.--in short, of the whole interval between 10 and zero. But here our mind passes naturally from the sphere of quantity to that of quality. It seems to us that, a certain perfection being given, the whole continuity of degradations is given also between this perfection, on the one hand, and the nought, on the other hand, that we think we conceive. Let us then posit the God of Aristotle, thought of thought--that is, thought _making a circle_, transforming itself from subject to object and from object to subject by an instantaneous, or rather an eternal, circular process: as, on the other hand, the nought appears to posit itself, and as, the two extremities being given, the interval between them is equally given, it follows that all the descending degrees of being, from the divine perfection down to the "absolute nothing," are realized automatically, so to speak, when we have posited God.
Let us then run through this interval from top to bottom. First of all, the slightest diminution of the first principle will be enough to precipitate Being into space and time; but duration and extension, which represent this first diminution, will be as near as possible to the divine inextension and eternity. We must therefore picture to ourselves this first degradation of the divine principle as a sphere turning on itself, imitating, by the perpetuity of its circular movement, the eternity of the circle of the divine thought; creating, moreover, its own place, and thereby place in general,[103] since it includes without being included and moves without stirring from the spot; creating also its own duration, and thereby duration in general, since its movement is the measure of all motion.[104] Then, by degrees, we shall see the perfection decrease, more and more, down to our sublunary world, in which the cycle of birth, growth and decay imitates and mars the original circle for the last time. So understood, the causal relation between God and the world is seen as an attraction when regarded from below, as an impulsion or a contact when regarded from above, since the first heaven, with its circular movement, is an imitation of God and all imitation is the reception of a form. Therefore, we perceive God as efficient cause or as final cause, according to the point of view. And yet neither of these two relations is the ultimate causal relation. The true relation is that which is found between the two members of an equation, when the first member is a single term and the second a sum of an endless number of terms. It is, we may say, the relation of the gold-piece to the small change, if we suppose the change to offer itself automatically as soon as the gold piece is presented. Only thus can we understand why Aristotle has demonstrated the necessity of a first motionless mover, not by founding it on the assertion that the movement of things must have had a beginning, but, on the contrary, by affirming that this movement could not have begun and can never come to an end. If movement exists, or, in other words, if the small change is being counted, the gold piece is to be found somewhere. And if the counting goes on for ever, having never begun, the single term that is eminently equivalent to it must be eternal. A perpetuity of mobility is possible only if it is backed by an eternity of immutability, which it unwinds in a chain without beginning or end.
Such is the last word of the Greek philosophy. We have not attempted to reconstruct it _a priori_. It has manifold origins. It is connected by many invisible threads to the soul of ancient Greece. Vain, therefore, the effort to deduce it from a simple principle.[105] But if everything that has come from poetry, religion, social life and a still rudimentary physics and biology be removed from it, if we take away all the light material that may have been used in the construction of the stately building, a solid framework remains, and this framework marks out the main lines of a metaphysic which is, we believe, the natural metaphysic of the human intellect. We come to a philosophy of this kind, indeed, whenever we follow to the end, the cinematographical tendency of perception and thought. Our perception and thought begin by substituting for the continuity of evolutionary change a series of unchangeable forms which are turn by turn, "caught on the wing," like the rings at a merry-go-round, which the children unhook with their little stick as they are passing. Now, how can the forms be passing, and on what "stick" are they strung? As the stable forms have been obtained by extracting from change everything that is definite, there is nothing left, to characterize the instability on which the forms are laid, but a negative attribute, which must be indetermination itself. Such is the first proceeding of our thought: it dissociates each change into two elements--the one stable, definable for each particular case, to wit, the Form; the other indefinable and always the same, Change in general. And such, also, is the essential operation of language. Forms are all that it is capable of expressing. It is reduced to taking as understood or is limited to _suggesting_ a mobility which, just because it is always unexpressed, is thought to remain in all cases the same.--Then comes in a philosophy that holds the dissociation thus effected by thought and language to be legitimate. What can it do, except objectify the distinction with more force, push it to its extreme consequences, reduce it into a system? It will therefore construct the real, on the one hand, with definite Forms or immutable elements, and, on the other, with a principle of mobility which, being the negation of the form, will, by the hypothesis, escape all definition and be the purely indeterminate. The more it directs its attention to the forms delineated by thought and expressed by language, the more it will see them rise above the sensible and become subtilized into pure concepts, capable of entering one within the other, and even of being at last massed together into a single concept, the synthesis of all reality, the achievement of all perfection. The more, on the contrary, it descends toward the invisible source of the universal mobility, the more it will feel this mobility sink beneath it and at the same time become void, vanish into what it will call the "non-being." Finally, it will have on the one hand the system of ideas, logically coördinated together or concentrated into one only, on the other a quasi-nought, the Platonic "non-being" or the Aristotelian "matter."--But, having cut your cloth, you must sew it. With supra-sensible Ideas and an infra-sensible non-being, you now have to reconstruct the sensible world. You can do so only if you postulate a kind of metaphysical necessity in virtue of which the confronting of this All with this Zero _is equivalent_ to the affirmation of all the degrees of reality that measure the interval between them--just as an undivided number, when regarded as a difference between itself and zero, is revealed as a certain sum of units, and with its own affirmation affirms all the lower numbers. That is the natural postulate. It is that also that we perceive as the base of the Greek philosophy. In order then to explain the specific characters of each of these degrees of intermediate reality, nothing more is necessary than to measure the distance that separates it from the integral reality. Each lower degree consists in a diminution of the higher, and the _sensible_ newness that we perceive in it is resolved, from the point of view of the _intelligible_, into a new quantity of negation which is superadded to it. The smallest possible quantity of negation, that which is found already in the highest forms of sensible reality, and consequently _a fortiori_ in the lower forms, is that which is expressed by the most general attributes of sensible reality, extension and duration. By increasing degradations we will obtain attributes more and more special. Here the philosopher's fancy will have free scope, for it is by an arbitrary decree, or at least a debatable one, that a particular aspect of the sensible world will be equated with a particular diminution of being. We shall not necessarily end, as Aristotle did, in a world consisting of concentric spheres turning on themselves. But we shall be led to an analogous cosmology--I mean, to a construction whose pieces, though all different, will have none the less the same relations between them. And this cosmology will be ruled by the same principle. The physical will be defined by the logical. Beneath the changing phenomena will appear to us, by transparence, a closed system of concepts subordinated to and coördinated with each other. Science, understood as the system of concepts, will be more real than the sensible reality. It will be prior to human knowledge, which is only able to spell it letter by letter; prior also to things, which awkwardly try to imitate it. It would only have to be diverted an instant from itself in order to step out of its eternity and thereby coincide with all this knowledge and all these things. Its immutability is therefore, indeed, the cause of the universal becoming.
Such was the point of view of ancient philosophy in regard to change and duration. That modern philosophy has repeatedly, but especially in its beginnings, had the wish to depart from it, seems to us unquestionable. But an irresistible attraction brings the intellect back to its natural movement, and the metaphysic of the moderns to the general conclusions of the Greek metaphysic. We must try to make this point clear, in order to show by what invisible threads our mechanistic philosophy remains bound to the ancient philosophy of Ideas, and how also it responds to the requirements, above all practical, of our understanding.
* * * * *
Modern, like ancient, science proceeds according to the cinematographical method. It cannot do otherwise; all science is subject to this law. For it is of the essence of science to handle _signs_, which it substitutes for the objects themselves. These signs undoubtedly differ from those of language by their greater precision and their higher efficacy; they are none the less tied down to the general condition of the sign, which is to denote a fixed aspect of the reality under an arrested form. In order to think movement, a constantly renewed effort of the mind is necessary. Signs are made to dispense us with this effort by substituting, for the moving continuity of things, an artificial reconstruction which is its equivalent in practice and has the advantage of being easily handled. But let us leave aside the means and consider only the end. What is the essential object of science? It is to enlarge our influence over things. Science may be speculative in its form, disinterested in its immediate ends; in other words we may give it as long a credit as it wants. But, however long the day of reckoning may be put off, some time or other the payment must be made. It is always then, in short, practical utility that science has in view. Even when it launches into theory, it is bound to adapt its behavior to the general form of practice. However high it may rise, it must be ready to fall back into the field of action, and at once to get on its feet. This would not be possible for it, if its rhythm differed absolutely from that of action itself. Now action, we have said, proceeds by leaps. To act is to re-adapt oneself. To know, that is to say, to foresee in order to act, is then to go from situation to situation, from arrangement to rearrangement. Science may consider rearrangements that come closer and closer to each other; it may thus increase the number of moments that it isolates, but it always isolates moments. As to what happens in the interval between the moments, science is no more concerned with that than are our common intelligence, our senses and our language: it does not bear on the interval, but only on the extremities. So the cinematographical method forces itself upon our science, as it did already on that of the ancients.
Wherein, then, is the difference between the two sciences? We indicated it when we said that the ancients reduced the physical order to the vital order, that is to say, laws to genera, while the moderns try to resolve genera into laws. But we have to look at it in another aspect, which, moreover, is only a transposition, of the first. Wherein consists the difference of attitude of the two sciences toward change? We may formulate it by saying that _ancient science thinks it knows its object sufficiently when it has noted of it some privileged moments, whereas modern science considers the object at any moment whatever_.
The forms or ideas of Plato or of Aristotle correspond to privileged or salient moments in the history of things--those, in general, that have been fixed by language. They are supposed, like the childhood or the old age of a living being, to characterize a period of which they express the quintessence, all the rest of this period being filled by the passage, of no interest in itself, from one form to another form. Take, for instance, a falling body. It was thought that we got near enough to the fact when we characterized it as a whole: it was a movement _downward_; it was the tendency toward a _centre_; it was the _natural_ movement of a body which, separated from the earth to which it belonged, was now going to find its place again. They noted, then, the final term or culminating point ([Greek: telos, akmê]) and set it up as the essential moment: this moment, that language has retained in order to express the whole of the fact, sufficed also for science to characterize it. In the physics of Aristotle, it is by the concepts "high" and "low," spontaneous displacement and forced displacement, own place and strange place, that the movement of a body shot into space or falling freely is defined. But Galileo thought there was no essential moment, no privileged instant. To study the falling body is to consider it at it matters not what moment in its course. The true science of gravity is that which will determine, for any moment of time whatever, the position of the body in space. For this, indeed, signs far more precise than those of language are required.
We may say, then, that our physics differs from that of the ancients chiefly in the indefinite breaking up of time. For the ancients, time comprises as many undivided periods as our natural perception and our language cut out in it successive facts, each presenting a kind of individuality. For that reason, each of these facts admits, in their view, of only a _total_ definition or description. If, in describing it, we are led to distinguish phases in it, we have several facts instead of a single one, several undivided periods instead of a single period; but time is always supposed to be divided into determinate periods, and the mode of division to be forced on the mind by apparent crises of the real, comparable to that of puberty, by the apparent release of a new form.--For a Kepler or a Galileo, on the contrary, time is not divided objectively in one way or another by the matter that fills it. It has no natural articulations. We can, we ought to, divide it as we please. All moments count. None of them has the right to set itself up as a moment that represents or dominates the others. And, consequently, we know a change only when we are able to determine what it is about at any one of its moments.
The difference is profound. In fact, in a certain aspect it is radical. But, from the point of view from which we are regarding it, it is a difference of degree rather than of kind. The human mind has passed from the first kind of knowledge to the second through gradual perfecting, simply by seeking a higher precision. There is the same relation between these two sciences as between the noting of the phases of a movement by the eye and the much more complete recording of these phases by instantaneous photography. It is the same cinematographical mechanism in both cases, but it reaches a precision in the second that it cannot have in the first. Of the gallop of a horse our eye perceives chiefly a characteristic, essential or rather schematic attitude, a form that appears to radiate over a whole period and so fill up a time of gallop. It is this attitude that sculpture has fixed on the frieze of the Parthenon. But instantaneous photography isolates any moment; it puts them all in the same rank, and thus the gallop of a horse spreads out for it into as many successive attitudes as it wishes, instead of massing itself into a single attitude, which is supposed to flash out in a privileged moment and to illuminate a whole period.
From this original difference flow all the others. A science that considers, one after the other, undivided periods of duration, sees nothing but phases succeeding phases, forms replacing forms; it is content with a _qualitative_ description of objects, which it likens to organized beings. But when we seek to know what happens within one of these periods, at any moment of time, we are aiming at something entirely different. The changes which are produced from one moment to another are no longer, by the hypothesis, changes of quality; they are _quantitative_ variations, it may be of the phenomenon itself, it may be of its elementary parts. We were right then to say that modern science is distinguishable from the ancient in that it applies to magnitudes and proposes first and foremost to measure them. The ancients did indeed try experiments, and on the other hand Kepler tried no experiment, in the proper sense of the word, in order to discover a law which is the very type of scientific knowledge as we understand it. What distinguishes modern science is not that it is experimental, but that it experiments and, more generally, works only with a view to measure.
For that reason it is right, again, to say that ancient science applied to _concepts_, while modern science seeks _laws_--constant relations between variable magnitudes. The concept of circularity was sufficient to Aristotle to define the movement of the heavenly bodies. But, even with the more accurate concept of elliptical form, Kepler did not think he had accounted for the movement of planets. He had to get a law, that is to say, a constant relation between the quantitative variations of two or several elements of the planetary movement.
Yet these are only consequences--differences that follow from the fundamental difference. It did happen to the ancients accidentally to experiment with a view to measuring, as also to discover a law expressing a constant relation between magnitudes. The principle of Archimedes is a true experimental law. It takes into account three variable magnitudes: the volume of a body, the density of the liquid in which the body is immersed, the vertical pressure that is being exerted. And it states indeed that one of these three terms is a function of the other two.
The essential, original difference must therefore be sought elsewhere. It is the same that we noticed first. The science of the ancients is static. Either it considers in block the change that it studies, or, if it divides the change into periods, it makes of each of these periods a block in its turn: which amounts to saying that it takes no account of time. But modern science has been built up around the discoveries of Galileo and of Kepler, which immediately furnished it with a model. Now, what do the laws of Kepler say? They lay down a relation between the areas described by the heliocentric radius-vector of a planet and the _time_ employed in describing them, a relation between the longer axis of the orbit and the _time_ taken up by the course. And what was the principle discovered by Galileo? A law which connected the space traversed by a falling body with the _time_ occupied by the fall. Furthermore, in what did the first of the great transformations of geometry in modern times consist, if not in introducing--in a veiled form, it is true--time and movement even in the consideration of figures? For the ancients, geometry was a purely static science. Figures were given to it at once, completely finished, like the Platonic Ideas. But the essence of the Cartesian geometry (although Descartes did not give it this form) was to regard every plane curve as described by the movement of a point on a movable straight line which is displaced, parallel to itself, along the axis of the abscissae--the displacement of the movable straight line being supposed to be uniform and the abscissa thus becoming representative of the time. The curve is then defined if we can state the relation connecting the space traversed on the movable straight line to the time employed in traversing it, that is, if we are able to indicate the position of the movable point, on the straight line which it traverses, at any moment whatever of its course. This relation is just what we call the equation of the curve. To substitute an equation for a figure consists, therefore, in seeing the actual position of the moving points in the tracing of the curve at any moment whatever, instead of regarding this tracing all at once, gathered up in the unique moment when the curve has reached its finished state.
Such, then, was the directing idea of the reform by which both the science of nature and mathematics, which serves as its instrument, were renewed. Modern science is the daughter of astronomy; it has come down from heaven to earth along the inclined plane of Galileo, for it is through Galileo that Newton and his successors are connected with Kepler. Now, how did the astronomical problem present itself to Kepler? The question was, knowing the respective positions of the planets at a given moment, how to calculate their positions at any other moment. So the same question presented itself, henceforth, for every material system. Each material point became a rudimentary planet, and the main question, the ideal problem whose solution would yield the key to all the others was, the positions of these elements at a particular moment being given, how to determine their relative positions at any moment. No doubt the problem cannot be put in these precise terms except in very simple cases, for a schematized reality; for we never know the respective positions of the real elements of matter, supposing there are real elements; and, even if we knew them at a given moment, the calculation of their positions at another moment would generally require a mathematical effort surpassing human powers. But it is enough for us to know that these elements might be known, that their present positions might be noted, and that a superhuman intellect might, by submitting these data to mathematical operations, determine the positions of the elements at any other moment of time. This conviction is at the bottom of the questions we put to ourselves on the subject of nature, and of the methods we employ to solve them. That is why every law in static form seems to us as a provisional instalment or as a particular view of a dynamic law which alone would give us whole and definitive knowledge.
Let us conclude, then, that our science is not only distinguished from ancient science in this, that it seeks laws, nor even in this, that its laws set forth relations between magnitudes: we must add that the magnitude to which we wish to be able to relate all others is time, and that _modern science must be defined pre-eminently by its aspiration to take time as an independent variable_. But with what time has it to do?
We have said before, and we cannot repeat too often, that the science of matter proceeds like ordinary knowledge. It perfects this knowledge, increases its precision and its scope, but it works in the same direction and puts the same mechanism into play. If, therefore, ordinary knowledge, by reason of the cinematographical mechanism to which it is subjected, forbears to follow becoming in so far as becoming is moving, the science of matter renounces it equally. No doubt, it distinguishes as great a number of moments as we wish in the interval of time it considers. However small the intervals may be at which it stops, it authorizes us to divide them again if necessary. In contrast with ancient science, which stopped at certain so-called essential moments, it is occupied indifferently with any moment whatever. But it always considers moments, always virtual stopping-places, always, in short, immobilities. Which amounts to saying that real time, regarded as a flux, or, in other words, as the very mobility of being, escapes the hold of scientific knowledge. We have already tried to establish this point in a former work. We alluded to it again in the first chapter of this book. But it is necessary to revert to it once more, in order to clear up misunderstandings.
When positive science speaks of time, what it refers to is the movement of a certain mobile T on its trajectory. This movement has been chosen by it as representative of time, and it is, by definition, uniform. Let us call T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3}, ... etc., points which divide the trajectory of the mobile into equal parts from its origin T_0. We shall say that 1, 2, 3, ... units of time have flowed past, when the mobile is at the points T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3}, ... of the line it traverses. Accordingly, to consider the state of the universe at the end of a certain time _t_, is to examine where it will be when T is at the point T_t of its course. But of the _flux_ itself of time, still less of its effect on consciousness, there is here no question; for there enter into the calculation only the points T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3}, ... taken on the flux, never the flux itself. We may narrow the time considered as much as we will, that is, break up at will the interval between two consecutive divisions T_{n} and T_{n-|-1}; but it is always with points, and with points only, that we are dealing. What we retain of the movement of the mobile T are positions taken on its trajectory. What we retain of all the other points of the universe are their positions on their respective trajectories. To each _virtual stop_ of the moving body T at the points of division T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3}, ... we make correspond a _virtual stop_ of all the other mobiles at the points where they are passing. And when we say that a movement or any other change has occupied a time _t_, we mean by it that we have noted a number _t_ of correspondences of this kind. We have therefore counted simultaneities; we have not concerned ourselves with the flux that goes from one to another. The proof of this is that I can, at discretion, vary the rapidity of the flux of the universe in regard to a consciousness that is independent of it and that would perceive the variation by the quite qualitative _feeling_ that it would have of it: whatever the variation had been, since the movement of T would participate in this variation, I should have nothing to change in my equations nor in the numbers that figure in them.
Let us go further. Suppose that the rapidity of the flux becomes infinite. Imagine, as we said in the first pages of this book, that the trajectory of the mobile T is given at once, and that the whole history, past, present and future, of the material universe is spread out instantaneously in space. The same mathematical correspondences will subsist between the moments of the history of the world unfolded like a fan, so to speak, and the divisions T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3}, ... of the line which will be called, by definition, "the course of time." In the eyes of science nothing will have changed. But if, time thus spreading itself out in space and succession becoming juxtaposition, science has nothing to change in what it tells us, we must conclude that, in what it tells us, it takes account neither of _succession_ in what of it is specific nor of _time_ in what there is in it that is fluent. It has no sign to express what strikes our consciousness in succession and duration. It no more applies to becoming, so far as that is moving, than the bridges thrown here and there across the stream follow the water that flows under their arches.
Yet succession exists; I am conscious of it; it is a fact. When a physical process is going on before my eyes, my perception and my inclination have nothing to do with accelerating or retarding it. What is important to the physicist is the _number_ of units of duration the process fills; he does not concern himself about the units themselves and that is why the successive states of the world might be spread out all at once in space without his having to change anything in his science or to cease talking about time. But for us, conscious beings, it is the units that matter, for we do not count extremities of intervals, we feel and live the intervals themselves. Now, we are conscious of these intervals as of _definite_ intervals. Let me come back again to the sugar in my glass of water:[106] why must I wait for it to melt? While the duration of the phenomenon is _relative_ for the physicist, since it is reduced to a certain number of units of time and the units themselves are indifferent, this duration is an _absolute_ for my consciousness, for it coincides with a certain degree of impatience which is rigorously determined. Whence comes this determination? What is it that obliges me to wait, and to wait for a certain length of psychical duration which is forced upon me, over which I have no power? If succession, in so far as distinct from mere juxtaposition, has no real efficacy, if time is not a kind of force, why does the universe unfold its successive states with a velocity which, in regard to my consciousness, is a veritable absolute? Why with this particular velocity rather than any other? Why not with an infinite velocity? Why, in other words, is not everything given at once, as on the film of the cinematograph? The more I consider this point, the more it seems to me that, if the future is bound to _succeed_ the present instead of being given alongside of it, it is because the future is not altogether determined at the present moment, and that if the time taken up by this succession is something other than a number, if it has for the consciousness that is installed in it absolute value and reality, it is because there is unceasingly being created in it, not indeed in any such artificially isolated system as a glass of sugared water, but in the concrete whole of which every such system forms part, something unforeseeable and new. This duration may not be the fact of matter itself, but that of the life which reascends the course of matter; the two movements are none the less mutually dependent upon each other. _The duration of the universe must therefore be one with the latitude of creation which can find place in it._
When a child plays at reconstructing a picture by putting together the separate pieces in a puzzle game, the more he practices, the more and more quickly he succeeds. The reconstruction was, moreover, instantaneous, the child found it ready-made, when he opened the box on leaving the shop. The operation, therefore, does not require a definite time, and indeed, theoretically, it does not require any time. That is because the result is given. It is because the picture is already created, and because to obtain it requires only a work of recomposing and rearranging--a work that can be supposed going faster and faster, and even infinitely fast, up to the point of being instantaneous. But, to the artist who creates a picture by drawing it from the depths of his soul, time is no longer an accessory; it is not an interval that may be lengthened or shortened without the content being altered. The duration of his work is part and parcel of his work. To contract or to dilate it would be to modify both the psychical evolution that fills it and the invention which is its goal. The time taken up by the invention, is one with the invention itself. It is the progress of a thought which is changing in the degree and measure that it is taking form. It is a vital process, something like the ripening of an idea.
The painter is before his canvas, the colors are on the palette, the model is sitting--all this we see, and also we know the painter's style: do we foresee what will appear on the canvas? We possess the elements of the problem; we know in an abstract way, how it will be solved, for the portrait will surely resemble the model and will surely resemble also the artist; but the concrete solution brings with it that unforeseeable nothing which is everything in a work of art. And it is this nothing that takes time. Nought as matter, it creates itself as form. The sprouting and flowering of this form are stretched out on an unshrinkable duration, which is one with their essence. So of the works of nature. Their novelty arises from an internal impetus which is progress or succession, which confers on succession a peculiar virtue or which owes to succession the whole of its virtue--which, at any rate, makes succession, or _continuity of interpenetration_ in time, irreducible to a mere instantaneous juxtaposition in space. This is why the idea of reading in a present state of the material universe the future of living forms, and of unfolding now their history yet to come, involves a veritable absurdity. But this absurdity is difficult to bring out, because our memory is accustomed to place alongside of each other, in an ideal space, the terms it perceives in turn, because it always represents _past_ succession in the form of juxtaposition. It is able to do so, indeed, just because the past belongs to that which is already invented, to the dead, and no longer to creation and to life. Then, as the succession to come will end by being a succession past, we persuade ourselves that the duration to come admits of the same treatment as past duration, that it is, even now, unrollable, that the future is there, rolled up, already painted on the canvas. An illusion, no doubt, but an illusion that is natural, ineradicable, and that will last as long as the human mind!
_Time is invention or it is nothing at all._ But of time-invention physics can take no account, restricted as it is to the cinematographical method. It is limited to counting simultaneities between the events that make up this time and the positions of the mobile T on its trajectory. It detaches these events from the whole, which at every moment puts on a new form and which communicates to them something of its novelty. It considers them in the abstract, such as they would be outside of the living whole, that is to say, in a time unrolled in space. It retains only the events or systems of events that can be thus isolated without being made to undergo too profound a deformation, because only these lend themselves to the application of its method. Our physics dates from the day when it was known how to isolate such systems. To sum up, _while modern physics is distinguished from ancient physics by the fact that it considers any moment of time whatever, it rests altogether on a substitution of time-length for time-invention_.
It seems then that, parallel to this physics, a second kind of knowledge ought to have grown up, which could have retained what physics allowed to escape. On the flux itself of duration science neither would nor could lay hold, bound as it was to the cinematographical method. This second kind of knowledge would have set the cinematographical method aside. It would have called upon the mind to renounce its most cherished habits. It is within becoming that it would have transported us by an effort of sympathy. We should no longer be asking where a moving body will be, what shape a system will take, through what state a change will pass at a given moment: the moments of time, which are only arrests of our attention, would no longer exist; it is the flow of time, it is the very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow. The first kind of knowledge has the advantage of enabling us to foresee the future and of making us in some measure masters of events; in return, it retains of the moving reality only eventual immobilities, that is to say, views taken of it by our mind. It symbolizes the real and transposes it into the human rather than expresses it. The other knowledge, if it is possible, is practically useless, it will not extend our empire over nature, it will even go against certain natural aspirations of the intellect; but, if it succeeds, it is reality itself that it will hold in a firm and final embrace. Not only may we thus complete the intellect and its knowledge of matter by accustoming it to install itself within the moving, but by developing also another faculty, complementary to the intellect, we may open a perspective on the other half of the real. For, as soon as we are confronted with true duration, we see that it means creation, and that if that which is being unmade endures, it can only be because it is inseparably bound to what is making itself. Thus will appear the necessity of a continual growth of the universe, I should say of a _life_ of the real. And thus will be seen in a new light the life which we find on the surface of our planet, a life directed the same way as that of the universe, and inverse of materiality. To intellect, in short, there will be added intuition.
The more we reflect on it, the more we shall find that this conception of metaphysics is that which modern science suggests.
For the ancients, indeed, time is theoretically negligible, because the duration of a thing only manifests the degradation of its essence: it is with this motionless essence that science has to deal. Change being only the effort of a form toward its own realization, the realization is all that it concerns us to know. No doubt the realization is never complete: it is this that ancient philosophy expresses by saying that we do not perceive form without matter. But if we consider the changing object at a certain essential moment, at its apogee, we may say that there it just touches its intelligible form. This intelligible form, this ideal and, so to speak, limiting form, our science seizes upon. And possessing in this the gold-piece, it holds eminently the small money which we call becoming or change. This change is less than being. The knowledge that would take it for object, supposing such knowledge were possible, would be less than science.
But, for a science that places all the moments of time in the same rank, that admits no essential moment, no culminating point, no apogee, change is no longer a diminution of essence, duration is not a dilution of eternity. The flux of time is the reality itself, and the things which we study are the things which flow. It is true that of this flowing reality we are limited to taking instantaneous views. But, just because of this, scientific knowledge must appeal to another knowledge to complete it. While the ancient conception of scientific knowledge ended in making time a degradation, and change the diminution of a form given from all eternity--on the contrary, by following the new conception to the end, we should come to see in time a progressive growth of the absolute, and in the evolution of things a continual invention of forms ever new.
It is true that it would be to break with the metaphysics of the ancients. They saw only one way of knowing definitely. Their science consisted in a scattered and fragmentary metaphysics, their metaphysics in a concentrated and systematic science. Their science and metaphysics were, at most, two species of one and the same genus. In our hypothesis, on the contrary, science and metaphysics are two opposed although complementary ways of knowing, the first retaining only moments, that is to say, that which does not endure, the second bearing on duration itself. Now, it was natural to hesitate between so novel a conception of metaphysics and the traditional conception. The temptation must have been strong to repeat with the new science what had been tried on the old, to suppose our scientific knowledge of nature completed at once, to unify it entirely, and to give to this unification, as the Greeks had already done, the name of metaphysics. So, beside the new way that philosophy might have prepared, the old remained open, that indeed which physics trod. And, as physics retained of time only what could as well be spread out all at once in space, the metaphysics that chose the same direction had necessarily to proceed as if time created and annihilated nothing, as if duration had no efficacy. Bound, like the physics of the moderns and the metaphysics of the ancients, to the cinematographical method, it ended with the conclusion, implicitly admitted at the start and immanent in the method itself: _All is given._
That metaphysics hesitated at first between the two paths seems to us unquestionable. The indecision is visible in Cartesianism. On the one hand, Descartes affirms universal mechanism: from this point of view movement would be relative,[107] and, as time has just as much reality as movement, it would follow that past, present and future are given from all eternity. But, on the other hand (and that is why the philosopher has not gone to these extreme consequences), Descartes believes in the free will of man. He superposes on the determinism of physical phenomena the indeterminism of human actions, and, consequently, on time-length a time in which there is invention, creation, true succession. This duration he supports on a God who is unceasingly renewing the creative act, and who, being thus tangent to time and becoming, sustains them, communicates to them necessarily something of his absolute reality. When he places himself at this second point of view, Descartes speaks of movement, even spatial, as of an absolute.[108]
He therefore entered both roads one after the other, having resolved to follow neither of them to the end. The first would have led him to the denial of free will in man and of real will in God. It was the suppression of all efficient duration, the likening of the universe to a thing given, which a superhuman intelligence would embrace at once in a moment or in eternity. In following the second, on the contrary, he would have been led to all the consequences which the intuition of true duration implies. Creation would have appeared not simply as _continued_, but also as _continuous_. The universe, regarded as a whole, would really evolve. The future would no longer be determinable by the present; at most we might say that, once realized, it can be found again in its antecedents, as the sounds of a new language can be expressed with the letters of an old alphabet if we agree to enlarge the value of the letters and to attribute to them, retro-actively, sounds which no combination of the old sounds could have produced beforehand. Finally, the mechanistic explanation might have remained universal in this, that it can indeed be extended to as many systems as we choose to cut out in the continuity of the universe; but mechanism would then have become a _method_ rather than a _doctrine_. It would have expressed the fact that science must proceed after the cinematographical manner, that the function of science is to scan the rhythm of the flow of things and not to fit itself into that flow.--Such were the two opposite conceptions of metaphysics which were offered to philosophy.
It chose the first. The reason of this choice is undoubtedly the mind's tendency to follow the cinematographical method, a method so natural to our intellect, and so well adjusted also to the requirements of our science, that we must feel doubly sure of its speculative impotence to renounce it in metaphysics. But ancient philosophy also influenced the choice. Artists for ever admirable, the Greeks created a type of supra-sensible truth, as of sensible beauty, whose attraction is hard to resist. As soon as we incline to make metaphysics a systematization of science, we glide in the direction of Plato and of Aristotle. And, once in the zone of attraction in which the Greek philosophers moved, we are drawn along in their orbit.
Such was the case with Leibniz, as also with Spinoza. We are not blind to the treasures of originality their doctrines contain. Spinoza and Leibniz have poured into them the whole content of their souls, rich with the inventions of their genius and the acquisitions of modern thought. And there are in each of them, especially in Spinoza, flashes of intuition that break through the system. But if we leave out of the two doctrines what breathes life into them, if we retain the skeleton only, we have before us the very picture of Platonism and Aristotelianism seen through Cartesian mechanism. They present to us a systematization of the new physics, constructed on the model of the ancient metaphysics.
What, indeed, could the unification of physics be? The inspiring idea of that science was to isolate, within the universe, systems of material points such that, the position of each of these points being known at a given moment, we could then calculate it for any moment whatever. As, moreover, the systems thus defined were the only ones on which the new science had hold, and as it could not be known beforehand whether a system satisfied or did not satisfy the desired condition, it was useful to proceed always and everywhere _as if_ the condition was realized. There was in this a methodological rule, a very natural rule--so natural, indeed, that it was not even necessary to formulate it. For simple common sense tells us that when we are possessed of an effective instrument of research, and are ignorant of the limits of its applicability, we should act as if its applicability were unlimited; there will always be time to abate it. But the temptation must have been great for the philosopher to hypostatize this hope, or rather this impetus, of the new science, and to convert a general rule of method into a fundamental law of things. So he transported himself at once to the limit; he supposed physics to have become complete and to embrace the whole of the sensible world. The universe became a system of points, the position of which was rigorously determined at each instant by relation to the preceding instant and theoretically calculable for any moment whatever. The result, in short, was universal mechanism. But it was not enough to formulate this mechanism; what was required was to found it, to give the reason for it and prove its necessity. And the essential affirmation of mechanism being that of a reciprocal mathematical dependence of all the points of the universe, as also of all the moments of the universe, the reason of mechanism had to be discovered in the unity of a principle into which could be contracted all that is juxtaposed in space and successive in time. Hence, the whole of the real was supposed to be given at once. The reciprocal determination of the juxtaposed appearances in space was explained by the indivisibility of true being, and the inflexible determinism of successive phenomena in time simply expressed that the whole of being is given in the eternal.
The new philosophy was going, then, to be a recommencement, or rather a transposition, of the old. The ancient philosophy had taken each of the _concepts_ into which a becoming is concentrated or which mark its apogee: it supposed them all known, and gathered them up into a single concept, form of forms, idea of ideas, like the God of Aristotle. The new philosophy was going to take each of the _laws_ which condition a becoming in relation to others and which are as the permanent substratum of phenomena: it would suppose them all known, and would gather them up into a unity which also would express them eminently, but which, like the God of Aristotle and for the same reasons, must remain immutably shut up in itself.
True, this return to the ancient philosophy was not without great difficulties. When a Plato, an Aristotle, or a Plotinus melt all the concepts of their science into a single one, in so doing they embrace the whole of the real, for concepts are supposed to represent the things themselves, and to possess at least as much positive content. But a law, in general, expresses only a relation, and physical laws in particular express only _quantitative_ relations between concrete things. So that if a modern philosopher works with the laws of the new science as the Greek philosopher did with the concepts of the ancient science, if he makes all the conclusions of a physics supposed omniscient converge on a single point, he neglects what is concrete in the phenomena--the qualities perceived, the perceptions themselves. His synthesis comprises, it seems, only a fraction of reality. In fact, the first result of the new science was to cut the real into two halves, quantity and quality, the former being credited to the account of _bodies_ and the latter to the account of _souls_. The ancients had raised no such barriers either between quality and quantity or between soul and body. For them, the mathematical concepts were concepts like the others, related to the others and fitting quite naturally into the hierarchy of the Ideas. Neither was the body then defined by geometrical extension, nor the soul by consciousness. If the [Greek: psychê] of Aristotle, the entelechy of a living body, is less spiritual than our "soul," it is because his [Greek: oôma], already impregnated with the Idea, is less corporeal than our "body." The scission was not yet irremediable between the two terms. It has become so, and thence a metaphysic that aims at an abstract unity must resign itself either to comprehend in its synthesis only one half of the real, or to take advantage of the absolute heterogeneity of the two halves in order to consider one as a translation of the other. Different phrases will express different things if they belong to the same language, that is to say, if there is a certain relationship of sound between them. But if they belong to two different languages, they might, just because of their radical diversity of sound, express the same thing. So of quality and quantity, of soul and body. It is for having cut all connection between the two terms that philosophers have been led to establish between them a rigorous parallelism, of which the ancients had not dreamed, to regard them as translations and not as inversions of each other; in short, to posit a fundamental identity as a substratum to their duality. The synthesis to which they rose thus became capable of embracing everything. A divine mechanism made the phenomena of thought to correspond to those of extension, each to each, qualities to quantities, souls to bodies.
It is this parallelism that we find both in Leibniz and in Spinoza--in different forms, it is true, because of the unequal importance which they attach to extension. With Spinoza, the two terms Thought and Extension are placed, in principle at least, in the same rank. They are, therefore, two translations of one and the same original, or, as Spinoza says, two attributes of one and the same substance, which we must call God. And these two translations, as also an infinity of others into languages which we know not, are called up and even forced into existence by the original, just as the essence of the circle is translated automatically, so to speak, both by a figure and by an equation. For Leibniz, on the contrary, extension is indeed still a translation, but it is thought that is the original, and thought might dispense with translation, the translation being made only for us. In positing God, we necessarily posit also all the possible views of God, that is to say, the monads. But we can always imagine that a view has been taken from a point of view, and it is natural for an imperfect mind like ours to class views, qualitatively different, according to the order and position of points of view, qualitatively identical, from which the views might have been taken. In reality the points of view do not exist, for there are only views, each given in an indivisible block and representing in its own way the whole of reality, which is God. But we need to express the plurality of the views, that are _unlike_ each other, by the multiplicity of the points of view that are _exterior_ to each other; and we also need to symbolize the more or less close relationship between the views by the relative situation of the points of view to one another, their nearness or their distance, that is to say, by a magnitude. That is what Leibniz means when he says that space is the order of coexistents, that the perception of extension is a confused perception (that is to say, a perception relative to an imperfect mind), and that nothing exists but monads, expressing thereby that the real Whole has no parts, but is repeated to infinity, each time integrally (though diversely) within itself, and that all these repetitions are complementary to each other. In just the same way, the visible relief of an object is equivalent to the whole set of stereoscopic views taken of it from all points, so that, instead of seeing in the relief a juxtaposition of solid parts, we might quite as well look upon it as made of the _reciprocal complementarity_ of these whole views, each given in block, each indivisible, each different from all the others and yet representative of the same thing. The Whole, that is to say, God, is this very relief for Leibniz, and the monads are these complementary plane views; for that reason he defines God as "the substance that has no point of view," or, again, as "the universal harmony," that is to say, the reciprocal complementarity of monads. In short, Leibniz differs from Spinoza in this, that he looks upon the universal mechanism as an aspect which reality takes for us, whereas, Spinoza makes of it an aspect which reality takes for itself.
It is true that, after having concentrated in God the whole of the real, it became difficult for them to pass from God to things, from eternity to time. The difficulty was even much greater for these philosophers than an Aristotle or a Plotinus. The God of Aristotle, indeed, had been obtained by the compression and reciprocal compenetration of the Ideas that represent, in their finished state or in their culminating point, the changing things of the world. He was, therefore, transcendent to the world, and the duration of things was juxtaposed to His eternity, of which it was only a weakening. But in the principle to which we are led by the consideration of universal mechanism, and which must serve as its substratum, it is not concepts or _things_, but laws or _relations_ that are condensed. Now, a relation does not exist separately. A law connects changing terms and is immanent in what it governs. The principle in which all these relations are ultimately summed up, and which is the basis of the unity of nature, cannot, therefore, be transcendent to sensible reality; it is immanent in it, and we must suppose that it is at once both in and out of time, gathered up in the unity of its substance and yet condemned to wind it off in an endless chain. Rather than formulate so appalling a contradiction, the philosophers were necessarily led to sacrifice the weaker of the two terms, and to regard the temporal aspect of things as a mere illusion. Leibniz says so in explicit terms, for he makes of time, as of space, a confused perception. While the multiplicity of his monads expresses only the diversity of views taken of the whole, the history of an isolated monad seems to be hardly anything else than the manifold views that it can take of its own substance: so that time would consist in all the points of view that each monad can assume towards itself, as space consists in all the points of view that all monads can assume towards God. But the thought of Spinoza is much less clear, and this philosopher seems to have sought to establish, between eternity and that which has duration, the same difference as Aristotle made between essence and accidents: a most difficult undertaking, for the [Greek: ylê] of Aristotle was no longer there to measure the distance and explain the passage from the essential to the accidental, Descartes having eliminated it for ever. However that may be, the deeper we go into the Spinozistic conception of the "inadequate," as related to the "adequate," the more we feel ourselves moving in the direction of Aristotelianism--just as the Leibnizian monads, in proportion as they mark themselves out the more clearly, tend to approximate to the Intelligibles of Plotinus.[109] The natural trend of these two philosophies brings them back to the conclusions of the ancient philosophy.
To sum up, the resemblances of this new metaphysic to that of the ancients arise from the fact that both suppose ready-made--the former above the sensible, the latter within the sensible--a science one and complete, with which any reality that the sensible may contain is believed to coincide. _For both, reality as well as truth are integrally given in eternity._ Both are opposed to the idea of a reality that creates itself gradually, that is, at bottom, to an absolute duration.
* * * * *
Now, it might easily be shown that the conclusions of this metaphysic, springing from science, have rebounded upon science itself, as it were, by ricochet. They penetrate the whole of our so-called empiricism. Physics and chemistry study only inert matter; biology, when it treats the living being physically and chemically, considers only the inert side of the living: hence the mechanistic explanations, in spite of their development, include only a small part of the real. To suppose _a priori_ that the whole of the real is resolvable into elements of this kind, or at least that mechanism can give a complete translation of what happens in the world, is to pronounce for a certain metaphysic--the very metaphysic of which Spinoza and Leibniz have laid down the principles and drawn the consequences. Certainly, the psycho-physiologist who affirms the exact equivalence of the cerebral and the psychical state, who imagines the possibility, for some superhuman intellect, of reading in the brain what is going on in consciousness, believes himself very far from the metaphysicians of the seventeenth century, and very near to experience. Yet experience pure and simple tells us nothing of the kind. It shows us the interdependence of the mental and the physical, the necessity of a certain cerebral substratum for the psychical state--nothing more. From the fact that two things are mutually dependent, it does not follow that they are equivalent. Because a certain screw is necessary to a certain machine, because the machine works when the screw is there and stops when the screw is taken away, we do not say that the screw is the equivalent of the machine. For correspondence to be equivalence, it would be necessary that to any part of the machine a definite part of the screw should correspond--as in a literal translation in which each chapter renders a chapter, each sentence a sentence, each word a word. Now, the relation of the brain to consciousness seems to be entirely different. Not only does the hypothesis of an equivalence between the psychical state and the cerebral state imply a downright absurdity, as we have tried to prove in a former essay,[110] but the facts, examined without prejudice, certainly seem to indicate that the relation of the psychical to the physical is just that of the machine to the screw. To speak of an equivalence between the two is simply to curtail, and make almost unintelligible, the Spinozistic or Leibnizian metaphysic. It is to accept this philosophy, such as it is, on the side of Extension, but to mutilate it on the side of Thought. With Spinoza, with Leibniz, we suppose the unifying synthesis of the phenomena of matter achieved, and everything in matter explained mechanically. But, for the conscious facts, we no longer push the synthesis to the end. We stop half-way. We suppose consciousness to be coextensive with a certain part of nature and not with all of it. We are thus led, sometimes to an "epiphenomenalism" that associates consciousness with certain particular vibrations and puts it here and there in the world in a sporadic state, and sometimes to a "monism" that scatters consciousness into as many tiny grains as there are atoms; but, in either case, it is to an incomplete Spinozism or to an incomplete Leibnizianism that we come back. Between this conception of nature and Cartesianism we find, moreover, intermediate historical stages. The medical philosophers of the eighteenth century, with their cramped Cartesianism, have had a great part in the genesis of the "epiphenomenalism" and "monism" of the present day.
* * * * *
These doctrines are thus found to fall short of the Kantian criticism. Certainly, the philosophy of Kant is also imbued with the belief in a science single and complete, embracing the whole of the real. Indeed, looked at from one aspect, it is only a continuation of the metaphysics of the moderns and a transposition of the ancient metaphysics. Spinoza and Leibniz had, following Aristotle, hypostatized in God the unity of knowledge. The Kantian criticism, on one side at least, consists in asking whether the whole of this hypothesis is necessary to modern science as it was to ancient science, or if part of the hypothesis is not sufficient. For the ancients, science applied to _concepts_, that is to say, to kinds of _things_. In compressing all concepts into one, they therefore necessarily arrived at a _being_, which we may call Thought, but which was rather thought-object than thought-subject. When Aristotle defined God the [Greek: noêseôs noêsis], it is probably on [Greek: noêseôs], and not on [Greek: noêsis] that he put the emphasis. God was the synthesis of all concepts, the idea of ideas. But modern science turns on laws, that is, on relations. Now, a relation is a bond established by a mind between two or more terms. A relation is nothing outside of the intellect that relates. The universe, therefore, can only be a system of laws if phenomena have passed beforehand through the filter of an intellect. Of course, this intellect might be that of a being infinitely superior to man, who would found the materiality of things at the same time that he bound them together: such was the hypothesis of Leibniz and of Spinoza. But it is not necessary to go so far, and, for the effect we have here to obtain, the human intellect is enough: such is precisely the Kantian solution. Between the dogmatism of a Spinoza or a Leibniz and the criticism of Kant there is just the same distance as between "it may be maintained that--" and "it suffices that--." Kant stops this dogmatism on the incline that was making it slip too far toward the Greek metaphysics; he reduces to the strict minimum the hypothesis which is necessary in order to suppose the physics of Galileo indefinitely extensible. True, when he speaks of the human intellect, he means neither yours nor mine: the unity of nature comes indeed from the human understanding that unifies, but the unifying function that operates here is impersonal. It imparts itself to our individual consciousnesses, but it transcends them. It is much less than a substantial God; it is, however, a little more than the isolated work of a man or even than the collective work of humanity. It does not exactly lie within man; rather, man lies within it, as in an atmosphere of intellectuality which his consciousness breathes. It is, if we will, a _formal_ God, something that in Kant is not yet divine, but which tends to become so. It became so, indeed, with Fichte. With Kant, however, its principal rôle was to give to the whole of our science a relative and _human_ character, although of a humanity already somewhat deified. From this point of view, the criticism of Kant consisted chiefly in limiting the dogmatism of his predecessors, accepting their conception of science and reducing to a minimum the metaphysic it implied.
But it is otherwise with the Kantian distinction between the matter of knowledge and its form. By regarding intelligence as pre-eminently a faculty of establishing relations, Kant attributed an extra-intellectual origin to the terms between which the relations are established. He affirmed, against his immediate predecessors, that knowledge is not entirely resolvable into terms of intelligence. He brought back into philosophy--while modifying it and carrying it on to another plane--that essential element of the philosophy of Descartes which had been abandoned by the Cartesians.
Thereby he prepared the way for a new philosophy, which might have established itself in the extra-intellectual matter of knowledge by a higher effort of intuition. Coinciding with this matter, adopting the same rhythm and the same movement, might not consciousness, by two efforts of opposite direction, raising itself and lowering itself by turns, become able to grasp from within, and no longer perceive only from without, the two forms of reality, body and mind? Would not this twofold effort make us, as far as that is possible, re-live the absolute? Moreover, as, in the course of this operation, we should see intellect spring up of itself, cut itself out in the whole of mind, intellectual knowledge would then appear as it is, limited, but not relative.
Such was the direction that Kantianism might have pointed out to a revivified Cartesianism. But in this direction Kant himself did not go.
He _would_ not, because, while assigning to knowledge an extra-intellectual matter, he believed this matter to be either coextensive with intellect or less extensive than intellect. Therefore he could not dream of cutting out intellect in it, nor, consequently, of tracing the genesis of the understanding and its categories. The molds of the understanding and the understanding itself had to be accepted as they are, already made. Between the matter presented to our intellect and this intellect itself there was no relationship. The agreement between the two was due to the fact that intellect imposed its form on matter. So that not only was it necessary to posit the intellectual form of knowledge as a kind of absolute and give up the quest of its genesis, but the very matter of this knowledge seemed too ground down by the intellect for us to be able to hope to get it back in its original purity. It was not the "thing-in-itself," it was only the refraction of it through our atmosphere.
If now we inquire why Kant did not believe that the matter of our knowledge extends beyond its form, this is what we find. The criticism of our knowledge of nature that was instituted by Kant consisted in ascertaining what our mind must be and what Nature must be _if_ the claims of our science are justified; but of these claims themselves Kant has not made the criticism. I mean that he took for granted the idea of a science that is one, capable of binding with the same force all the parts of what is given, and of coördinating them into a system presenting on all sides an equal solidity. He did not consider, in his _Critique of Pure Reason_, that science became less and less objective, more and more symbolical, to the extent that it went from the physical to the vital, from the vital to the psychical. Experience does not move, to his view, in two different and perhaps opposite ways, the one conformable to the direction of the intellect, the other contrary to it. There is, for him, only _one_ experience, and the intellect covers its whole ground. This is what Kant expresses by saying that all our intuitions are sensuous, or, in other words, infra-intellectual. And this would have to be admitted, indeed, if our science presented in all its parts an equal objectivity. But suppose, on the contrary, that science is less and less objective, more and more symbolical, as it goes from the physical to the psychical, passing through the vital: then, as it is indeed necessary to perceive a thing somehow in order to symbolize it, there would be an intuition of the psychical, and more generally of the vital, which the intellect would transpose and translate, no doubt, but which would none the less transcend the intellect. There would be, in other words, a supra-intellectual intuition. If this intuition exist, a taking possession of the spirit by itself is possible, and no longer only a knowledge that is external and phenomenal. What is more, if we have an intuition of this kind (I mean an ultra-intellectual intuition) then sensuous intuition is likely to be in continuity with it through certain intermediaries, as the infra-red is continuous with the ultra-violet. Sensuous intuition itself, therefore, is promoted. It will no longer attain only the phantom of an unattainable thing-in-itself. It is (provided we bring to it certain indispensable corrections) into the absolute itself that it will introduce us. So long as it was regarded as the only material of our science, it reflected back on all science something of the relativity which strikes a scientific knowledge of spirit; and thus the perception of bodies, which is the beginning of the science of bodies, seemed itself to be relative. Relative, therefore, seemed to be sensuous intuition. But this is not the case if distinctions are made between the different sciences, and if the scientific knowledge of the spiritual (and also, consequently, of the vital) be regarded as the more or less artificial extension of a certain manner of knowing which, applied to bodies, is not at all symbolical. Let us go further: if there are thus two intuitions of different order (the second being obtained by a reversal of the direction of the first), and if it is toward the second that the intellect naturally inclines, there is no essential difference between the intellect and this intuition itself. The barriers between the matter of sensible knowledge and its form are lowered, as also between the "pure forms" of sensibility and the categories of the understanding. The matter and form of intellectual knowledge (restricted to its own object) are seen to be engendering each other by a reciprocal adaptation, intellect modeling itself on corporeity, and corporeity on intellect.
But this duality of intuition Kant neither would nor could admit. It would have been necessary, in order to admit it, to regard duration as the very stuff of reality, and consequently to distinguish between the substantial duration of things and time spread out in space. It would have been necessary to regard space itself, and the geometry which is immanent in space, as an ideal limit in the direction of which material things develop, but which they do not actually attain. Nothing could be more contrary to the letter, and perhaps also to the spirit, of the _Critique of Pure Reason_. No doubt, knowledge is presented to us in it as an ever-open roll, experience as a push of facts that is for ever going on. But, according to Kant, these facts are spread out on one plane as fast as they arise; they are external to each other and external to the mind. Of a knowledge from within, that could grasp them in their springing forth instead of taking them already sprung, that would dig beneath space and spatialized time, there is never any question. Yet it is indeed beneath this plane that our consciousness places us; there flows true duration.
In this respect, also, Kant is very near his predecessors. Between the non-temporal, and the time that is spread out in distinct moments, he admits no mean. And as there is indeed no intuition that carries us into the non-temporal, all intuition is thus found to be sensuous, by definition. But between physical existence, which is spread out in space, and non-temporal existence, which can only be a conceptual and logical existence like that of which metaphysical dogmatism speaks, is there not room for consciousness and for life? There is, unquestionably. We perceive it when we place ourselves in duration in order to go from that duration to moments, instead of starting from moments in order to bind them again and to construct duration.
Yet it was to a non-temporal intuition that the immediate successors of Kant turned, in order to escape from the Kantian relativism. Certainly, the ideas of becoming, of progress, of evolution, seem to occupy a large place in their philosophy. But does duration really play a part in it? Real duration is that in which each form flows out of previous forms, while adding to them something new, and is explained by them as much as it explains them; but to deduce this form directly from one complete Being which it is supposed to manifest, is to return to Spinozism. It is, like Leibniz and Spinoza, to deny to duration all efficient action. The post-Kantian philosophy, severe as it may have been on the mechanistic theories, accepts from mechanism the idea of a science that is one and the same for all kinds of reality. And it is nearer to mechanism than it imagines; for though, in the consideration of matter, of life and of thought, it replaces the successive degrees of complexity, that mechanism supposed by degrees of the realization of an Idea or by degrees of the objectification of a Will, it still speaks of degrees, and these degrees are those of a scale which Being traverses in a single direction. In short, it makes out the same articulations in nature that mechanism does. Of mechanism it retains the whole design; it merely gives it a different coloring. But it is the design itself, or at least one half of the design, that needs to be re-made.
If we are to do that, we must give up the method of _construction_, which was that of Kant's successors. We must appeal to experience--an experience purified, or, in other words, released, where necessary, from the molds that our intellect has formed in the degree and proportion of the progress of our action on things. An experience of this kind is not a non-temporal experience. It only seeks, beyond the spatialized time in which we believe we see continual rearrangements between the parts, that concrete duration in which a radical recasting of the whole is always going on. It follows the real in all its sinuosities. It does not lead us, like the method of construction, to higher and higher generalities--piled-up stories of a magnificent building. But then it leaves no play between the explanations it suggests and the objects it has to explain. It is the detail of the real, and no longer only the whole in a lump, that it claims to illumine.
* * * * *
That the thought of the nineteenth century called for a philosophy of this kind, rescued from the arbitrary, capable of coming down to the detail of particular facts, is unquestionable. Unquestionably, also, it felt that this philosophy ought to establish itself in what we call concrete duration. The advent of the moral sciences, the progress of psychology, the growing importance of embryology among the biological sciences--all this was bound to suggest the idea of a reality which _endures_ inwardly, which is duration itself. So, when a philosopher arose who announced a doctrine of evolution, in which the progress of matter toward perceptibility would be traced together with the advance of the mind toward rationality, in which the complication of correspondences between the external and the internal would be followed step by step, in which change would become the very substance of things--to him all eyes were turned. The powerful attraction that Spencerian evolutionism has exercised on contemporary thought is due to that very cause. However far Spencer may seem to be from Kant, however ignorant, indeed, he may have been of Kantianism, he felt, nevertheless, at his first contact with the biological sciences, the direction in which philosophy could continue to advance without laying itself open to the Kantian criticism.
But he had no sooner started to follow the path than he turned off short. He had promised to retrace a genesis, and, lo! he was doing something entirely different. His doctrine bore indeed the name of evolutionism; it claimed to remount and redescend the course of the universal becoming; but, in fact, it dealt neither with becoming nor with evolution.
We need not enter here into a profound examination of this philosophy. Let us say merely that _the usual device of the Spencerian method consists in reconstructing evolution with fragments of the evolved_. If I paste a picture on a card and then cut up the card into bits, I can reproduce the picture by rightly grouping again the small pieces. And a child who working thus with the pieces of a puzzle-picture, and putting together unformed fragments of the picture finally obtains a pretty colored design, no doubt imagines that he has _produced_ design and color. Yet the act of drawing and painting has nothing to do with that of putting together the fragments of a picture already drawn and already painted. So, by combining together the most simple results of evolution, you may imitate well or ill the most complex effects; but of neither the simple nor the complex will you have retraced the genesis, and the addition of evolved to evolved will bear no resemblance whatever to the movement of evolution.
Such, however, is Spencer's illusion. He takes reality in its present form; he breaks it to pieces, he scatters it in fragments which he throws to the winds; then he "integrates" these fragments and "dissipates their movement." Having _imitated_ the Whole by a work of mosaic, he imagines he has retraced the design of it, and made the genesis.
Is it matter that is in question? The diffused elements which he integrates into visible and tangible bodies have all the air of being the very particles of the simple bodies, which he first supposes disseminated throughout space. They are, at any rate, "material points," and consequently unvarying points, veritable little solids: as if solidity, being what is nearest and handiest to us, could be found at the very origin of materiality! The more physics progresses, the more it shows the impossibility of representing the properties of ether or of electricity--the probable base of all bodies--on the model of the properties of the matter which we perceive. But philosophy goes back further even than the ether, a mere schematic figure of the relations between phenomena apprehended by our senses. It knows indeed that what is visible and tangible in things represents our possible action on them. It is not by dividing the evolved that we shall reach the principle of that which evolves. It is not by recomposing the evolved with itself that we shall reproduce the evolution of which it is the term.
Is it the question of mind? By compounding the reflex with the reflex, Spencer thinks he generates instinct and rational volition one after the other. He fails to see that the specialized reflex, being a terminal point of evolution just as much as perfect will, cannot be supposed at the start. That the first of the two terms should have reached its final form before the other is probable enough; but both the one and the other are _deposits_ of the evolution movement, and the evolution movement itself can no more be expressed as a function solely of the first than solely of the second. We must begin by mixing the reflex and the voluntary. We must then go in quest of the fluid reality which has been precipitated in this twofold form, and which probably shares in both without being either. At the lowest degree of the animal scale, in living beings that are but an undifferentiated protoplasmic mass, the reaction to stimulus does not yet call into play one definite mechanism, as in the reflex; it has not yet choice among several definite mechanisms, as in the voluntary act; it is, then, neither voluntary nor reflex, though it heralds both. We experience in ourselves something of this true original activity when we perform semi-voluntary and semi-automatic movements to escape a pressing danger. And yet this is but a very imperfect imitation of the primitive character, for we are concerned here with a mixture of two activities already formed, already localized in a brain and in a spinal cord, whereas the original activity was a simple thing, which became diversified through the very construction of mechanisms like those of the spinal cord and brain. But to all this Spencer shuts his eyes, because it is of the essence of his method to recompose the consolidated with the consolidated, instead of going back to the gradual process of consolidation, which is evolution itself.
Is it, finally, the question of the correspondence between mind and matter? Spencer is right in defining the intellect by this correspondence. He is right in regarding it as the end of an evolution. But when he comes to retrace this evolution, again he integrates the evolved with the evolved--failing to see that he is thus taking useless trouble, and that in positing the slightest fragment of the actually evolved he posits the whole--so that it is vain for him, then, to pretend to make the genesis of it.
For, according to him, the phenomena that succeed each other in nature project into the human mind images which represent them. To the relations between phenomena, therefore, correspond symmetrically relations between the ideas. And the most general laws of nature, in which the relations between phenomena are condensed, are thus found to have engendered the directing principles of thought, into which the relations between ideas have been integrated. Nature, therefore, is reflected in mind. The intimate structure of our thought corresponds, piece by piece, to the very skeleton of things--I admit it willingly; but, in order that the human mind may be able to represent relations between phenomena, there must first be phenomena, that is to say, distinct facts, cut out in the continuity of becoming. And once we posit this particular mode of cutting up such as we perceive it to-day, we posit also the intellect such as it is to-day, for it is by relation to it, and to it alone, that reality is cut up in this manner. Is it probable that mammals and insects notice the same aspects of nature, trace in it the same divisions, articulate the whole in the same way? And yet the insect, so far as intelligent, has already something of our intellect. Each being cuts up the material world according to the lines that its action must follow: it is these lines of _possible action_ that, by intercrossing, mark out the net of experience of which each mesh is a fact. No doubt, a town is composed exclusively of houses, and the streets of the town are only the intervals between the houses: so, we may say that nature contains only facts, and that, the facts once posited, the relations are simply the lines running between the facts. But, in a town, it is the gradual portioning of the ground into lots that has determined at once the place of the houses, their general shape, and the direction of the streets: to this portioning we must go back if we wish to understand the particular mode of subdivision that causes each house to be where it is, each street to run as it does. Now, the cardinal error of Spencer is to take experience already allotted as given, whereas the true problem is to know how the allotment was worked. I agree that the laws of thought are only the integration of relations between facts. But, when I posit the facts with the shape they have for me to-day, I suppose my faculties of perception and intellection such as they are in me to-day; for it is they that portion the real into lots, they that cut the facts out in the whole of reality. Therefore, instead of saying that the relations between facts have generated the laws of thought, I can as well claim that it is the form of thought that has determined the shape of the facts perceived, and consequently their relations among themselves: the two ways of expressing oneself are equivalent; they say at bottom the same thing. With the second, it is true, we give up speaking of evolution. But, with the first, we only speak of it, we do not think of it any the more. For a true evolutionism would propose to discover by what _modus vivendi_, gradually obtained, the intellect has adopted its plan of structure, and matter its mode of subdivision. This structure and this subdivision work into each other; they are mutually complementary; they must have progressed one with the other. And, whether we posit the present structure of mind or the present subdivision of matter, in either case we remain in the evolved: we are told nothing of what evolves, nothing of evolution.
And yet it is this evolution that we must discover. Already, in the field of physics itself, the scientists who are pushing the study of their science furthest incline to believe that we cannot reason about the parts as we reason about the whole; that the same principles are not applicable to the origin and to the end of a progress; that neither creation nor annihilation, for instance, is inadmissible when we are concerned with the constituent corpuscles of the atom. Thereby they tend to place themselves in the concrete duration, in which alone there is true generation and not only a composition of parts. It is true that the creation and annihilation of which they speak concern the movement or the energy, and not the imponderable medium through which the energy and the movement are supposed to circulate. But what can remain of matter when you take away everything that determines it, that is to say, just energy and movement themselves? The philosopher must go further than the scientist. Making a clean sweep of everything that is only an imaginative symbol, he will see the material world melt back into a simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming. And he will thus be prepared to discover real duration there where it is still more useful to find it, in the realm of life and of consciousness. For, so far as inert matter is concerned, we may neglect the flowing without committing a serious error: matter, we have said, is weighted with geometry; and matter, the reality which _descends_, endures only by its connection with that which _ascends_. But life and consciousness are this very ascension. When once we have grasped them in their essence by adopting their movement, we understand how the rest of reality is derived from them. Evolution appears and, within this evolution, the progressive determination of materiality and intellectuality by the gradual consolidation of the one and of the other. But, then, it is within the evolutionary movement that we place ourselves, in order to follow it to its present results, instead of recomposing these results artificially with fragments of themselves. Such seems to us to be the true function of philosophy. So understood, philosophy is not only the turning of the mind homeward, the coincidence of human consciousness with the living principle whence it emanates, a contact with the creative effort: it is the study of becoming in general, it is true evolutionism and consequently the true continuation of science--provided that we understand by this word a set of truths either experienced or demonstrated, and not a certain new scholasticism that has grown up during the latter half of the nineteenth century around the physics of Galileo, as the old scholasticism grew up around Aristotle.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 96: The part of this chapter which treats of the history of systems, particularly of the Greek philosophy, is only the very succinct résumé of views that we developed at length, from 1900 to 1904, in our lectures at the Collège de France, especially in a course on the _History of the Idea of Time_ (1902-1903). We then compared the mechanism of conceptual thought to that of the cinematograph. We believe the comparison will be useful here.]
[Footnote 97: The analysis of the idea of the nought which we give here (pp. 275-298) has appeared before in the _Revue philosophique_ (November 1906).]
[Footnote 98: Kant, _Critique of Pure Reason_, 2nd edition, p. 737: "From the point of view of our knowledge in general ... the peculiar function of negative propositions is simply to prevent error." Cf. Sigwart, _Logik_, 2nd edition, vol. i. pp. 150 ff.]
[Footnote 99: That is, we do not consider the sophism of Zeno refuted by the fact that the geometrical progression _a_(1 + 1/_n_ + 1/_n_2 + 1/_n_3 +,... etc.)--in which _a_ designates the initial distance between Achilles and the tortoise, and _n_ the relation of their respective velocities--has a finite sum if _n_ is greater than 1. On this point we may refer to the arguments of F. Evellin, which we regard as conclusive (see Evellin, _Infini et quantité_, Paris, 1880, pp. 63-97; cf. _Revue philosophique_, vol. xi., 1881, pp. 564-568). The truth is that mathematics, as we have tried to show in a former work, deals and can deal only with lengths. It has therefore had to seek devices, first, to transfer to the movement, which is not a length, the divisibility of the line passed over, and then to reconcile with experience the idea (contrary to experience and full of absurdities) of a movement that is a length, that is, of a movement _placed upon_ its trajectory and arbitrarily decomposable like it.]
[Footnote 100: Plato, _Timaeus_, 37 D.]
[Footnote 101: We have tried to bring out what is true and what is false in this idea, so far as spatiality is concerned (see Chapter III.). It seems to us radically false as regards _duration_.]
[Footnote 102: Aristotle, _De anima_, 430 a 14 [Greek: kai hestin ho men toioutos nous tô pynta ginesthai, ho de tô panta poiein, ôs hexis tis, oion to phôs. tropon gar tina ka to phôs poiei ta dynamei onta chrômata energeia chrômata].]
[Footnote 103: _De caelo_, ii. 287 a 12 [Greek: tês eschatês periphoras oute kenon estin exôthen oute topos.] _Phys._ iv. 212 a 34 [Greek: to de pan esti men hôs kinêsetai hesti d' hôs ou. hôs men gar holon, hama ton topon hou metaballei. kyklô de kinêsetai, tôn moriôn gar outos ho topos].]
[Footnote 104: _De caelo_, i. 279 a 12 [Greek: oude chronos hestin hexô tou ouranou]. _Phys._ viii. 251 b 27 [Greek: ho chronos pathos ti kinêseôs].]
[Footnote 105: Especially have we left almost entirely on one side those admirable but somewhat fugitive intuitions that Plotinus was later to seize, to study and to fix.]
[Footnote 106: See page 10.]
[Footnote 107: Descartes, _Principes_, ii. § 29.]
[Footnote 108: Descartes, _Principes_, ii. §§ 36 ff.]
[Footnote 109: In a course of lectures on Plotinus, given at the Collège de France in 1897-1898, we tried to bring out these resemblances. They are numerous and impressive. The analogy is continued even in the formulae employed on each side.]
[Footnote 110: "Le Paralogisme psycho-physiologique" (_Revue de métaphysique et de morale_, Nov. 1904, pp. 895-908). Cf. _Matière et mémoire_, Paris, 1896, chap. i.]
INDEX
(Compiled by the Translator)
Abolition of everything a self-contradiction, 280, 283, 296, 298 idea of, 279, 282, 283, 295, 296. _See_ Nought
Absence of order, 231, 234, 274. _See_ Disorder
Absolute and freedom, 277 reality, 99, 228-9, 269, 358, 361 reality of the person, 269 time and the, 239, 240, 298, 340, 344
Absoluteness of duration, 206 of understanding, xi, 47, 152, 190, 197, 199
Abstract becoming, 304-7 multiplicity, 257-9 time, 9, 17, 20-2, 37, 39, 46, 51, 163, 318-9, 336, 352-3
Accident and essence in Aristotle's philosophy, 353 in evolution, 86-7, 104, 114-5, 127, 169, 170, 252, 254-5, 266, 267, 326-7
Accidental variations, 55, 63, 68, 69, 74, 85-6, 168
Accumulation of energy, function of vegetable organisms, 253, 255
Achilles and tortoise, in Zeno, 311, 312-3
Acquired characters, inheritance of, 76-9, 83-4, 87, 169, 170, 173, 231
Act, consciousness as inadequacy of, to representation, 144 form (or essence), quality, three classes of representation, 302-3
Action, creativeness of free, 192, 247 and concepts, 160, 297 and consciousness, xiii, 5, 143-4, 145, 179-80, 207, 262 discontinuity of, 154, 307 freedom of, in animals, 130 as function of nervous system, 262-3 indivisibility of, 94, 95, 308-9 and inert matter, 96, 136, 141-2, 156, 187, 198, 226, 366 instinct and, 136, 141 instrument of, consciousness, 180 instrument of, life, 162 instrument of matter, 161, 198-9 as instrument of consciousness, 180 and intellect. _See_ Intellect and action intensity of consciousness varies with ratio of possible, to real, 145 meaning of, 301-3 moves from want to fulness, 297, 298 organism a machine for, 252, 254, 300 and perception, 5, 11, 12, 93, 188, 189, 206, 227-30, 300, 307, 368 possible, 12, 13, 96, 144, 145, 146-7, 159, 165, 179-81, 188, 264 and science, 93, 195-6, 198-9, 329-30 and space, 203 sphere of the intellect, 155 tension in a free, 200, 207, 238, 240, 301-2
Activity, dissatisfaction the starting-point of, 297 of instinct, continuous with vital process, 139, 140 life as, 128-9, 247 mutually inverse factors in vital, 248 and nervous system, 110, 130, 132-3, 134-5, 180, 252, 261-3 organism as, 174 potential. _See_ Action, possible tension of free, 200, 202, 207-8, 223-4, 237, 239, 300-1 and torpor in evolution, 109, 111, 113, 114, 119-20, 129-30, 135-6, 181, 292 vital, has evolved divergently, 134 _See_ Divergent lines of evolution
Adaptation, 50-1, 55, 57-8, 59, 70, 101, 129, 133, 192, 255, 270, 305-6 and causation, 102 mutual, between materiality and intellectuality, 187, 206-7 and progress, 101-2
Adequate and inadequate in Spinoza, 353
Adjectives, substantives and verbs, 303-4, 315
Aesthetics and philosophy, 177
Affection, Role of, in the idea of chance, 234 in the idea of nought, 281-3, 289, 293, 295, 296 in negation, 286-7
Affirmation and negation, 285-6, 293
Age and individuality, 15-6
Albuminoid substances, 121-2
Alciope, 96
Alexandrian philosophy, 322, 323
Algae in illustration of probable consciousness in vegetable forms, 112
Alimentation, 113-4, 117, 247
Allegory of the Cave, 191
Alternations of increase and decrease of mutability of the universe, 245-6
Alveolar froth, 33-4
Ambiguity of the idea of "generality" in philosophy, 230-1, 320-1 of primitive organisms, 99, 112, 113, 129-30
Ammophila hirsuta, paralyzing instinct in, 173
Amoeba, in illustration of imitation of the living by the unorganized, 33-6 in illustration of the ambiguity of primitive organisms, 99 in illustration of the mobility characteristic of animals, 108 in illustration of the "explosive" expenditure of energy characteristic of animals, 120, 253
Anagenesis, 34
Anarchy, idea of, 233, 234. _See_ Disorder
Anatomy, comparative, and transformism, 25
Ancient philosophy, Achilles and tortoise, 311-2 Alexandrian philosophy, 322-3 Allegory of the Cave, 191 Anima (De), 322 _note_ Apogee of sensible object, 344, 345, 349 Archimedes, 343-4 Aristotle, 135, 174-5, 227-8, 314, 316, 321, 323, 324, 328-33, 347, 349, 353, 356, 370 Arrow of Zeno, 308-13 ascent toward God, in Aristotle, 323 Astronomy, ancient and modern, 334-6 attraction and impulsion in, 323-4 becoming in, 313-4, 317 bow and indivisibility of motion, 308-9 Caelo (De), of Aristotle, 322 _note_, 324 _note_ and Cartesian geometry, 334-5 causality in, 323, 325-6 change in, 313-4, 317, 328-9, 342-3 cinematographical nature of, 315 circularity of God's thought, 323-4 concentric spheres, 328 concepts, 326-7, 356 "conversion" and "procession" in, 323 degradation of ideas into sensible flux, 317-8, 321, 323-4, 327, 328, 343-5, 352-3 degrees of reality, 323-4, 327 diminution, derivation of becoming by. _See_ Degradation of Ideas, etc. duration, 317-9 _note_, 323-4, 327-9 Eleatic philosophy, 308, 314 Enneads of Plotinus, 210 _note_ essence and accident, 354 essence or form, 314-5 eternal, 317-8, 324-6 Eternity, 317-8, 320, 324, 328-9 extension, 210 _note_, 318, 324, 327 form or idea, 314-20, 322, 327, 329-31, 352 geometry, Cartesian, and ancient philosophy, 334 God of Aristotle, 196-7, 322-4, 349, 352, 356 [Greek: hylê], 353 Idea, 314-22, 352-3 and indivisibility of motion, 307-8, 311 intelligible reality in, 326 intelligibles of Plotinus, 353 [Greek: logos], of Plotinus, 210 _note_ matter in Aristotle's philosophy, 316, 327 and modern astronomy, 333-4, 335 and modern geometry, 333-4 and modern philosophy, 226-7, 228-9, 232, 281-2, 344-5, 346, 349-51, 364, 369 and modern science, 329-30, 336, 342-3, 344-5, 357 motion in, 307-8, 312-3 necessity in, 327 [Greek: noêseôs noêsis], 356 non-being, 316, 327 [Greek: nous poiêtikos], 322 oscillation about being, sensible reality as, 317-8 Physics of Aristotle, 227-8 _note_, 324 _note_, 330-1 Plato, 48, 156, 191, 210 _note_, 316-8, 321-4, 327, 330, 348, 349 Plotinus, 210, 316, 323, 326 _note_, 349, 352-4 procession in Alexandrian philosophy, 323 [Greek: psychê], 210 _note_, 350 realism in, 232 refraction of idea through matter or non-being, 317 sectioning of becoming, 318-9 sensible reality, 314, 316-8, 321, 327-9, 352-3 [Greek: sôma], 350 space and time, 317-9, 320 Timaeus, 318 _note_ time in ancient and in modern science, 330-1, 336-7, 341-4 time and space, 317-9, 320 vision of God in Alexandrian philosophy, 322 Zeno, 308, 313
Ancient science and modern, 329-31, 336-7, 342-5, 357
Anima (De), of Aristotle, 322 _note_
Animal kingdom, 12, 105-6, 119-21, 126, 129, 131-2, 134-6, 137-8, 139, 179, 184-5
Animals, 105-47, 167, 170, 181, 183, 187, 212, 214, 246, 252, 253, 254, 262-5, 267, 271, 293, 301 deduction in, 212 induction in, 214 and man, 139-43, 183, 187, 188, 212, 263, 264, 267 and man in respect to brain, 183, 184-5, 263-5 and man in respect to consciousness, 139-43, 180, 183, 187, 188, 192, 212, 263-8 and man in respect to instruments of action, 139-43, 150-1 and man in respect to intelligence, 137-8, 187, 188, 191-2, 212 and plants, 105-39, 124-6, 143, 145, 146-7, 168-70, 181-2, 253, 254, 293 and plants in respect to activity of consciousness, 109, 111, 113, 119-21, 128-9, 132, 134-6, 142-3, 144, 181-2, 293 and plants in respect to function, 117-8, 121-2, 127 and plants in respect to instinct, 167, 170 and plants in respect to mobility, 109, 110, 113, 129-30, 132-3, 135, 181 and plants in respect to nature of consciousness, 134-5
Antagonistic currents of the vital impetus, 129, 135-6, 181, 184, 250, 258-9
Anthophora, 146-7
Antinomies of Kant, 204, 205
Antipathy. _See_ Sympathy, Feeling, Divination
Antithesis and thesis, 205
Ants, 101, 134, 140, 157
Ape's brain and consciousness contrasted with man's, 263
Aphasia, 181
Apidae, social instinct in the, 171
Apogee of instinct in the hymenoptera and of intelligence in man, 174-5 _See_ Evolutionary superiority
Apogee of sensible object, in philosophy of Ideas, 343-4, 349
Approximateness of the knowledge of matter, 206-7
Approximation, in matter, to the mathematical order, 218. _See_ Order
Archimedes, 333-4
Aristotle. _See_ Ancient Philosophy, Aristotle
Arrow, Flying, of Zeno, 308-9, 310, 312-3
Art, 6-7, 29 _note_, 45, 89, 177
Artemia Salina, transformations of, 72, 73
Arthropods in evolution, 130-5, 142
Articulate species, 133
Articulations of matter relative to action, 156, 367 of motion, 310-1 of real time, 332-3
Artificial, how far scientific knowledge is, 197, 218-9 instruments, 138, 139, 140-1
Artist, in illustration of the creativeness of duration, 340-1
Ascending cosmic movement, 11, 208, 275, 369
Ascent toward God, in Aristotle, 323
Association of organisms, 260. _See_ Individuation universal oscillation between association and individuation, 259, 260. _See_ Societies
Astronomy and deduction, 213 and the inert order, 224 modern, in reference to ancient science, 334-6
Atmosphere of spatiality bathing intelligence, 204
Atom, 240, 254, 255 as an intellectual view of matter, 203, 250 and interpenetration, 207
Attack and defence in evolution, 131-2
Attention, 2, 148-9, 154, 184, 209 discontinuity of, 2 in man and in lower animals, 184. _See_ Tension and instinct, Tension as inverted extension, Tension of personality, Sympathetic appreciation, etc., Relaxation and intellect
Attraction and impulsion in Greek philosophy, 323, 324
Attribute and subject, 148
Automatic activity, 145 as instrument of voluntary, 252 order, 224, 231-4. _See_ Negative movement, etc., Geometrical order
Automatism, 127, 143-4, 174, 223-4, 261, 264
Background of instinct and intelligence, consciousness as, 186
Backward-looking attitude of the intellect, 47, 48, 237
Baldwin, J.M., 27 _note_
Ballast of intelligence, 152, 230, 239, 369-70
Bastian, 212 _note_
Bateson, 63
Becoming, 164, 236, 248-9, 273, 299-304, 307-8, 313-4, 316, 337-8, 342-3, 345, 363 in ancient philosophy, 313-4, 317 in Descartes's philosophy, 346 in Eleatic philosophy, 313-4, 315 in general, or abstract becoming, 304, 306-7 instantaneous and static views of, 272, 304-5 states of, falsely so called, 164, 247-8, 273, 298-301, 307-8 in the successors of Kant, 363. _See_ Change, New, Duration, Time, Views of reality
Bees, 101, 140, 142, 146, 166, 172
Beethoven, 224
Berthold, 34 _note_
Bethe, 176 _note_
Bifurcations of tendency, 54. _See_ Divergent lines of evolution
Biology, 12, 25, 26, 31-2, 43, 168-9, 174-5, 194-6 evolutionist, 168-9 and philosophy, 43, 194-6 and physico-chemistry, 26
Blaringhem, 85
Bodies, 156, 188, 189, 300-1, 360. _See_ Inert matter as a relaxation of the unextended into the extended defined as bundles of qualities, 349
Bois-Reymond (Du), 38
Boltzmann, 245
Bombines, social instincts in, 171
Bouvier, 142 _note_
Bow, strain of, illustrating indivisibility of motion, 308-10
Brain and consciousness, 5, 109, 110, 179-80, 183-4, 212 _note_, 252, 261-4, 270, 354, 356, 366. _See_ Nervous System in man and lower animals, 183, 184, 263-5
Brandt, 66 _note_
Breast-Plate, in reference to animal mobility, 130, 131. _See_ Carapace, Cellulose envelope
Brown-Séquard, 80-2
Bulb, medullary, in the development of the nervous system, 110, 252
Busquet, 259 _note_
Bütschli, 33 _note_
Buttel-Reepen, 171 _note_
Butterflies, in illustration of variation from evolutionary type, 72
Caelo (De), of Aristotle, 322 _note_, 324 _note_
Calcareous sheath, in reference to animal mobility, 130-1
Calkins, 16 _note_
Canal, in illustration of the relation of function and structure, 93
Canalization, in illustration of the function of animal organisms, 93, 95, 110, 126, 256, 270
Canvas, embroidering "something" on the, of "nothing," 297
Caprice, an attribute not of freedom but of mechanism, 47
Carapace, in reference to animal mobility, 130-1
Carbohydrates, in reference to the function of the animal organism, 121-2
Carbon, in reference to the function of organisms, 107, 113, 114, 117, 254, 255
Carbonic acid, in reference to the function of organisms, 254, 255
Carnot, 243, 246, 256
Cartesian geometry, compared with ancient, 334
Cartesianism, 345, 356, 358
Cartesians, 358. _See_ Spinoza, Leibniz
Carving, the, of matter by intellect, 155
Categorical propositions, characteristic of instinctive knowledge, 149-50
Categories, conceptual, x, xiii, 48, 147, 148-9, 165, 189-90, 195-7, 207, 220-1, 257-60, 265, 358, 361. _See_ Concept deduction of, and genesis of the intellect, 196, 207, 359. _See_ Genesis of matter and of the intellect innate, 147, 148-9 misfit for the vital, x, xiii, 48, 165, 195-9, 220-1, 257-9 in reference to the adaptation to each other of the matter and form of knowledge, 361
Cats, in illustration of the law of correlation, 67
Causal relation in Aristotle, 325 between consciousness and movement, 111 in Greek philosophy, 324-5
Causality, mechanical, a category which does not apply to life, x, xiv, 177 in the philosophy of Ideas, 323-6
Causation and adaptation, 101, 102 final, involves mechanical, 44
Cause and effect as mathematical functions of each other, 20, 21 efficient, 238, 277, 323 efficient, in Aristotle's philosophy, 324 efficient, in Leibniz's philosophy, 353 final, 40, 44, 238 final, in Aristotle's philosophy, 324 by impulsion, release and unwinding, 73 mechanical, as containing effect, 14, 233, 269 in the vital order, 95, 164
Cave, Plato's allegory of the, 191
Cell, 16, 24, 33, 162, 166, 167, 260, 269 as artificial construct, 162 in the "colonial theory," 260 division, 16, 24, 33 instinct in the, 166, 167 in relation to the soul, 269
Cellulose envelope in reference to vegetable immobility and torpor, 108, 111, 130
Cerebral activity and consciousness, 5, 109-10, 180-1, 183-4, 212 _note_, 252, 253, 261, 264, 268, 270, 350, 351, 354, 355, 366 mechanism, 5, 252, 253, 262, 264, 366
Cerebro-spinal system, 124. _See_ Nervous system
Certainty of induction, 215, 216
Chance analogous to disorder, 233, 234. _See_ Affection in evolution, 86-7, 104, 114-5, 126, 169-70, 171, 252, 254, 255, 266, 267, 326-7. _See_ Indetermination
Change, 1, 7-8, 18, 85-6, 248, 275, 294, 300-304, 308, 313-4, 317, 326, 328-9, 343-4, 344-5 in ancient philosophy, 313-4, 316-7, 325-6, 327-9, 343, 345 in Eleatic philosophy, 314 known only from within, 307-8
Chaos, 232. _See_ Disorder
Character, moral, 5, 99-100
Charrin, 81 _note_
Chemistry, 27, 34-6, 55, 72, 74, 98, 194, 226, 256, 260
Child, intelligence in, 147-8 adolescence of, in illustration of evolutionary becoming, 311-3
Chipped stone, in paleontology, 139
Chlorophyllian function, 107-9, 114, 117, 246, 253
Choice, 110, 125, 143-5, 179, 180, 252, 260-4, 276, 366 and consciousness, 110, 179, 260-4
Chrysalis, 114 _note_
Cinematograph, 306-7, 339-40
Cinematographical character of ancient philosophy, 315-6 of intellectual knowledge, 306, 307, 312-8, 323-4, 331-3, 346 of language, 306-7, 312-5 of modern science, 329-31, 336-7, 341-3, 345, 346, 347
Circle of the given, broken by action, 192, 247 logical and physical, 277 vicious, in intellectualist philosophy, 193, 197, 320 vicious, in the intuitional method is only apparent, 192, 193
Circularity of God's thought in Aristotle's philosophy, 324 of each special evolution, 128
Circulation, protoplasmic, imitated, 32-3 in plants and animals, 108
Circumstances in the determination of evolution, 101-2, 128-9, 133, 138, 142, 150-1, 167, 168, 170-1, 193, 194, 252, 256 in relation to special instincts, 138, 168, 193
Classes of words corresponding to the three kinds of representation, 303-4
Clausius, 243
Clearness characteristic of intellect, 160
Cleft between the organized and the unorganized, 190, 196-9
Climbing plants, instincts of, 170 _note_
Coincidence of matter with space as in Kant, 206, 207, 244 of mind with intellect as in Kant, 48, 206 of qualities, 216 of seeing and willing, 237 of self with self, definition of the feeling of duration, 199-200
Coleopter, instinct in, 146
Colonial theory, 259, 260
Colonies, microbial, 259
Color variation in lizards, 72, 74
Coming and going of the mind between the without and the within gives rise to the idea of "Nothing," 279 between nature and mind, the true method of philosophy, 239
Common-sense, 29, 153, 161, 213, 224, 277 defined as continuous experience of the real, 213
Comparison of ancient philosophy with modern, 226, 228-9, 232, 328-9, 345-6, 349-51, 353-4, 356
Compenetration, 352-3. _See_ Interpenetration
Complementarity of forms evolved, xii, xiii, 51, 101, 103, 113, 116-7, 135, 136, 254, 255 of instinct and intelligence, 146, 173. _See_ Opposition of Instinct and Intelligence of intuition and intellect, 343, 345 in the powers of life, 49, 96-7, 140-3, 177, 178-9, 183-5, 239, 246, 254, 343 of science and metaphysics, 344
Complexity of the order of mathematics, 208-10, 217, 251
Compound reflex, instinct as a, 174
Concentration, intellect as, 191, 301 of personality, 198-9, 201
Concentric spheres in Aristotle's philosophy, 328
Concept accessory to action, ix analogy of, with the solid body, ix in animals, 187 externality of, 160, 168, 175-8, 199-200, 251, 306, 311, 314 fringed about with intuition, 46 and image distinguished, 160, 279 impotent to grasp life, ix-xiii, 49 intellect the concept-making faculty, vi, 49 misfit for the vital, 48 representation of the act by which the intellect is fixed on things, 161 synthesis of, in ancient philosophy, 325-6, 356. _See_ Categories, Externality, Frames, Image, Space, Symbol
Conditions, external, in evolution, 128-9, 133, 138, 141-2, 150-1, 166-7, 168, 170, 193, 194, 251, 256, 257 external, in determination of special instinct, 141-2, 150-1, 167, 168, 171
Conduct, mechanism and finality in the evolution of, 47. _See_ Freedom, Determination, Indetermination
Confused plurality of life, 257
Conjugation of Infusoria, 16
Consciousness and action, ix, 5, 144, 145, 179-80, 207, 260-1 consciousness as appendage to action, ix consciousness as arithmetical difference between possible and real activity, 145 consciousness as auxiliary to action, 179-80 consciousness as inadequacy of act to representation, 144 consciousness as instrument of action, 180 consciousness as interval between possible and real action, 145, 179 consciousness as light from zone of possible actions surrounding the real act, 179 consciousness and locomotion, 262 consciousness plugged up by action, 144, 145. _See_ Torpor, Sleep consciousness as sketch of action, 207 intensity of, varies with ratio of possible to real action, 145
Consciousness in animals, as distinguished from the consciousness of plants, 130, 135-6, 143 as distinguished from the consciousness of man, 139-43, 180, 183, 184, 187, 188, 212, 263-9. _See_ Torpor, Sleep characteristic of animals, torpor of plants, 109, 111, 113, 120, 128-9, 135-6, 181, 182, 292 as background of instinct and intelligence, 186 and brain, 180, 262, 263, 269, 270, 354 and choice, 110, 144-5, 179, 262-4 coextensive with universal life, 186, 270 and creation, consciousness as demand for creation, 261 current of, penetrating matter, 181, 270 as deficiency of instinct, 145 in dog and man, 180 double form of, 179 function of, 207 as hesitation or choice, 143, 144 imprisonment of, 180, 183-4, 264 as invention and freedom, 264, 270 in man as distinguished from, in lower forms of life, 180, 263, 264, 267, 268 and matter, 179, 181-2 as motive principle of evolution, 181-2 nullified, as distinguished from the absence of consciousness, 143 and the organism, 270 in plants, 131, 135-6, 143 as world principle, 237, 261
Conservation of energy, 243, 244
Construction, 139-42, 150-1, 156, 157-8, 180, 182. _See_ Manufacture, Solid the characteristic work of intellect, 163-4 as the method of Kant's successors, 364-5
Contingency, 96, 255, 268. _See_ Accident, Chance the, of order, 231, 235
Continuation of vital process in instinct, 138, 139, 166, 167, 246. _See_ Variations, Vital process
Continuity, 1, 26, 29-30, 37, 138-40, 154, 162-4, 258, 302, 306-7, 311-2, 321, 325-6, 329-30, 347 of becoming, 306-7, 312 of change, 325-6 of evolution, 18, 19 of extension, 154 of germinative plasma, 26, 37 of instinct with vital process, 139, 140, 166-7, 246 of life, 1-11, 29, 163-4, 258 of living substance, 162 of psychic life, 1, 30 of the real, 302, 329-30 of sensible intuition with ultra-intellectual, 361 of sensible universe, 346
Conventionality of science, 207
"Conversion" and "procession" in Alexandrian philosophy, 323
Cook, Plato's comparison of the, and the dialectician, 156
Cope, 35 _note_, 77, 111
Correlation, law of, 66, 67
Correspondence between mind and matter in Spencer, 368. _See_ Simultaneity
Cortical mechanism, 252, 253, 262. _See_ Cerebral mechanism
Cosmogony and genesis of matter, 188. _See_ Genesis of matter and of intellect, Spencer
Cosmology the, that follows from the philosophy of Ideas, 315, 328 as reversed psychology, 208
Counterweight representation as, to action, 145
Counting simultaneities, the measurement of time is, 338, 341-2
Creation, xi, 7, 11, 12, 22, 29, 30, 45, 93, 100, 101, 103, 105, 108, 114, 128-31, 161, 163-4, 178, 200, 217, 218, 223, 226, 230, 237-40, 261, 270, 275, 339-40 in Descartes's philosophy, 345 of intellect, 248-9 of matter, 237, 239, 247-8, 249. _See_ Materiality the inversion of spirituality of present by past, 5, 20-3, 27, 167, 199-202 the vital order as, 230
Creative evolution, 7, 15, 21, 27, 29, 36, 37, 65, 100, 104-5, 161, 163, 223-4, 230-1, 237, 264, 269
Creativeness of free action, 192, 243 of invention, 250
Creeping plants in illustration of vegetable mobility, 108
Cricket victim of paralyzing instinct of sphex, 172
Criterion, quest of a, 53 _ff._ of evolutionary rank, 133, 265
Criticism, Kantian, 205, 287 _note_, 356, 360-2 of knowledge, 194-5
Cross-cuts through becoming by intellect, 314. _See_ Views of reality through matter by perception, 206
Cross-roads of vital tendency, 51, 52, 54, 110, 126
Crustacea, 19, 111, 129-30
Crystal illustrating (by contrast) individuation, 12
Cuénot, 79 _note_
Culminating points of evolutionary progress, 50, 133-5. _See_ Evolutionary superiority
Current, 26, 27, 51, 185, 236, 237, 250, 266, 269
Currents, antagonistic, 250 of existence, 185 of life penetrating matter, 26, 27, 266, 270 vital, 26, 27, 51, 237, 266, 270 of will penetrating matter, 237
Curves, as symbol of life, 32, 90, 213
Cuts through becoming by the intellect, 313-4. _See_ Views of reality, Snapshots in illustration, etc. through matter by perception, 206
Cuvier, 125 _note_
Dantec (Le), 18 _note_, 34 _note_
Darwin, 62-5, 66, 72, 108, 170 _note_
Darwinism, 56, 85, 86
Dastre, 36 _note_
Dead, the, is the object of intellect, 165
Dead-locks in speculation, 155, 312
Death, 246 _note_, 271
Declivity descended by matter, 208, 246, 256, 339-40. _See_ Descending movement
Decomposing and recomposing powers characteristic of intellect, 157, 251
Deduction, analogy between, related to moral sphere and tangent to curve, 213 and astronomy, 213 duration refractory to, 213 geometry the ideal limit of, 213-26, 361 in animals, 212 inverse to positive spiritual effort, 212 nature of, 211 physics and, 213 weakness of, in psychology and moral science, 213
Defence and attack in evolution, 132
Deficiency of will the negative condition of mathematical order and complexity, 209
Definition in the realm of life, 13, 105, 106
Degenerates, 133-5
_Dégénérescence sénile (La)_, by Metchnikoff, 18 _note_
Degradation of energy, 241, 242, 246 of the extra-spatial into the spatial, 207 of the ideas into the sensible flux in ancient philosophy, 317-9, 324-5, 327-9, 331, 343, 345, 352-3
Degrees of being in the successors of Kant, 362-3
Degrees of reality in Greek philosophy, 324, 327
Delage, 59 _note_, 81 _note_, 260 _note_
Delamare, 81 _note_
Deliberation, 144
De Manacéine, 124 _note_
Deposit, instinct and intelligence as deposits, emanations, issues, or aspects of life, x, xii, xiii, 49, 103, 105, 136, 365
De Saporta, 107 _note_
Descartes, 280, 334, 345, 346, 353, 358 becoming, 345-6 creation, 346 determinism, 345 duration, 346 freedom, 345, 346 geometry, 334 God, 346 image and idea or concept, 281 indeterminism, 345 mechanism, 345, 346 motion, 346 vacillation between abstract time and real duration, 345
Descending movement of existence, 11, 202, 203, 208, 271, 275, 369
Design, motionless, of action the object of intellect, 154-5, 299, 301-2, 303
Detention in the dream state, 202 of intuition in intellect, 238
Determination, 76-7, 129-30, 223, 246
Determinism, 217, 264, 345, 348. _See_ Inert matter, Geometry in Descartes, 345
Development, 133, 134-5, 141. _See_ Order, Progress, Evolution, Superiority
Deviation from type, 82-4
Dialect and intuition in philosophy, 238
Dichotomy of the real in modern philosophy, 350
Differentiation of parts in an organism, 253, 260
Dilemma of any systematic metaphysics, 195, 197, 230
Diminution, derivation of becoming from being by, in ancient philosophy, 316, 317, 322, 323-4, 327-8, 343-5, 352 geometrical order as, or lower complication of the vital order, 236
Dionaea illustrating certain animal characteristics in plants, 107, 108, 109
Discontinuity of action, 154, 306-7 of attention, 2 of extension relative to action, 154, 163 of knowledge, 306 of living substance, 163 a positive idea, 154
Discontinuous the object of intellect, 154
Discord in nature, 127, 128, 254-5, 267
Disorder, 40, 104, 222-3, 225-6, 232-5, 274. _See_ Expectation, Order, mathematical, Orders of reality, two
Disproportion between an invention and its consequences, 182
Dissociation as a cosmic principle opposed to association, 260 of tendencies, 54, 89, 135, 254, 255, 257, 258. _See_ Divergent lines of evolution
Distance, extension as the, between what is and what ought to be, 318-9, 327-8, 331
Distinct multiplicity in the dream state, 201, 210 of the inert, 257
Distinctness characteristic of the intellect, 160, 237, 251 characteristic of perception, 227, 251 as spatiality, 203, 207-8, 244, 250
Divergent lines of evolution, xii, 54, 55, 87, 97-101, 103-4, 106, 107, 109, 112, 113, 116, 119, 130, 132, 134-5, 142, 149, 150, 168, 173, 181, 254, 255, 266, 267. _See_ Dissociation of tendencies, Complementarity, etc., Schisms in the primitive impulsion of life
Diversity, sensible, 205, 220-1, 231, 235, 236
Divination, instinct as, 176. _See_ Sympathy, etc.
Divisibility of extension, 154, 162
Division as function of intellect, 152, 154, 162-3, 189 of labor, 99, 110, 118, 157, 166, 260 of labor in cells, 166
Dog and man, consciousness in, 180
Dogmatism of the ancient epistemology contrasted with the relativism of the modern, 230 of Leibniz and Spinoza, 356-7 skepticism, and relativism, 196-7, 230
Dogs and the law of correlation, 66
Domestication of animals and heredity, 80
Dominants of Reinke, 42 _note_
Dorfmeister, 72
Dream, 144, 180-1, 202, 209, 256. _See_ Interpenetration, Relaxation, Detention, Recollection as relaxation, 202
Driesch, 42 _note_
Drosera, 107, 108, 109
Dufourt, 124 _note_
Duhem, 242 _note_
Dunan, Ch., xv _note_
Duration, xiv _note_, 2, 4-6, 8-11, 15, 17, 21, 22, 37, 39, 46, 51, 199, 201, 206, 213, 216, 240, 272, 273, 276, 298-9, 308-9, 317-8, 319 _note_, 324, 328, 332, 339, 342, 343, 345, 354, 361, 363-4 absoluteness of, 206 and deduction, 213 in Descartes's philosophy, 346 gnawing of, 4, 8, 46 indivisibility of, 6, 308-9 and induction, 216 and the inert, 343-4 in the philosophy of the Ideas, 316-7, 319 _note_, 324, 327, 328-9 rhythm of, 11, 128, 346. _See_ Creation, Evolution, Invention, Time, Unforeseeableness, Uniqueness
Echinoderms in reference to animal mobility, 130, 131
Efficient cause in conception of chance, 234 Spinoza and, 269
Effort in evolution, 170
[Greek: Eidos], 314-5
Eimer, 55, 72, 73, 86
Elaborateness of the mathematical order, 208-10, 217, 251
Eleatic philosophy, 308, 314-5
Emanation, logical thought an, issue, aspect or deposit of life, ix, xii, xiii, 49
Embroidering "something" on the canvas of "nothing," 297
Embroidery by descendants on the canvas handed down by ancestors, 23
Embryo, 18, 19, 26, 27, 75, 81, 89, 101, 166
Embryogeny, comparative, and transformism, 25
Embryonic life, 27, 166
Empirical study of evolution the centre of the theory of knowledge and of the theory of life, 178 theories of knowledge, 205
Empty, thinking the full by means of the empty, 273-4
End in Eleatic philosophy, 314-5 of science is practical utility, 329
Energy, 115-7, 120-3, 242, 243, 245, 246, 252-5, 256, 257, 262 conservation of, 242 degradation of, 242, 243, 246 solar, stored by plants, released by animals, 245, 254
Enneadae of Plotinus, 210 _note_
Entelechy of Driesch, 42 _note_
Entropy, 243
Environment in evolution, 129, 133, 138, 140, 142, 150, 167, 168, 170, 192, 193, 252, 256, 257 and special instincts, 138, 168, 192, 193
Epiphenomenalism, 262
Essence and accidents in Aristotle's philosophy, 353 or form in Eleatic philosophy, 314-5 the meaning of, 302-3
Essences (or forms), qualities and acts, the three kinds of representation, 303-4
Eternity, 39, 298, 314, 317, 320, 324, 328, 346, 352, 354 in the philosophy of Ideas, 316-7, 319, 324, 328 in Spinoza's philosophy, 353
Euglena, 116
Evellin, 311 _note_
Eventual actions, 11, 96. _See_ Possible activity
Evolution, ix-xv, 18, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26-7, 37, 46-55, 63, 68, 79 _note_, 84-8, 97-105, 107, 113, 116, 126, 127, 129-30, 131-2, 133, 134, 136, 138-40, 141-2, 143, 161, 166, 167, 168-72, 173, 174, 175, 179, 181, 182, 185, 186, 190, 193, 198-9, 207-8, 224, 231, 242 _note_, 246, 248, 249, 251, 252, 254, 264-6, 268, 273, 302, 311, 345, 359, 360, 366 accident in, 104, 169, 170, 173, 174, 251, 252 animal, a progress toward mobility, 131 antagonistic tendencies in, 103, 113, 185 automatic and determinate, is action being undone, 248 blind alleys of, 129 circularity of each special, 128 complementarity of the divergent lines of, 97-102, 103, 116 conceptually inexpressible, 49, 50, 52, 53, 127, 181, 273 continuity of, 18, 19, 26, 37, 46, 273, 302, 312, 345 creative, 7, 15, 21, 27, 30, 36, 37, 65, 100, 105, 161, 162, 163, 223, 230, 238, 264, 269 culminating points of, 50, 133, 174, 185, 265, 266, 268 development by, 133, 134, 141-2 divergent lines of, xii, 53, 54, 87, 97-101, 103-4, 107, 173-4, 246 and duration, 20, 22, 37, 45-6 empirical study of, the centre of the theory of knowledge and of life, 178 and environment, 101-3, 129, 133, 138, 142, 150, 167, 168, 169, 192, 193, 251, 256, 257 of instinct, 170, 171, 174-5. _See_ Divergent lines, etc., Culminating points, etc., Evolution and environment of intellect, x-xii, 153, 186, 189-90, 193, 198-9, 207-8, 359, 360. _See_ Divergent lines, etc., Culminating points, etc., Genesis of matter and of intellect as invention, 344 of man, 264, 266, 268. _See_ Culminating points, etc. motive principle of, is consciousness, 181 of species product of the vital impetus opposed by matter, 247-8, 254 and transformism, 24 unforeseeable, 47, 48, 53, 86, 224 variation in, 23-4, 55, 63, 68, 72 _note_, 85, 131, 137-8, 167, 169, 171, 264
Evolutionary, qualitative, and extensive motion 302-3, 311, 312 superiority, 133-5, 174-5. _See_ Success, Criterion of evolutionary rank, Culminating points, etc.
Evolutionism, x-xii, xiv, 77, 84, 364
Exhaustion of the mutability of the universe, 337-8
Existence, logical, as contrasted with psychical and physical, 276, 362 of matter tends toward instantaneity, 201 of self means change, 1 _ff._ superaddition of, upon nothingness, 276
Expectation, 214-6, 221, 222, 226, 233, 235, 274, 281, 292 in conception of disorder, 221, 222, 226, 233, 234, 235, 274 in conception of void or naught, 282, 292
Experience, 138, 147, 177, 197, 204, 229, 321, 354, 359, 363, 368
Explosion, illustrating cause by release, 73
Explosive character of animal energy, 116, 119, 120, 246 of organization, 92
Explosives, manufacture of, by plants and use by animals, 246, 254
Extension, 149, 154, 161, 202, 203, 207, 211, 223, 236, 245, 318-20, 324, 327, 351, 352 continuity of, 154 discontinuity of, relative to action, 154, 162 as the distance between what is and what ought to be, 318 divisibility of, 154, 162 the most general property of matter, 154, 250, 251 the inverse movement to tension, 245 of knowledge, 150 in Leibniz's philosophy, 351, 352 of matter in space, 204, 211 in the philosophy of Ideas, 318-9, 323-4, 327 and relaxation, 202, 207, 209, 211, 212, 218, 223, 245 in Spinoza's philosophy, 350 in the Transcendental Aesthetic, 203 unity of, 158-9 as weakening of the essence of being, in Plotinus, 210 _note_
Extensive, evolutionary and qualitative motion, 302-3, 311, 312
External conditions in evolution, 128, 133, 137, 141-2, 150-1, 167, 168, 170, 192, 193, 252, 256, 257 finality, 41
Externality of concepts, 160, 168, 174, 177, 199, 251, 305, 311-4 the most general property of matter, 154, 250, 251
Externalized action in distinction from internalized, 147, 165. _See_ Somnambulism, etc., Automatic activity, etc.
Eye of mollusc and vertebrate compared, 60, 75, 77, 84, 86, 87-8
Fabre, 172 _note_
Fabrication. _See_ Construction
Fallacies, two fundamental, 272, 273
Fallacy of thinking being by not-being, 276, 277, 284, 297-8 of thinking the full by the empty, 273-5 of thinking motion by the motionless, 272, 273, 297-8, 307-8, 309-14
Fallibility of instinct, 172-3
Falling back of matter upon consciousness, 264 bodies, comparison of Aristotle and Galileo, 228, 331-2, 334 weight, figure of material world, 245, 246
Familiar, the, is the object of intellect, 163, 164, 199, 270
Faraday, 203
Fasting, in reference to primacy of nervous system over the other physiological systems, 124
Fauna, menace of torpor in primitive, 130
Feeling in the conception of chance, 207 and instinct, 143, 174-5
Fencing-master, illustrating hereditary transmission, 79
Ferments, certain characteristics of, 106
Fertilization of orchids by insects, by Darwin, 170 _note_
Fichte's conception of the intellect, 189-90, 357
Filings, iron, in illustration of the relation of structure to function, 94, 95
Film, cinematographic, figure of abstract motion, 304-6
Final cause, 40, 45, 234, 325 conception of, involves conception of mechanical cause, 44 God as, in Aristotle, 322-3
Finalism, 39-53, 58, 74, 88-97, 101-5, 126-8
Finality, 41, 164, 177-8, 185, 223, 224, 266 external and internal, 41 misfit for the vital, 177, 223-4, 225, 266 and the unforeseeableness of life, 164, 185
Fischel, 75 _note_
Fish in illustration of animal tendency to mobility, 130, 131
Fixation of nutritive elements, 107-9, 113, 117, 246, 247, 253
Fixity, 108-13, 118, 119, 130, 155. _See_ Torpor apparent or relative, 155 cellulose envelope and the, of plants, 108, 111, 130 of extension, 155 of plants, 108-13, 118, 119, 130-1 of torpid animals, 130
Flint hatchets and human intelligence, 137
Fluidity of life, 153, 165, 193 of matter as a whole, 186, 369
Flux of material bodies, 265 of reality, 250, 251, 337, 342, 344
Flying arrow of Zeno, 308, 309, 310
Focalization of personality, 201
Food, 106-9, 113-4, 117, 120, 121, 246, 247, 254
Foraminifera, failure of certain, to evolve, 197
Force, 126-7, 141, 149, 150, 175, 246, 254, 339 life a, inverse to matter, 246 limitedness of vital force, 126, 127, 141, 149, 162 time as, 339-40
Forel, 176 _note_
Foreseeing, 8, 28, 29, 30, 37, 45, 47, 96. _See_ Unforeseeableness
Form, xi, 51, 101, 104, 113, 116-8, 129, 135-6, 148-53, 155, 156, 160, 164, 195-7, 222, 237, 250, 255, 302, 303, 314, 317, 318, 322, 341, 357, 359, 361, 362 complementarity of forms evolved, xi, 51, 101, 104, 113, 116-8, 135-6, 255 expansion of the forms of consciousness, xii, xiii (or essences), qualities and acts the three kinds of representation, 302-3 God as pure form in Aristotle, 196, 322 or idea in ancient philosophy, 317, 318, 330 of intelligence, xiv, 48, 147, 148, 165, 190, 195, 196, 198, 207, 219, 257-9, 266, 358-9, 361. _See_ Concept and matter in creation, 239, 250 and matter in knowledge, 195, 361 a snapshot view of transition, 302
Formal knowledge, 152 logic, 292
Forms of sensibility, 361
Fossil species, 102
Foster, 125 _note_
Fox in illustration of animal intelligence, 138
Frames of the understanding, 46-7, 48, 150-2, 173, 177, 197-9, 219-20, 223-4, 258, 270, 313, 358, 364 fit the inert, 197, 218 inadequate to reality entire, 364 misfit for the vital, x, xiii, xiv, 46, 48, 173, 177, 197-9, 223, 258, 313 product of life, 358 transform freedom into necessity, 270 utility of, lies in their unlimited application, 149-50, 152
Freedom, 11, 48, 126, 130, 163, 164, 200, 202, 207, 208, 217, 223, 231, 237, 239, 247, 249, 264-6, 269, 270, 277, 300, 339-41, 345, 346 the absolute as freely acting, 277 affirmed by conscience, 269 animal characteristic rather than vegetable, 129-30 caprice attribute not of, but of mechanism, 47 coextensiveness of consciousness with, 111, 112, 202, 264, 270 of creation and life, 247, 254, 255 creativeness of, 223, 239, 248 in Descartes's philosophy, 345, 346 as efficient causality, 277 inversion of necessity, 236 and liberation of consciousness, 265, 266. _See_ Imprisonment of consciousness and novelty, 12, 163, 164, 200, 218, 231, 239, 249, 270, 339-42 order in, 223 property of every organism, 129-31 relaxation of, into necessity, 217 tendency of, to self-negation in habit, 127 tension of, 200, 201, 202, 207, 223, 237, 301 transformed by the understanding into necessity, 270 _See_ Spontaneity
Fringe of intelligence around instinct, 136 of intuition around intellect, xii, xiii, 46 of possible action around real action, 179, 272
Froth, alveolar, in imitation of organic phenomena, 33-4
Full, fallacy of thinking the, by the empty, 273-6
Function, ix, 3, 5, 44, 46, 47, 88-90, 94, 95, 106-10, 113, 114, 117, 120, 121, 127, 132, 140, 141, 145, 152, 153, 157, 161, 163, 164, 168, 173-5, 186-92, 199, 206, 207, 233, 237, 246, 251, 254-6, 262, 263, 270, 273, 298, 306, 346, 358, 369 accumulation of energy the function of vegetable organisms, 254, 255 action the, of intellect, ix, 12, 44, 47, 93, 161, 162, 186-8, 206, 251, 273, 305 action the, of nervous system, 262, 263 alimentation, 106, 107, 120, 121, 246, 254 of animals is canalization of energy, 93, 110, 126, 255, 256 carbon and the, of organisms, 107, 113, 114, 117, 254, 255 chlorophyllian, 107-9, 114, 117, 246, 254 concept-making the, of intellect, x, 49 of consciousness: sketching movements, 207 construction the, of intellect, 108 illumination of action, of perception, 5, 206, 307-8 of intelligence: action, ix, 12, 44, 46, 93, 160, 162, 186-8, 206, 251, 273, 307-8 of intelligence: concept-making, x, 50 of intelligence: construction, 160, 163, 181-2 of intelligence: division, 154, 155, 162, 189 of intelligence: illumination of action by perception, 5, 206, 301 of intelligence: repetition, 164, 199, 214-6 of intelligence: retrospection, 47, 237 of intelligence: connecting same with same, 199, 233, 270 of intelligence: scanning the rhythm of the universe, 346 of intelligence: tactualizing all perception, 168 of intelligence: unification, 152, 154, 357 of the nervous system: action, 262, 263 and organ, 88-90, 94, 95, 132-3, 140, 141, 158. _See_ Function and structure and organ in arthropods, vertebrates and man, 132-3 of the organism, 94, 106-10, 112, 114, 117, 120, 126, 173-5, 246, 253-6 of the organism, alimentation, 106, 107, 120, 121, 246, 254 of the organism, animal: canalization of energy, 93, 110, 126, 255, 256 of the organism, carbon in, 107, 113, 114, 117, 254, 255 of the organism, chlorophyllian function, 107-9, 114, 117, 246, 247, 254 of the organism, primary functions of life: storage and expenditure of energy, 254-6 of the organism, vegetable: accumulation of energy, 254, 255 of philosophy: adoption of the evolutionary movement of life and consciousness, 370 of science, 168, 346 sketching movements the, of consciousness, 207 and structure, 55, 62, 66, 69, 74, 75, 76, 86, 88-91, 93, 94, 96, 118, 132, 140, 141, 158, 162, 250, 252, 256 tactualizing all perception the, of science, 168 of vegetable organism: accumulation of energy, 254, 255
Functions of life, the two: storage and expenditure of energy, 254-6
Galileo, homogeneity of time in, 332 his influence on metaphysics, 20, 228 his influence on modern science, 334, 335 extension of Galileo's physics, 357, 370 his theory of the fall of bodies compared with Aristotle's, 228, 331, 332, 334
Ganoid breast-plate of ancient fishes, in reference to animal mobility, 130, 131
Gaudry, 130 _note_
Genera, relation of, to individuals, 226 relation of, to laws, 225, 226, 330 potential, 226-7 and signs, 158
Generality, ambiguity of the idea of, in philosophy, 229-31, 236
Generalization dependent on repetition, 230, 231 distinguished from transference of sign, 158 in the vital and mathematical orders, 224, 225, 230
Generic, type of the: similarity of structure between generating and generated, 223, 224
Genesis, xiii, xiv, 153, 186-199, 207, 359, 360 of intellect, xiii, xiv, 153, 186, 187, 190, 193, 194, 196-7, 207, 264, 360 of knowledge, 191 of matter, xiii, xiv, 153, 186, 188, 190, 193, 199, 207, 360
Genius and the willed order, 223, 237
Genus. _See_ Genera
Geometrical, the, is the object of the intellect, 190
Geometrical order as a diminution or lower complication of the vital, 223, 225, 236, 330. _See_ Genera, Relation of, to laws mutual contingency of, and vital order, 235 _See_ Mathematical order space, relation of, to the spatiality of things, 203
Geometrism, the latent, of intellect, 194, 211-3
Geometry, fitness of, to matter, 10 goal of intellectual operations, 211, 213, 218 ideal limit of induction and deduction, 214-8, 361. _See_ Space, Descending movement of existence modern, compared with ancient, 36, 161, 333-4 natural, 194, 211-2 perception impregnated with, 205, 230 reasoning in, contrasted with reasoning concerning life, 7, 8 scientific, 161, 211
Germ, accidental predisposition of, in Neo-Darwinism, 168, 169, 170
Germ-plasm, continuity of, 27, 37, 78-83
Giard, 84
Glucose in organic function, 122, 123
Glycogen in organic function, 122-4
God, as activity, 249 of Aristotle, 196, 322, 325, 349, 353, 356-7 ascent toward, in Aristotle's philosophy, 322-3 circularity of God's thought, in Aristotle's philosophy, 324, 325 in Descartes's philosophy, 346, 347 as efficient cause in Aristotle's philosophy, 324 as hypostasis of the unity of nature, 196, 322, 357 in Leibniz's philosophy, 352, 353, 356-7 as eternal matter, 196-7 as pure form, 196-7, 322 in Spinoza's philosophy, 351, 357
Greek philosophy. _See_ Ancient philosophy
Green parts of plants, 107-9, 114, 117, 246, 247, 254
Growing old, 15
Growth, creation is, 240-1, 275 and novelty, 231 of the powers of life, 132, 134-5 reality is, 237 of the universe, 343, 345
Guérin, P., 59 _note_
Guinea-pig, in illustration of hereditary transmission, 80, 81
Habit and consciousness annulled, 143 form of knowledge a habit or bent of attention, 148 and heredity, 78, 93, 169, 170, 173. _See_ Acquired characters, inheritance of instinct as an intelligent, 173-4 and invention in animals, 264 and invention in man, 265 tendency of freedom to self-negation in, 127-8
Harmony between instinct and life, and between intelligence and the inert, 187, 194-5, 198 of the organic world is complementarity due to a common original impulse 50, 51, 103, 116, 118 pre-established, 205, 206 in radical finalism, 127-8. _See_ Discord
Hartog, 60 _note_
Hatchets, ancient flint, and human intellect, 137
Heliocentric radius-vector in Kepler's laws, 333-4
Hereditary transmission, 76-83, 87, 168-9, 170, 173, 225-6, 230 domestication of animals and, 80-1 habit and, 79, 83, 169, 170, 173
Hesitation or choice, consciousness as, 143, 144
Heteroblastia and identical structures on divergent lines of evolution, 75
Heymons, 72 _note_
History as creative evolution, 6, 15, 21, 26, 29, 36, 37, 65-6, 103-4, 105, 163, 264, 269 of philosophy, 238
Hive as an organism, 166
_Homo faber_, designation of human species, 139
Homogeneity of space, 156, 212 the sphere of intellect, 163 of time in Galileo, 332
Horse-fly illustrating the object of instinct, 146
Houssay, 109 _note_
Human and animal attention, 184 and animal brain, 184, 263-5 and animal consciousness, 139-43, 180, 183, 184, 187, 188, 191, 212, 263-8 and animal instruments of action, 139-43, 150 and animal intelligence, 138, 187, 188, 191, 192, 212 and animal invention, relation of, to habit, 264, 265 intellect and language, 157-8 intellect and manufacture, 137, 138
Humanity in evolution, 134, 137-9, 142, 147, 158, 181, 184, 185, 264-71. _See_ Culminating points, etc. goal of evolution, 266, 267
Huxley, 38
Hydra and individuality, 13
[Greek: Hylê] of Aristotle, 353
Hymenoptera, the culmination of arthropod and instinctive evolution, 134, 173-4 as entomologists, 146, 172-3 organization and instinct in, 140 paralyzing instinct of, 146, 172, 173-4 social instincts of, 101, 171
Hypostasis of the unity of nature, God as, 196-7, 322, 356
Hypothetical propositions characteristic of intellectual knowledge, 149-50
Idea or form in ancient philosophy, 49, 314, 316-7, 318, 329-30 in ancient philosophy, [Greek: eidos], 314-5 in ancient philosophy, Platonic, 48 and image in Descartes, 280
Idealism, 232
Idealists and realists alike assume the possibility of an absence of order, 220, 232
Identical structures in divergent lines of evolution, 55, 60-1, 62, 69, 74-7, 86, 119
Illumination of action the function of perception, 5, 206, 307
Image and idea in Descartes, 280 distinguished from concept, 160-1, 280
Imitation of being in Greek philosophy, 324, 327 of instinct by science, 168-9, 173-4 of life in intellectual representation, 4, 33, 88-9, 101, 176, 208, 209, 213, 226, 259, 341, 365 of life by the unorganized, 33, 35, 36 of motion by intelligence, 305, 307-8, 312, 313, 329. _See_ Imitation of the real, etc. of the physical order by the vital, 230 of the real by intelligence, 258, 270, 307
Immobility of extension, 155 and plants, 108-13, 118, 119, 130 of primitive and torpid animals, 130-1 relative and apparent; mobility real, 155
Impatience, duration as, 10, 339-40
Impelling cause, 73
Impetus, vital, divergence of, 26-7, 51-5, 97-105, 110, 118-9, 126-7, 131, 134-6, 257, 258, 266, 270 vital, limitedness of, 126, 141, 148-9, 254 vital, loaded with matter, 239 vital, as necessity for creation, 252, 261 vital, transmission of, through organisms, 25, 27, 79, 85, 87, 88, 230, 231, 250, 251 vital, _See_ Impulse of life
Implement, the animal, is natural: the human, artificial, 139-43 artificial, 137-40, 150-1 constructing, function of intelligence, 159, 182-3 life known to intelligence only as, 162 matter known to intelligence only as, 161, 198 natural, 141, 145, 150 organized, 141, 145, 150 unorganized, 137-9, 141, 150-1
Implicit knowledge, 148
Impotence of intellect and perception to grasp life, 176-8
Imprisonment of consciousness, 180-3, 264-6
Impulse of life, divergence of, 26, 27, 51-5, 97-105, 110, 118-9, 126-7, 131, 134-6, 257, 258, 266, 270 limitedness of, 126, 141, 148-9, 254 loaded with matter, 239 tendency to mobility, 131, 132 as necessity for creation, 252, 261 negates itself, 247, 248 prolonged in evolution, 246 prolonged in our will, 239 transmitted through generations of organisms, 25, 26, 79, 85, 87, 230, 231 unity of, 202, 250, 270
Impulsion and attraction in Greek philosophy, 323-4 release and unwinding, the three kinds of cause, 73 given to mind by matter, 202
Inadequacy of act to representation, consciousness as, 143
Inadequate and adequate in Spinoza, 353
Inanition, illustrating primacy of nervous system, 124 _note_
Incoherence, 236. _See_ Absence of order, Chance, Chaos in nature, 104
Incommensurability of free act with conceptual idea, 47, 201 of instinct and intelligence, 167-8, 175
Incompatibility of developed tendencies, 104, 168
Independent variable, time as, 20, 335-6
Indetermination, 86, 114, 126, 252, 253, 326. _See_ Accident in evolution
Indeterminism in Descartes, 345
Individual, viewed by intelligence as aggregate of molecules and of facts, 250-1 and division of labor, 140 in evolutionist biology, 169, 171, 246 _note_ and genus, 226-9 mind in philosophy, 191 aesthetic intuition only attains the, 177 and society, 260, 265 transmits the vital impetus, 250, 259, 270
Individuality never absolute, x, 12, 13, 16, 19, 42, 260 and age, 15-23, 27, 43 corporeal, physics tends to deny, 188, 189, 208. _See_ Interpenetration, Obliteration of outlines, Solidarity of the parts of matter and generality, 226-8 the many and the one in the idea of, x, 258 as plan of possible influence, 11
Individuation never absolute, x, 12-16, 43, 260 as a cosmic principle in contrast with association, 259-60 property of life, 12-5 partly the work of matter, 257-8, 259, 270
Indivisibility of action, 94, 95 of duration, 6, 308 of invention, 164 of life, 225, 270-1. _See_ Unity of life of motion, 307-11
Induction in animals, 214 certainty of, approached as factors approach pure magnitudes, 222, 223 and duration, 216 and expectation, 214-6 geometry the ideal limit of, 214-8, 361. _See_ Space, Geometry, Reasoning, "Descending" movement of matter, etc. and magnitude, 215, 216 repetition the characteristic function of intellect, 164, 199, 205-16 and space, 216. _See_ Space as the ideal limit, Systems, etc.
Industry, ix, 161, 162, 164
Inert matter and action, 96, 136, 141, 155, 187, 198, 225, 367 in Aristotle, 316, 327, 353 bodies, 7, 8, 12, 14, 20, 21, 156, 159, 174, 186, 188, 189, 204, 213, 215, 228, 240, 241, 298, 300, 341, 342, 346-8, 360 Creation of. _See_ Inert matter the inversion of life flux of, 186, 265, 273, 369 and form, 148, 149, 157, 239, 250 genesis of, 188 homogeneity of, 156 imitation of living matter by, 33, 35, 36 imitation of physical order by vital, 230 instantaneity of, 10, 201 and intellect, ix, 31, 141, 159-62, 164, 165, 167-8, 175, 179, 181, 186, 187, 195, 196, 197, 198, 205-12, 216-9, 224, 264, 270, 319, 369 the inversion or interruption of life, 93, 94, 98, 99, 128-9, 153, 177, 186, 189, 190, 196, 197, 201, 203, 208, 216-9, 231, 235, 236, 239, 240, 245-50, 252, 254, 256, 258, 259, 261, 264, 267, 272, 276, 319, 339-40, 343. _See_ Inert matter, order inherent in knowledge of, approximate but not relative, 206 the metaphysics and the physics of, 195-6 as necessity, 252, 264 the order inherent in, 40, 103, 153, 201, 207-12, 216, 226-7, 230-6, 245, 251, 263, 274, 319-20. _See_ Inert matter, inversion of life penetration of, by life, 25, 26, 51, 179, 181, 237, 239, 266, 270, 271 and perception, 12, 206, 226 and the psychical, 201, 202, 205, 269, 270, 350, 367 solidarity of the parts of, 188, 202, 207, 241, 257-9, 270, 271, 352 and space, 10, 153, 189, 204-11, 214, 244, 250, 251, 257 in Spencer's philosophy, 365
Inertia, 176, 224
Infant, intelligence in, 147, 148
Inference a beginning of invention, 138
Inferiority in evolutionary rank, 174-5
Influence, possible, 11, 189
Infusoria, conjugation of, 15 development of the eye from its stage in, 60-1, 72, 78, 84 and individuation, 260 and mechanical explanations, 34, 35 vegetable function in, 116
Inheritance of acquired characters. _See_ Hereditary transmission
Innate knowledge, 146-7, 150-1
Innateness of the categories, 148, 149-50
Inorganic matter. _See_ Inert matter
Insectivorous plants, 107-9
Insects, 19, 101, 107, 126, 131, 134, 135, 140-1, 146, 147, 157, 166, 169, 171-5, 188 apogee of instinct in hymenoptera, 134, 173-4 consciousness and instinct, 145, 167, 173 continuity of instinct with organization, 139, 145 fallibility of instinct in, 172-3 instinct in general in, 169, 173-4 language of ants, 157-8 object of instinct in, 146 paralyzing instinct in, 146, 171, 172-3 social instinct in, 101, 157-8, 171 special instincts as variations on a theme, 167. _See_ Arthropods in evolution
Insensible variation, 63, 66
Inspiration of a poem an undivided intuitive act, contrasted with its intellectual imitation in words, 209, 210, 258. _See_ Sympathy
Instantaneity of the intellectual view, 31, 70, 84, 89, 199, 201-2, 207, 226, 249, 258, 273, 300-6, 311, 314, 331-3, 342, 351, 352
Instinct and action on inert matter, 136, 141 in animals as distinguished from plants, 170 in cells, 166 and consciousness, 143-5, 166, 167, 173, 174, 175, 186 culmination of, in evolution, 133, 174-5. _See_ Arthropods in evolution, Evolutionary superiority fallibility of, 173-4 in insects in general, 169, 173-4 and intelligence, xii, 51, 100, 103, 113, 116-8, 132-7, 141-3, 145, 150, 152, 159, 168-70, 173-9, 184-5, 186, 197-8, 238, 246, 254, 255, 259, 267, 268, 343, 345, 366 and intuition, 177, 178-9, 181 object of, 146-52, 165, 168, 172-9, 186, 189, 195, 234, 254 and organization, 23-4, 138-40, 145, 166-8, 171-2, 173, 176, 193, 194, 264 paralyzing, in certain hymenoptera, 146, 171, 172-3 in plants, 170, 171 social, of insects, 101, 157-8, 171
Instinctive knowledge, 148, 167, 168, 173-4 learning, 193 metaphysics, 192, 269, 270, 277
Instrument, action as, of consciousness, 180 animal, is natural; human artificial, 139-43 automatic activity as instrument of voluntary, 252 consciousness as, of action, 180 intelligence: the function of intelligence is to construct instruments, 159, 192-3 intelligence transforms life into an, 162 intelligence transforms matter into an, 161, 198 intelligence: the instruments of intelligence are artificial, ix, 137-9, 140-1, 150-1 natural or organized instruments of instinct, 140-1, 145, 150
Intellect and action, ix, 11, 29, 44-8, 93, 136, 142, 152-7, 162, 179, 186, 187, 192, 195, 197-8, 219, 220, 226-9, 251, 270, 273, 297-9, 301, 302, 306, 329, 346-7 in animals, 187 Fichte's conception of the, 189, 190, 357 function of the, 5, 11, 12, 44-50, 92, 93, 126, 137-45, 149-60, 162-4, 168, 174, 176, 181, 187-99, 204-8, 214-9, 229, 233, 237, 241, 242, 246, 247, 251, 270, 290, 298, 299, 328, 336, 337, 341, 342, 347, 348, 356, 357 genesis of the, xi-xv, 49, 103, 104-5, 126-7, 152, 153, 186, 187, 189, 193, 194, 195, 198, 207, 247-9, 358, 359, 366 as inversion of intuition, 7, 8, 11, 12, 46, 49, 51, 86, 88-91, 93, 94, 103-4, 113, 116-8, 129, 132, 133, 135, 136, 139-43, 145, 157, 161, 168-80, 181, 183, 184, 185, 190-204, 207-12, 216-8, 221, 223, 225-6, 230-3, 235, 236, 238, 245-52, 254-9, 264, 267-71, 276, 277, 313, 330, 339, 342-5, 361, 369 and language, 4, 148, 158-60, 258, 265, 292, 303, 304, 312, 313, 326 and matter, ix-xv, 10, 11, 48-9, 92, 135, 136, 141, 142, 152-4, 155, 160, 161, 165, 168, 175, 179, 181, 182, 186-7, 190, 193, 194, 195, 198, 199, 201-4, 205-10, 213, 215, 218-20, 224, 225-30, 240-2, 245, 246, 248-52, 254, 256-9, 264, 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 297-8, 306, 319, 321, 329, 340, 341-3, 347-9, 355, 358-61, 368, 369 mechanism of the, ix-xv, 4, 30, 32, 47-9, 70, 84-5, 88-9, 101, 137-8, 150-5, 156-7, 160, 161, 164, 165, 167, 168, 173, 174, 176, 177, 186, 187, 190-3, 194-218, 223-40, 244, 246-7, 249-51, 254, 255, 257, 258, 266, 270, 273, 276-7, 292, 300-21, 325, 329, 330, 332, 337, 338, 339, 341-8, 351, 358-9, 361-2, 363-4, 365, 367 object of the, ix-xv, 7, 8, 10, 17, 20, 21, 30, 31, 34, 35, 37, 46-9, 52, 71, 74, 84, 87-92, 93, 95, 102, 103, 139, 140, 149, 152-66, 168, 173, 175-9, 180, 181, 186, 190, 193-211, 213, 216-20, 223, 224, 226, 228-30, 233, 237, 238, 240, 245, 249-51, 254, 255, 257-9, 261, 264, 265, 270, 271, 273, 274, 298-314, 318-22, 326, 328, 329, 332-8, 342, 344-9, 351, 352-7, 359-61, 363, 365, 369-70 and perception, 4-5, 11, 12, 93-4, 161-2, 168, 176-7, 188, 189, 205, 207, 226-7, 228-9, 230, 238, 249-51, 273, 299-300, 301, 306, 359-60 and rhythm, 299, 300-1, 306-7, 329, 337, 346-7 and science, 8-12, 31, 92-3, 152, 153, 157-8, 159, 160-1, 162-3, 168, 173-6, 187, 193-8, 202, 204, 207-9, 214-6, 217, 225-6, 228-9, 241, 251, 270, 273, 297-8, 306, 321, 322, 329, 333-5, 345, 346-8, 354, 356, 357, 359-60, 362-3, 369-70 and space, 10-11, 154, 156-7, 160-3, 174-5, 176-7, 189, 202-4, 207-12, 215, 218, 222-3, 244, 245, 250, 251, 257-8, 361-2 and time, 4, 8-9, 17, 18, 20-2, 36, 39, 45-6, 47, 51, 163, 300, 301, 331-2, 335-7, 341 possibility of transcending the, xii, xiii, 48, 152, 177-8, 193-4, 198-200, 205-6, 207-8, 266, 360-1. _See_ Philosophy, Intelligence
Intellectualism, hesitation of Descartes between, and intuitionism, 345
Intelligence and action, 137-41, 150, 154-5, 161, 162-3, 181, 189, 198, 306 animal, 138, 187, 188, 212 categories of, x, 48, 195-6 of the child, 147-8 and consciousness, 187 culmination of, 130, 139-40, 174-5. _See_ Superiority genesis of, 136, 177-8, 366 and the individual, 251 and instinct, 109, 135, 136, 141, 142, 168-70, 173-7, 179, 186, 197, 209, 238, 259, 267 in Kant's philosophy, 357-8 and laws, 229-30 limitations of, 152 and matter, 152, 159-60, 161-2, 175, 179, 181, 186, 189, 194-8, 230, 237, 250, 369, 370 mechanism of, 152, 153, 164, 165 and motion, 153, 159-60, 274, 303-7, 312, 313, 329 object of, 145-56, 161, 162, 175, 179, 250 practical nature of, ix-xv, 137-9, 141, 150-1, 247-8, 305, 306, 328-9 and reality, ix-xv, 161-2, 177, 237, 251, 258, 269, 271, 307 and science, 175, 176, 193, 194-5 and signs, 157, 158, 159, 160 and space, 205 _See_ Intellect, Understanding, Reason
Intelligent, the, contrasted with the merely intelligible, 175
Intelligible reality in ancient philosophy, 316-7 world, 160-1
Intelligibles of Plotinus, 353
Intension of knowledge, 149-50
Intensity of consciousness varies with ratio of possible to real action, 144-5
Intention as contrasted with mechanism, 233. _See_ Automatic order, Willed order of life the object of instinct, 176, 233
Interaction, universal, 188-9
Interest as cause of variation, 131 in representation of "nought," 296, 297. _See_ Affection, rôle of, etc.
Internal finality, 41
Internality of instinct, 168, 174-5, 176-7 of subject in object the condition of knowledge of reality, 307, 317, 358-9
Interpenetration, 161, 162, 174-5, 177, 184 _note_, 188, 189, 201-3, 207-8, 257, 258, 270, 319-20, 341, 352
Interruption, materiality an, of positivity, 219, 246, 247-8, 319-20. _See_ Inverse relation, etc.
Interval of time, 8-9, 22, 23 between what is done and what might be done covered by consciousness, 179
Intuition, continuity between sensible and ultra-intellectual, 360-1 dialectic and, in philosophy, 238. _See_ Intellect as inversion of intuition fringe of, around the nucleus of intellect, xiii, 12, 46, 49, 193 and instinct, 176-9, 182 and intellect in theoretical knowledge, 176-9, 270-1
Intuitional cosmology as reversed psychology, 207-8 metaphysics contrasted with intellectual or systematic, 191-2, 268-70, 277-8 method of philosophy, apparent vicious circle of, 191-4, 195-8
Intuitionism in Spinoza, 347-8 and intellectualism in Descartes, 345-6
Invention, consciousness as, and freedom, 264, 270-1 creativeness of, 164, 237, 340, 341 disproportion between, and its consequences, 181, 182-3 duration as, 10-1 evolution as, 102-3, 255, 344-5 fervor of, 164 indivisibility of, 164 inference a beginning of, 138 mechanical, 142-3, 194-5 of steam engine as epoch-marking, 138-9 time as, 341 unforeseeableness of, 164 upspringing of, 164 _See_ New
Inverse relation of the physical and psychical, 126-7, 143-4, 145, 173-4, 177-8, 201, 202, 206-7, 208, 210-1, 212, 217, 218, 222, 223, 236, 240, 245, 246, 247-8, 249, 256, 257, 261, 264, 265, 270, 319-20
Irreversibility of duration. _See_ Repetition
Isolated systems of matter, 204, 213, 215, 241, 242, 341, 342, 346, 347-8. _See_ Bodies
Janet, Paul, 60-1 _note_
Jennings, 35 _note_
Jourdain and the two kinds of order, 221
Juxtaposition, 207-8, 338, 339, 341. Cf. Succession
Kaleidoscopic variation, 74
Kant, antinomies of, 204-5, 206 becoming in Kant's successors, 362 coincidence of matter with space in Kant's philosophy, 206, 207-8, 244 construction the method of Kant's successors, 364-5 his criticism of pure reason, 205, 287 _note_, 356-62, 364 degrees of being in Kant's successors, 362-3 duration in Kant's successors, 362-3 intelligence in Kant's philosophy, 230, 357 ontological argument in Kant's philosophy, 285 space and time in Kant's philosophy, 204-6 and Spencer, 364 _See_ Mind and matter, Sensuous manifold, Thing-in-itself
Kantianism, 358, 364
Katagenesis, 34
Kepler, 228-9, 332-5
Knowledge and action, 150, 193-4, 196, 197, 206-7, 208, 218 criticism of, 193-4 discontinuity of, 306 extension of, 149 form of, 148, 194-5, 358-362 formal, 152 genesis of, 190 innate or natural, 146-50 instinct in, 143, 144, 166-9, 173, 177, 192-3, 198, 268 intellect in, ix-xv, 48, 149, 162-4, 177, 179, 193-4, 196-9, 206-7, 208, 218, 237, 238, 251, 270, 305, 306, 312, 313, 315, 317, 325, 331-2, 342, 343, 347-8, 359-60, 361 intension of, 149-50 of reality viewed as the internality of subject in object, 307, 317, 358-9 intuition and intellect in theoretical knowledge, 174-7, 179, 238, 270, 342-4 matter of, 194-5, 357-8, 359-62 of matter, xi, 48, 206-7, 360-1 object of, ix-xv, 1, 48, 147, 148, 159-60, 163, 164, 197-9, 270, 342, 359-60 fundamental problem of, 273-5 as relative to certain requirements of the mind, 152, 190-1, 230 scientific, 193-4, 196-8, 206, 207, 218 theory of, xiii, 177, 179, 197, 204-5, 207-8, 229, 231 unconscious, 142-6, 146, 150, 165, 166 alleged unknowableness of the thing-in-itself, 205, 206
Kunstler, 260 _note_
Labbé 260 _note_
Labor, division of, 99, 110, 118, 140, 157, 166, 260
Lalande, André, 246 _note_
Lamarck, 75-6
Lamarckism, 75-6, 77, 84-87
Language, 4, 147, 157-60, 258, 265, 293, 302-3, 305, 312-4, 320
La Place, 38
Lapsed intelligence, instinct as, 169, 175
Larvae, 19, 140, 145-66, 172-3
Latent geometrism of intellect, 194, 211-2
Law of correlation, 66, 67 and genera, 226-9, 330 heliocentric radius-vector in Kepler's laws, 334 imprint of relations and laws upon consciousness in Spencer's philosophy, 188 and intuitional philosophy, 176-7 physical, contrasted with the laws of our codes, 218-9 physical, expression of the negative movement, 218 physical, mathematical form of, 218, 219, 229-30, 241 relation as, 228, 229-30
Learning, instinctive, 192, 193
Le Dantec, 18 _note_
Leibniz, cause in, 277 dogmatism of, 356, 357 extension in, 351, 352 God in, 351, 352, 356 mechanism in, 348, 351, 355, 356 his philosophy a systematization of physics, 347 space in, 351-2 teleology in, 39, 40 time in, 352, 362
Lepidoptera, 114 _note_, 134
Le Roy, Ed., 218 _note_
Liberation of consciousness, 183-4, 265, 266
Liberty. _See_ Freedom
Life as activity, 128-9, 246 cause in the realm of, 94, 164 complementarity of the powers of, ix-xv, 25-6, 27, 51-5, 97-105, 110, 113, 116-9, 126-7, 131-6, 140-3, 176, 177, 183, 184, 246, 254-7, 266, 270, 343, 344-5 consciousness coextensive with, 186, 257, 270, 362-3 mutual contingency of the orders of life and matter, 235 continuity of, 1-11, 29, 30, 162, 163, 258 as creation, 57-8, 161-2, 223, 230, 246, 247-8, 252, 254, 255 symbolized by a curve, 31, 89, 90 embryonic, 166 and finality, 44, 89, 164, 185, 222-3 fluidity of, 153, 165, 191-2, 193 as free, 129-30 function of, 93-4, 106-10, 113, 114, 117, 120, 121, 126-7, 173-5, 246, 254-6 harmony of the realm of, 50, 51, 103, 116, 117-8, 127 imitation of the inert by, 230 imitation of, by the inert, 33-6 impulse of, prolonged in our will, 239 and individuation, 12-4, 26, 27, 79-80, 85, 87, 88, 127-8, 149, 195-6, 230, 231, 250, 259, 261, 269, 300-1, 302-3. _See_ Individuality indivisibility of, 225-6, 270 and instinct. 136-40, 145, 165-8, 170, 172, 173, 175-9, 186, 192-7, 233, 264, 366 and intellect, ix-xv, 13, 32-5, 44-9, 89, 101, 102-3, 104-5, 127, 136, 152, 160-5, 168, 173-4, 176-9, 181, 191-201, 206, 207, 213, 220, 222-3, 224, 225-6, 257-61, 266, 270, 300-1, 342, 355, 359-61, 365, 366 and interpenetration, 271 as inversion of the inert, 6-7, 8, 176, 177, 186, 190, 191, 196, 197, 201, 202, 207, 208-9, 210-1, 212, 216, 217, 218, 222-3, 225-6, 232, 235, 236, 238, 239, 245-50, 264, 329-31 a limited force, 126, 127, 141, 148, 149, 254 and memory, 167 penetrating matter, 26, 27, 52, 179, 181, 182, 237, 239, 266, 269-70 as tendency to mobility, 128, 131, 132 and physics and chemistry, 31, 33, 35, 36, 225-6 in other planets, 256 as potentiality, 258 repetition in, and in the inert, 224, 225, 230, 231 sinuousness of, 71, 98, 99, 102, 112, 113, 116, 129-30, 212 social, 138, 140, 157-8, 265 in other solar systems, 256 and evolution of species, 247-8, 254, 269 theory of, and theory of knowledge, xii, 177, 179, 197 unforeseeableness of, 6, 8-9, 20, 26-7, 28, 29, 37, 45-6, 47, 48, 52, 86, 96, 163, 164, 184, 223-4, 249, 339, 341 unity of, 250, 268, 270 as a wave flowing over matter, 251, 266 _See_ Impulse of, Organic substance, Organism, Organization, Vital impetus, Vital order, Vital principle, Vitalism, Willed order
Limitations of instinct and of intelligence, 152
Limitedness of the scope of Galileo's physics, 357, 370 of the vital impetus, 126, 127, 141, 148, 149, 255
Linden, Maria von, 114 _note_
Lingulae illustrating failure to evolve, 102
Lizards, color variation in, 72, 74
Locomotion and consciousness, 108, 111, 115, 261. _See_ Mobility, Movement
Logic and action, ix, 44, 46, 162, 179 formal, 292 genesis of, x-xi, xiii-xiv, 49, 103, 104-5, 136, 191-2, 193, 301, 359, 366 and geometry, ix, 161, 176, 212 impotent to grasp life, x, 13, 32, 35, 36, 46-9, 89, 101, 152, 162-5, 194-201, 205, 206, 213, 219, 220, 222, 223, 225-6, 256-61, 266, 270, 313, 355, 360-1, 365 natural, 161, 194-5 of number, 208 and physics, 319-20, 321 and time, 4, 277 _See_ Intellect, Intelligence, Understanding, Order, mathematical
Logical existence contrasted with psychical and physical, 277, 298, 328, 361-2 categories, x, 48, 195, 196 and physical contrasted, 276-7
_Logik_, by Sigwart, 287 _note_
[Greek: logos], in Plotinus, 210 _note_
Looking backward, the attitude of intellect, 46, 237
Lumbriculus, 13
Machinery and intelligence, 141
Machines, natural and artificial, 139. _See_ Implement, Instrument organisms, for action, 252, 254, 300-1
Magnitude, certainty of induction approached as factors approach pure magnitudes, 215-16 and modern science, 333, 335
Man in evolution, attention, 184 brain, 183, 184, 263-5 consciousness, 139-43, 180, 181, 183, 185, 187, 188, 191-2, 212, 262-8 goal, 134, 174-5, 185, 266, 267, 269, 270 habit and invention, 265 intelligence, 133, 137-9, 143, 146, 174, 175, 187, 188, 212, 266, 267 language, 158
Manacéine (de), 124 _note_
Manufacture, the aim of intellect, 137, 138, 145, 152-4, 159-65, 181, 191, 192, 199, 251, 298 and organization, 92, 93, 126-7, 139-43, 150 and repetition, 44, 45, 155-8 _See_ Construction, Solid, Utility
Many and one, categories inapplicable to life, x, 162-3, 177-8, 257, 261, 268 in the idea of individuality, 258 _See_ Multiplicity
Martin, J., 102 _note_
Marion, 107 _note_
Material knowledge, 152
Materialists, 240
Materiality the inversion of spirituality, 212
Mathematical order. _See_ Inert matter, Order
Matter. _See_ Inert matter
Maturation as creative evolution, 47-8, 230
Maupas, 35 _note_
Measurement a human convention, 218, 242 of real time an illusion, 336-40
Mechanical account of action after the fact, 47 cause, x, 34, 35, 40, 44, 177, 234, 235 procedure of intellect, 165 invention, 138, 140, 194-5 necessity, 47, 215, 216, 218, 236, 252, 265, 270, 327
Mechanics of transformation, 32
Mechanism, cerebral, 252, 253, 262, 263, 265, 366. _See_ Cerebral activity and consciousness of the eye, 88 instinct as, 176-7 of intellect. _See_ Intellect, mechanism of and intention, 233. _See_ Automatic order, Willed order life more than, x, xiv _note_, 78-9
Mechanistic philosophy, xii, xiv, 17, 29, 30, 37, 74, 88-96, 101, 102, 194-5, 218, 223, 264, 345, 346, 347, 348, 351, 355, 356, 362
Medical philosophers of the eighteenth century, 356 science, 165
Medullary bulb in the development of the nervous system, 252 and consciousness, 110
Memory, 5, 17, 20, 21, 167, 168, 180, 181, 201
Menopause in illustration of crisis of evolution, 19
Mental life, unity of, 268
Metamorphoses of larvae, 139-40, 146-7, 166
Metaphysics and duration, 276 and epistemology, 177, 179, 185, 197, 208-9 Galileo's influence on, 20, 238 instinctive, 191-2, 269, 270, 277-8 and intellect, 189-90 and matter, 194 natural, 21, 325 and science, 176-7, 194-5, 198, 208-9, 344, 354, 369-70 systematic, 191, 192, 194, 195-6, 238, 269, 270, 347
Metchnikoff, 18 _note_
Method of philosophy, 191-2
Microbes, illustrating divergence of tendency, 117
Microbial colonies, 259
Mind, individual, in philosophy, 191 and intellect, 48-9, 205-6 knowledge as relative to certain requirements of the mind, 152, 190-1, 230 and matter, 188-9, 201, 202, 203, 205-6, 264, 269, 270, 350, 365-9 _See_ Psychic, Psycho-physiological parallelism, Psychology and Philosophy, [Greek: psychê]
Minot, Sedgwick, 17 _note_
Mobility, tendency toward, characterizes animals, 109, 110, 113, 129-32, 135, 180 and consciousness, 108, 111, 115-6, 261 and intellect, 154-5, 161-2, 163, 300, 326, 327, 337 of intelligent signs, 158, 159 life as tendency toward, 127-8, 131, 132 in plants, 112, 135 _See_ Motion
Möbius, 60 _note_
Model necessary to the constructive work of intellect, 164, 166-7
Modern astronomy compared with ancient science, 334, 335 geometry compared with ancient science, 31, 161, 334 idealism, 231 philosophy compared with ancient, 225-9, 231, 327-8, 344, 345, 349-51, 354, 356-7 philosophy: parallelism of body and mind in, 180, 350, 355, 356 science: cinematographical character of, 329, 330, 336, 341, 342, 346-7 science compared with ancient, 329-36, 342-5, 356-7 science, Galileo's influence on, 334, 335 science, Kepler's influence on, 334 science, magnitudes the object of, 333, 335 science, time an independent variable in, 20, 335
Molecules, 251
Molluscs, illustrating animal tendency to mobility, 129-31 perception in, 189 vision in, 60, 75, 77, 83, 86, 87
Monads of Leibniz, 351-4
Monera, 126
Monism, 355
Moral sciences, weakness of deduction in, 212
Morat, 123 _note_
Morgan, L., 79 _note_, 80
Motion, abstract, 304 articulations of, 310-1 an animal characteristic, 252 and the cinematograph, 304-5 continuity of, 310 in Descartes, 346-7 evolutionary, extensive and qualitative, 302, 303, 311, 312 in general (_i.e._ abstract), 304-5 indivisibility of, 306-7, 311, 336-7, 338 and instinct, 139-40, 331-2 and intellect, 71, 155, 156, 159-60, 273, 274, 298, 317-8, 321, 329, 331-2, 338, 344-5 organization of, 310-1 track laid by motion along its course, 308-11, 337, 338 _See_ Mobility, Movement
Motive principle of evolution: consciousness, 181-2
Motor mechanisms, cerebral, 252, 253, 263, 265
Moulin-Quignon, quarry of, 137
Moussu, 81
Movement and animal life, 108, 131, 132 ascending, 12, 101, 103, 104, 185, 208-9, 210-1, 369-70. _See_ Vital impetus consciousness and, 111, 118, 144-5, 207-8 descending, 11-2, 202-4, 207-10, 212, 246, 252, 256, 270, 276, 339, 361, 369-70 goal of, the object of the intellect, 155, 299-300, 302, 303 intellect unable to grasp, 313 mutual inversion of cosmic movements, 126-7, 143, 144, 173-4, 176, 177, 209-10, 212, 217, 218, 222-3, 236, 245-51, 261, 264, 265, 272, 342-3 life as, 166, 176-7 and the nervous system, 110, 132, 134, 180, 262-3 of plants, 109, 135-6 _See_ Mobility, Motion, Locomotion, Current, Tendency, Impetus, Impulse, Impulsion
Movements, antagonistic cosmic, 128-9, 135, 181, 185, 250, 259. _See_ Movement, Mutual inversion of cosmic
Multiplicity, abstract, 257, 259 distinct, 202, 209-10, 257. _See_ Interpenetration does not apply to life, x, 162, 177, 257, 261, 270
Mutability, exhaustion of, of the universe, 244, 245
Mutations, sudden, 28, 62-3, 64-8 theory of, 85-6
Natural geometry, 195-6, 211-2 instrument, 141, 144-5, 150-1 or innate knowledge, 147, 150-1 logic, 161, 194-5 metaphysic, 21, 325-6 selection, 54, 56-7, 59-60, 61-5, 68, 95, 169-70
Nature, Aristotelian theory of, 135, 174 discord in, 127-8, 255, 267 facts and relations in, 368 incoherence in, 104 as inert matter, 161-2, 218, 219, 228-9, 239, 245, 264, 280-1, 303, 356, 359-60, 367 as life, 100, 138, 139-40, 141-2, 143, 144-5, 150, 154, 155-6, 227, 241, 260, 269, 270, 301-2 order of, 225-6 as ordered diversity, 231, 233 unity of, 105, 190, 191, 195, 196-9, 322, 352-7, 358
Nebula, cosmic, 249, 257
Necessity for creation, vital impetus as, 252, 261 and death of individuals, 246 _note_ and freedom, 218, 236, 270 in Greek philosophy, 326-7 in induction, 215, 216 and matter, 252, 264
Negation, 275, 285-97. _See_ Nought
Negative cause of mathematical order, 217. _See_ Inverse relation, etc. cosmic principle, 126-7, 143, 144, 173-4, 176-7, 209, 212, 218, 223-4, 236, 245-51, 261, 264-5, 272, 243. _See_ Inert matter, Opposition of the two ultimate cosmic movements, etc.
Neo-Darwinism, 55, 56, 85, 86, 169-70
Neo-Lamarckism, 42 _note_
Nervous system a centre of action, 109, 130-1, 132, 134-5, 180, 253, 261-3 of the plant, 114 primacy of, 120-1, 126-7, 252
Neurone and indetermination, 126
New, freedom and the, 11-2, 164, 165, 199-200, 218, 230, 239, 249, 270, 339-42
Newcomen, 184
Newton, 335
Nitrogen and the function of organisms, 108, 113-4, 117, 255
[Greek: noêseôs noêsis] of Aristotle, 356
Non-existence. _See_ Nought
Nothing. _See_ Nought
Nought, conception of the, 273-80, 281-3, 289-90, 292-8, 316-7, 327. _See_ Negation, Pseudo-ideas, etc.
[Greek: nous poiêtikos] of Aristotle, 322
Novelty. _See_ new.
Nucleus intelligence as the luminous, enveloped by instinct, 166-7 in microbial colonies, 259 intelligence as the solid, bathed by a mist of instinct, 193, 194 of Stentor, 260
Number illustrating degrees of reality, 324-5, 327 logic of, 208
Nuptial flight, 146
Nutritive elements, fixation of, 107-9, 114, 117, 246, 247, 254
Nymph (Zool.), 139, 146
Object of this book, ix-xv of instinct, 146-52, 163, 175-9 of intellect, 146-52, 161-5, 175, 179, 190-1, 199-200, 237, 250, 252, 270, 273, 298-304, 307-8, 311-2, 354, 359 internality of subject in, the condition of knowledge of reality, 307-8, 317-8, 359 of knowledge, 147, 148-9, 159-60 idea of, contrasted with that of universal interaction, 11, 188-9, 207-8 of philosophy as contrasted with object of science, 195-6, 220-1, 225-6, 227, 239, 251, 270, 273, 297-9, 305-6, 347 of science, 329, 332-3, 335-6
Obliteration of outlines in the real, 11, 188, 189, 207-8
Oenothera Lamarckiana, 63, 85-6
Old, growing. _See_ Age the, is the object of the intellect, 163, 164, 199, 270
One and many in the idea of individuality, x, 258. _See_ Unity
Ontological argument in Kant, 284
Opposition of the two ultimate cosmic movements, 128-9, 175-6, 179, 186, 201, 203, 238, 248, 254, 259, 261, 267. _See_ Inverse relation of the physical and psychical
Orchids, instincts of, 170
Order and action, 226-7 complementarity of the two orders, 145-6, 173-4, 221-2. _See_ Order, Mutual inversion of the two orders mutual contingency of the two orders, 231, 235 and disorder, 40, 103-4, 220-2, 225-6, 231-6, 274 mutual inversion of the two orders, 186, 201, 202, 206-9, 211, 212, 216-8, 219-21, 222-3, 225-6, 230, 232, 235, 236, 238, 240, 245-8, 256, 257, 258, 264, 270, 274, 313, 330 mathematical, 153, 209-11, 217-9, 223-6, 230-3, 236, 245, 251, 270, 330-1 of nature, 225-6, 231, 233 as satisfaction, 222, 223, 274 vital, 94-5, 164, 222-7, 230, 235, 236, 237, 330-1 willed, 224, 239
Organ and function, 88-91, 93-4, 95, 132, 140, 141, 157, 161-2
Organic destruction and physico-chemistry, 226 substance, 131, 140, 141-2, 149, 162-3, 195-6, 240 _note_, 255, 267 world, cleft between, and the inorganic, 190, 191, 196, 197-8 world, harmony of, 50-1, 103, 104, 116, 118, 126-7 world, instinct the procedure of, 165
Organism and action, 123-4, 125, 174, 253, 254, 300-1 ambiguity of primitive, 99, 112, 113, 116, 129, 130 association of organisms, 260 change and the, 301, 302-3 complementarity of intelligence and instinct in the, 141-2, 150, 181, 184, 185 complexity of the, 162, 250, 252, 253, 260 consciousness and the, 111, 145, 179, 180, 262, 270 contingency of the actual chemical nature of the, 255, 257 differentiation of parts in, 252, 260. _See_ Organism, complexity of extension of, by artificial instruments, 141, 161 freedom the property of every, 130, 131 function of, 26, 27, 79, 80, 85, 87, 88, 93-4, 106-110, 113, 114, 117, 120, 121, 126-7, 128, 136, 173-5, 230, 231, 246, 247, 250, 251, 254, 255, 256, 258, 270 function and structure, 55, 61, 62, 69, 74, 75, 76-7, 86, 88-91, 93-4, 95, 96-7, 118-9, 132, 139, 140, 157-8, 161-3, 250, 252, 256 generality typified by similarity among organisms, 223, 224, 228-9, 230 hive as, 166 and individuation, x, 12, 13, 15, 23, 26-7, 42, 149, 195-6, 225-6, 228-9, 259, 260, 261, 270 mutual interpenetration of organisms, 177-8 mechanism of the, 31, 92-3, 94 philosophy and the, 195-6 unity of the, 176-8
Organization of action, 142, 145, 147-8, 150, 181, 184, 185 of duration, 5-6, 15, 25, 26 explosive character of, 92 and instinct, 24, 138-46, 150, 165-7, 171-2, 173, 176, 192-3, 194, 264 and intellect, 161-2 and manufacture, 92, 93, 94-5, 96, 126-8 is the _modus vivendi_ between the antagonistic cosmic currents, 181, 250, 254 of motion, 310 and perception, 226-7
Originality of the willed order, 224
Orthogenesis, 69, 86-7
Oscillation between association and individuation, 259, 261. _See_ Societies of ether, 301-2 of instinct and intelligence about a mean position, 136 of pendulum, illustrating space and time in ancient philosophy, 318-9, 320 between representation of inner and outer reality, 279-80 of sensible reality in ancient philosophy about being, 316-8
Outlines of perception the plan of action, 5, 11, 12, 93, 188, 189, 204-5, 206-7, 226-7, 228-9, 230, 250, 299-300, 306
Oxygen, 114, 254, 255
Paleontology, 24-5, 129, 139
Paleozoic era, 102
Parallelism, psycho-physiological, 180, 350, 351, 355, 356
Paralyzing instinct in hymenoptera, 139-40, 146, 172, 174-5
Parasites, 106, 108, 109, 111-13, 134-5
Parasitism, 132
Passivity, 222-4
Past, subsistence of, in present, 4, 20-3, 26-7, 108, 199-202
Peckham, 173-4 _note_
Pecten, illustrating identical structures in divergent lines of evolution, 62, 63, 75
Pedagogical and social nature of negation, 287-97
Pedagogy and the function of the intellect, 165
Penetration, reciprocal, 161-2. _See_ Interpenetration
Perception and action, 4-5, 11, 12, 93, 188, 189, 206, 226-7, 228-9, 300-1, 306-7 and becoming, 176-7, 303-6 cinematographical character of, 206-7, 249, 251, 331-2 distinctness of, 226-7, 250 and geometry, 205, 230 in molluscs, 188 and organization, 226-7 prolonged in intellect, 161-2, 273 reaction in, 264 and recollection, 180, 181 refracts reality, 204, 238, 359-60 rhythm of, 299-300, 301 and science, 168
Permanence an illusion, 299-301
Peron, 80
Perrier, Ed., 260 _note_
Personality, absolute reality of, 269 concentration of, 201, 202 and matter, 269, 270 the object of intuition, 268 tension of, 199, 200, 201
Perthes, Boucher de, 137
Phaedrus, 156 _note_
Phagocytes and external finality, 42
Phagocytosis and growing old, 18
Phantom ideas and problems, 177, 277, 283, 296
Philosophical explanation contrasted with scientific explanation, 168
Philosophy and art, 176-7 and biology, 43-4, 194-6 and experience, 197-8 function of 29-30, 84-5, 93-4, 168, 173-4, 194-7, 198, 268, 269, 369-70 history of, 238 incompletely conscious of itself, 207-8, 209 individual mind in, 191 and intellect, ix-xv intellect and intuition in, 238 of intuition, 176-7, 191-4, 196, 197, 277 method of, 191-2, 194, 195, 239 object of, 239 and the organism, 195-6 and physics, 194, 208 and psychology, 194, 196 and science, 175, 196-7, 208, 345, 370 _See_ Ancient philosophy, Cosmology, Finalism, Mechanistic philosophy, Metaphysics, Modern philosophy, Post-Kantian philosophy
Phonograph illustrating "unwinding" cause, 73
Phosphorescence, consciousness compared to, 262
Photograph, illustrating the nature of the intellectual view of reality, 31, 304-5
Photography, instantaneous, illustrating the mechanism of the intellect, 331-2, 333
Physical existence, as contrasted with logical, 276, 297-8, 328, 361 laws, their precise form artificial, 218, 219, 229, 240-1 laws and the negative cosmic movement, 218 operations the object of intelligence, 175, 250 order, imitation of, by the vital, 230 science, 176-7
Physicochemistry and organic destruction, 226 and biology, 25-6, 29-30, 34, 35, 36, 55, 57, 98, 194
Physics, ancient, "logic spoiled," 320, 321-2 of ancient philosophy, 315, 320, 321-2, 355 of Aristotle, 228 _note_, 324 _note_, 331, 332 and deduction, 213 of Galileo, 357, 369-70 and individuality of bodies, 188, 208 as inverted psychics, 202 and logic, 319-20, 321 and metaphysics, 194, 208 and mutability, 245 success of, 218, 219
Pigment-spot and adaptation, 60, 61, 71-3, 76-7 and heredity, 83, 84
Pinguicula, certain animal characteristics of, 107
Plan, motionless, of action the object of intellect, 155, 298-9, 301-2, 303
Planets, life in other, 256
Plants and animals in evolution, 105-39, 142-3, 144, 145-6, 147, 168, 169-70, 181, 182, 183-4, 185, 254, 267 complementarity of, to animals, 183-4, 185, 267 consciousness of, 109, 111, 113, 120, 128-35, 142-3, 144, 181, 182, 292. _See_ Torpor, Sleep function of, 107-9, 113, 114, 117, 246, 247, 254, 256 function and structure in, 67, 77-8, 79 individuation in, 12 instinct in, 170, 171 and mobility, 108, 109, 111-13, 118-9, 129, 130, 135-6 parallelism of evolution with animals, 59-60, 106-8, 116 supporters of all life, 271 variation of, 85, 86
Plasma, continuity of germinative, 25-6, 42, 78-83
Plastic substances, 255
Plato, 49, 156, 191, 210 _note_, 316, 318, 319, 320, 321, 327, 330, 347, 349
Platonic ideas, 49, 315-6, 321, 322, 327, 330, 352
Plotinus, 210 _note_, 314-5, 323, 324 _note_, 349, 352, 353
Plurality, confused, of life, 257. _See_ Interpenetration
Poem, sounds of, distinct to perception; the sense indivisible to intuition, 209 illustrating creation of matter, 240, 319-20
[Greek: poiêtikos, nous], of Aristotle, 322
Polymorphism of ants, bees, and wasps, 140 of insect societies, 157
Polyzoism, 260
Positive reality, 208, 212. _See_ Reality
Positivity, materiality an inversion or interruption of, 219, 246, 247-8, 319-20
Possible activity as a factor in consciousness, 11, 12, 96, 144, 145, 146-7, 158-9, 165, 179, 180, 181, 189, 264, 368 existence, 290, 295
Post-Kantian philosophy, 362, 363
Potential activity. _See_ Possible activity genera, 226 knowledge, 142-7, 150, 166
Potentiality, life as an immense, 258, 270 zone of, surrounding acts, 179, 180, 181, 264. _See_ Possible activity
Powers of life, complementarity of, xii, xiii, 26, 27, 51-5, 97-105, 110, 113, 116-8, 119, 126-7, 131-6, 140-3, 176, 177, 183, 184, 246, 254, 255, 257, 266, 270, 343, 345
Practical nature of perception and its prolongation in intellect and science, 137-41, 150, 193-4, 196, 197, 206, 207-8, 218, 247-8, 273, 281, 305, 306-7, 328, 329
Preëstablished harmony, 205-6, 207
Present, creation of, by past, 5, 20-3, 26-7, 167, 199-202
Prevision. _See_ Foreseeing
Primacy of nervous system, 120-6, 252
Primary instinct, 138-9, 168
Primitive organisms, ambiguous forms of, 99, 112, 113, 116, 129, 130
"Procession" in Alexandrian philosophy, 323
Progress, adaptation and, 101 ff. evolutionary, 50, 133, 134, 138, 141-2, 173-4, 175, 185, 264-5, 266
Prose and verse, illustrating the two kinds of orders, 221, 232
Protophytes, colonizing of, 259
Protoplasm, circulation of, 32-3, 108 and senescence, 18, 19 imitation of, 32-3, 35 primitive, and the nervous system, 124, 126-7 of primitive organisms, 99, 108, 109 and the vital principle, 42-3
Protozoa, association of, 259-61 ageing of, 16 of ambiguous form, 112 and individuation, 14, 259-61 mechanical explanation of movements of, 33 and nervous system, 126 reproduction of, 14
Pseudo-ideas and problems, 177, 277, 283, 296
Pseudoneuroptera, division of labor among, 140
[Greek: pschnê] of Aristotle, 350 of Plotinus, 210 _note_
Psychic activity, twofold nature of, 136, 140-1, 142-3 life, continuity of, 1-11, 29-30
Psychical existence contrasted with logical, 276, 297-8, 327-8, 361 nature of life, 257
Psychics inverted physics, 201, 202. _See_ Inverse relation of the physical and psychical
Psychology and deduction, 212-3 and the genesis of intellect, 187, 194, 195-6, 197 intuitional cosmology as reversed, 208-9
Psycho-physiological parallelism, 180, 350, 351, 355, 356
Puberty, illustrating crises in evolution, 19, 320-1
Qualitative, evolutionary and extensive becoming, 313 motion, 302-3, 304, 311
Qualities, acts, forms, the classes of representation, 303, 314 bodies as bundles of, 300-1 coincidence of, 309 and movements, 299-300 and natural geometry, 211 superimposition of, in induction, 216
Quality is change, 299-300 in Eleatic philosophy, 314-5 and quantity in ancient philosophy, 323-4 and quantity in modern philosophy, 350 and rhythm, 300-2
Quaternary substances, 121
Quinton, René, 134 _note_
Radius-vector, Heliocentric, in Kepler's laws, 334
Rank, evolutionary, 50, 133-5, 173-4, 265
Reaction, rôle of, in perception, 226-7
Ready-made categories, x, xiv, 48, 237, 250, 251, 273, 311, 321, 329, 354, 359
Real activity as distinguished from possible, 145 common-sense is continuous experience of the, 213 continuity of the, 302, 329 dichotomy of the, in modern philosophy, 349 imitation of the, by intelligence, 90, 204, 258, 270, 307, 355 obliteration of outlines in the, 11-2, 188, 189, 207-8 representation of the, by science, 203-4
Realism, ancient, 231-2
Realists and idealists alike assume possibility of absence of order, 220, 231-2
Reality, absolute, 198, 228-9, 230, 269, 359-60, 361 as action, 47, 191-2, 194-5, 249 degrees of, 323, 327 in dogmatic metaphysics, 196 double form of, 179-80, 216, 230-1, 236 as duration, 11-2, 217, 272 as flux, 165, 250, 251, 294, 337, 338, 342 and the frames of the intellect, 363-4, 365. _See_ Frames of the understanding as freedom, 247 of genera in ancient philosophy, 226-7 is growth, 239 imitation of, by the intellect, 89-90, 365 and the intellect, 52, 89-90, 153, 191, 192, 314-5, 355-6 intelligible, in ancient philosophy, 317 knowledge of, 307-8, 317, 358-9 and mechanism, 351, 354-5 as movement, 90, 155, 301-2, 312 and not-being, 276, 280, 285 of the person, 269 refraction of, through the forms of perception, 204, 238, 359-60 and science, 194, 196, 198, 199, 203-4, 206-8, 354, 357 sensible, in ancient philosophy, 314, 317, 321, 327, 328, 352 symbol of, xi, 30-1, 71, 88-9, 93-4, 195-6, 197, 209, 240, 342, 360-1, 369 undefinable conceptually, 13, 49 unknowable in Kant, 205 unknowable in Spencer, xi views of, 30-1, 71, 84, 88, 199, 201, 206-7, 225-6, 249, 258, 273, 300-7, 311, 314, 331-2, 342, 351, 352
Reason and life, 7, 8, 48, 161 cannot transcend itself, 193-4
Reasoning and acting, 192-3 and experience, 203-4 and matter, 204-5, 208-9 on matter and life, 7, 8
Recollection, dependence of, on special circumstances, 167, 180 in the dream, 202, 207-8 and perception, 180, 181
Recommencing, continual, of the present in the state of relaxation, 201
Recomposing, decomposing and, the characteristic powers of intellect, 157, 251
Record, false comparison of memory with, 5
Reflection, 158-9
Reflex activity, 110 compound, 173-4, 175-6
Refraction of the idea through matter or non-being, 316-7 of reality through forms of perception, 204, 238, 359-60
Regeneration and individuality, 13, 14
Register of time, 16, 20, 37
Reinke, 42 _note_
Relation, imprint of relations and laws upon consciousness, 188 as law, 229, 230-1 and thing, 147-52, 156-7, 160, 161, 187, 202, 352, 357
Relativism, epistemological, 196, 197, 230
Relativity of immobility, 155 of the intellect, xi, 48-9, 152, 153, 187, 195-6, 197-8, 199, 219, 273, 306-7, 360-1 of knowledge, 152, 191, 230 of perception, 226-7, 228, 300-1
Relaxation in the dream state, 201, 209-10 and extension, 201, 207-8, 209, 210, 212, 218, 223, 245 and intellect, 200, 207-8, 209, 212, 218 logic a, of virtual geometry, 212 matter a, of unextended into extended, 218 memory vanishes in complete, 200 necessity as, of freedom, 218 present continually recommences in the state of relaxation, 200 will vanishes in complete, 200, 207-8 _See_ Tension
Releasing cause, 73, 74, 115, 118-9, 120
Repetition and generalization, 230-1, 232 and fabrication, 44-5, 46, 155-8 and intellect, 156-7, 199, 214-6 of states, 5-6, 7-8, 28-9, 30, 36, 45-6, 47 in the vital and in the mathematical order, 225, 226, 230, 231
Representation and action, 143-4, 145, 180 classes of: qualities, forms, acts, 302-3, 314 and consciousness, 143-4 of motion, 159-60, 303-4, 305, 306-7, 308, 313, 315, 344-5 of the Nought, 273-80, 281-4, 289-317, 327
Represented or internalized action distinguished from externalized action, 144-7, 158-9, 165
Reproduction and individuation, 13, 14
Resemblance. _See_ Similarity
Reservoir, organism a, of energy, 115, 116, 125-6, 245, 246, 254
Rest and motion in Zeno, 308-12
Retrogression in evolution, 133, 134
Retrospection the function of intellect, 47-8, 237
Reversed psychology: intuitional cosmology, 208
Rhizocephala and animal mobility, 111
Rhumbler, 34 _note_
Rhythm of duration, 11-2, 127-8, 300-1, 345-7 intelligence adopts the, of action, 305-6 of perception, 299-300, 301 and quality, 301 scanning the, of the universe the function of science, 346-7 of science must coincide with that of action, 320 of the universe untranslatable into scientific formulae, 337
Rings of arthropods, 132-3
Ripening, creative evolution as, 47-8, 340-1
Romanes, 139
Roule, 27 _note_
Roy (Le), Ed., 218 _note_
_Salamandra maculata_, vision in, 75
Salensky, 75 _note_
Same, function of intellect connecting same with same, 199-200, 233, 270
Samter and Heymons, 72 _note_
Saporta (De), 112 _note_
Savage's sense of distance and direction, 212
Skepticism or dogmatism the dilemma of any systematic metaphysics, 195-6, 197, 230-1
Schisms in the primitive impulsion of life, 254-5, 257. _See_ Divergent lines of evolution
Scholasticism, 370
Science and action, 93, 195, 198, 328-9 ancient, and modern, 329-37, 342-5, 357 astronomy, ancient and modern, 334-5, 336 cartesian geometry and ancient geometry, 333-4 cinematographical character of modern, 329, 330, 336-7, 340-1, 342, 345-8 conventionality of a certain aspect of, 206-7 and deduction, 212-3 and discontinuity, 161-2 function of, 92, 167-8, 173-4, 176-7, 193-4, 195-6, 198-9, 328-9, 346-7 Galileo's influence on modern, 333-4, 335 and instinct, 169, 170, 173-4, 175, 193-5 and intelligence, 176, 177, 193-6 Kepler's influence on modern, 334 and matter, 194-5, 206-7, 208 modern. _See_ Modern science object of, 195-6, 220, 221, 251, 270-1, 273, 296-8, 306-7, 328-9, 332-3, 335-6, 347-8 and perception, 168 and philosophy, 175-6, 196-7, 208-9, 344, 370 physical. _See_ Physics and reality. _See_ Reality and science and time, 8-13, 20, 335-8 unity of, 195-6, 197, 228-9, 230, 321-2, 323, 344-5, 347-8, 349, 354, 355-6, 359-60, 362-3
Scientific concepts, 338-40 explanation and philosophical explanation, 168 formulae, 337 geometry, 161, 211 knowledge, 193-4, 196-7, 198, 199, 207, 208, 218
Sclerosis and ageing, 19
Scolia, paralyzing instinct in, 172
Scope of action indefinitely extended by intelligent instruments, 141 of Galileo's physics, 357, 370
Scott, 63 _note_
Sea-urchin and individuality, 13
Séailles, 29 _note_
Secondary instincts, 139, 168
Sectioning of becoming in the philosophy of ideas, 317-8 of matter by perception, 206-7, 249, 251
Sedgwick, 260 _note_
Seeing and willing, coincidence of, in intuition, 237
Selection, natural, 54, 56-7, 59-60, 61-2, 63, 64, 68, 95-6, 169, 170
Self, coincidence of, with, 199 existence of, means change, 1 ff. knowledge of, 1 ff.
Senescence, 15-23, 26-7, 42-3
Sensation and space, 202
Sense-perception. _See_ Perception
Sensible flux, 316-7, 318, 321, 322, 327, 343, 345 intuition and ultra-intellectual, 360-1 object, apogee of, 342-3, 344-5, 349 reality, 314, 317, 319, 327, 328, 352
Sensibility, forms of, 361
Sensitive plant, in illustration of mobility in plants, 109
Sensori-motor system. _See_ Nervous system
Sensuous manifold, 205, 221, 232, 235, 236
Sentiment, poetic, in illustration of individuation, 258, 259
Serkovski, 259 _note_
Serpula, in illustration of identical evolution in divergent lines, 96
Sexual cells, 14, 26, 27, 79-81
Sexuality parallel in plants and animals, 58-60, 119-21
Shaler, N.S., 133 _note_, 184 _note_
Sheath, calcareous, in illustration of animal tendency to mobility, 130-1
Signs, function of, 158, 159, 160 the instrument of science, 329-30
Sigwart, 287 _note_
Silurian epoch, failure of certain species to evolve since, 102
Similarity among individuals of same species the type of generality, 224-6, 228-9, 230-1 and mechanical causality, 44, 45
Simultaneity, to measure time is merely to count simultaneities, 9, 336, 337, 341
Sinuousness of evolution, 71, 98, 102, 212-3
Sitaris, unconscious knowledge of, 146, 147
Situation and magnitude, problems of, 211
Sketching movements, function of consciousness, 207-8
Sleep, 129-31, 135, 181
Snapshot, in illustration of intellectual representation of motion, 305, 306, 313, 315, 344 _See_ View of reality, Cinematographical character, etc. form defined as a, of transition, 301-2, 317, 318, 321-2, 345
Social instinct, 101, 140, 158, 171-2 life, 138, 140, 158, 265 and pedagogical character of negation, 287-97
Societies, 101, 131-2, 158, 171-2, 259
Society and the individual, 260, 265
Solar energy stored by plants, released by animals, 246, 254 systems, 241-4, 246 _note_, 256, 270 systems, life in other, 256
Solid, concepts analogous to solids, ix intellect as a solid nucleus, 193, 194 the material of construction and the object of the intellect, 153, 154, 161, 162, 251
Solidarity between brain and consciousness, 180, 262 of the parts of matter, 203, 207-8, 241, 271
Solidification operated by the understanding, 249
[Greek: sôma] in Aristotle, 350
Somnambulism and consciousness, 144, 145, 159
Soul and body, 350 and cell, 269 creation of, 270
Space and action, 203 in ancient philosophy, 318, 319 and concepts, 160-1, 163, 174-5, 176-7, 188-9, 257-9 geometrical, 203 homogeneity of, 156, 212 and induction, 216 in Kant's philosophy, 205, 206, 207, 244 in Leibniz's philosophy, 351 and matter, 189, 202-13, 244, 257, 264, 361-2, 368 and time in Kant's philosophy, 205-6 unity and multiplicity determinations of, 357-9 _See_ Extension
Spatiality atmosphere of, bathing intelligence, 205 degradation of the extra-spatial, 207 and distinctness, 203, 207, 244, 250, 257-9 and geometrical space, 203, 211, 213, 218 and mathematical order, 208, 209
Special instincts and environment, 138, 168, 192-3, 194 and recollections, 167, 168, 180 as variations on a theme, 167, 172, 264
Species, articulate, 133 evolution of, 247, 255, 269 and external finality, 128-9, 130-1, 132, 266 fossil, 102 human, as goal of evolution, 266, 267 human, styled _homo faber_, 139 and instinct, 140, 167, 170-2, 264 and life, 167 similarity within, 223-6, 228-9, 230-1
Speculation, dead-locks in, xii, 155, 156, 312, 313-4 object of philosophy, 44, 152, 196, 198, 220, 225-6, 227, 251, 270-1, 273, 297-8, 306-7, 317, 347-8
Spencer, Herbert, xi, xiv, 78-9, 153, 188, 189, 190, 364, 365
Spencer's evolutionism, correspondence between mind and matter in, 368 cosmogony in, 188 imprint of relations and laws upon consciousness in, 188 matter in, 365, 367 mind in, 365, 367
Spheres, concentric, in Aristotle's philosophy, 328
Sphex, paralyzing instinct in, 172-5
Spiders and paralyzing hymenoptera, 172
Spinal cord, 110
Spinoza, the adequate and the inadequate, 353 cause, 277 dogmatism, 356, 357 eternity, 353 extension, 350 God, 351, 357 intuitionism, 347 mechanism, 348, 352, 355, 356 time, 362
Spirit, 251, 269, 270
Spirituality and materiality, 128-9, 201-3, 316-7, 208-9, 210-1, 212-3, 217, 218, 219, 222-3, 237, 238, 245, 247-8, 249, 251, 254, 256, 257, 259, 261, 267, 270-1, 272, 276, 343
Spontaneity of life, 86, 237. _See_ Freedom and mechanism, 40 in vegetables, 109 and the willed order, 224
Sport (biol.), 63
Starch, in the function of vegetable kingdom, 114
States of becoming, 1, 13, 163, 247-8, 299, 300, 307
Static character of the intellect, 155-6, 163, 274, 298 views of becoming, 273
Stehasny, 124 _note_
Steam-engine and bronze, parallel as epoch-marking, 138-9
Stentor and individuality, 260
Stoics, 316
Storing of solar energy by plants, 246, 253-6
Strain of bow and indivisibility of motion, 308
Stream, duration as a, 39, 338
Structure and function. _See_ Function and structure identical, in divergent lines of evolution, 55, 60, 61-2, 63, 69, 73-4, 75, 76-7, 83, 86, 87, 118-9
Subject and attribute, 147-8
Substance, albuminoid, 120-1 continuity of living, 162 organic, 121, 131, 140, 142, 149, 162-3, 195-7 _note_, 255, 267 in Spinoza's philosophy, 350 ternary substances, 121
Substantives, adjectives, verbs, correspond to the three classes of representation, 302-4
Substitution essential to representation of the Nought, 281, 283-4, 289-90, 291, 294, 296
Success of physics, 218, 219-20 and superiority, 133, 264-5
Succession in time, 10, 339, 340, 341, 345. Cf. Juxtaposition
Successors of Kant, 363, 364
Sudden mutations, 28, 62-3, 64-5, 68-9
Sun, 115, 241, 323
Superaddition of existence upon nothingness, 276 of order upon disorder, 236, 275
Superimposition. _See_ Measurement of qualities, in induction, 216
Superiority, evolutionary, 133-5, 173, 174-5
Superman, 267
Supraconsciousness, 261
Survival of the fit, 169. _See_ Natural selection
Swim, learning to, as instinctive learning, 193, 194
Symbol, the concept is a, 161, 209, 341-2 of reality, xi, 30-1, 71, 88-9, 93, 195-6, 210, 240, 342, 360-1, 369-70
Symbolic knowledge of life, 199, 342, 360
Symbolism, 176, 180, 360
Sympathetic or intuitive knowledge, 209, 210, 342
Sympathy, instinct is, 164, 168, 172-8, 342-3. _See_ Divination, Feeling, Inspiration
Systematic metaphysics, dilemma of, 195, 196, 230-1 contrasted with intuitional, 191-2, 193-4, 238, 269, 270, 277, 346-8 postulate of, 190, 195
Systematization of physics, Liebniz's philosophy, 347
Systems, isolated, 9-13, 203, 214, 215, 241, 242, 342, 347-9
Tangent and curve, analogy with deduction and the moral sphere, 214 analogy with physico-chemistry and life, 31
Tarakevitch, 124 _note_
Teleology. _See_ Finalism
Tendency, antagonistic tendencies of life, 13, 98, 103, 113, 135, 150 antagonistic tendencies in development of nervous system, 124-5 complementary tendencies of life, 51, 103, 135, 150, 168, 246 to dissociation, 260 divergent tendencies of life, 54, 89, 99, 101, 107-8, 109-10, 112, 116-8, 134, 135, 150, 181, 246, 254-8 to individuation, 13 life a tendency to act on inert matter, 96 toward mobility in animals, 109, 110, 113, 127-8, 129-33, 135, 181, 182 the past exists in present tendency, 5 to reproduce, 13 of species to change, 85-86 mathematical symbols of tendencies, 22, 23 toward systems, in matter, 10 transmission of, 80-1 a vital property is a, 13
Tension and extension, 236, 245 and freedom, 200-2, 207-8, 223, 237, 239, 300-2 matter the inversion of vital, 239 of personality, 199-200, 201, 207-8, 237, 239, 300
Ternary substances, 121
Theology consequent upon philosophy of ideas, 316
Theoretic fallacies, 263, 264 knowledge and instinct, 177, 268 knowledge and intellect, 155, 177, 179, 238, 270, 342, 343
Theorizing not the original function of the intellect, 154-5
Theory of knowledge, xiii, 178, 180, 184-5, 197, 204, 207-8, 209, 228-9, 231 of life, xiii, 178, 180, 197
Thermodynamics, 241-2. _See_ Conservation of energy, Degradation of energy
Thesis and antithesis, 205
Thing as distinguished from motion, 187, 202, 247-8, 249, 299-300 as distinguished from relation, 147, 148, 150, 152, 158-9, 159-60, 161, 187, 202, 352, 356-7 and mind, 206 as solidification operated by understanding, 249
Thing-in-itself, 205, 206, 230-1, 312
Timaeus, 318 _note_
Time and the absolute, 240, 241, 297-8, 339, 343-4 abstract, 21, 22, 37, 39 articulations of real, 331-3 as force, 16, 45-6, 47, 51, 103, 339 homogeneous, 17, 18, 163-4, 331-3 as independent variable, 20, 335-7 interval of, 9, 22, 23 as invention, 341-2 in Leibniz's philosophy, 351, 352, 362 and logic, 4, 277 and simultaneity, 9, 336, 337, 341 in modern science 321-37, 341-5 and space in Kant, 205 and space in ancient philosophy, 318, 319. _See_ Duration
Tools and intellect, 137-41, 150-1. _See_ Implement
Torpor, in evolution, 109, 111, 113, 114 _note_, 120, 128-35, 181, 292
Tortoise, Achilles and the, in Zeno, 311
Touch, science expresses all perception as touch, 168 is to vision as intelligence to instinct, 169
Track laid by motion along its course, 309-12, 337
Transcendental Aesthetic, 203
Transformation, 32, 72, 73, 131, 231, 263
Transformism, 23-5
Transition, form a snapshot view of, 301-2, 316-7, 318, 321, 344-5
Transmissibility of acquired characters, 75-84, 87, 168, 169, 172-3, 225-6, 230-1
Transmission of the vital impetus, 26, 27, 79, 85, 87, 88, 93-4, 110, 126-7, 128, 230, 231, 246, 255, 256, 257, 259, 270
Trigger-action of motor mechanisms, 272
Triton, Regeneration in, 75
Tropism and psychical activity, 35 _note_
Truth seized in intuition, 318-20
Unconscious effort, 170 instinct, 142-3, 144, 145-6, 147, 166 knowledge, 145-8, 150-1
Unconsciousness, two kinds of, 144
Undefinable, reality, 13, 48
Understanding, absoluteness of, 153-4, 190-1, 197-8, 199, 200 and action, ix, xi, 179 genesis of the, ix-xv, 49, 189, 207-8, 257-9, 359, 361-2 and geometry, ix, xii and innateness of categories, 147, 148-9 and intuition, 46-7 and life, ix-xv, 13, 32-3, 46-50, 88-9, 101, 147-8, 149, 152, 162-5, 173-4, 176-7, 178, 195-201, 213, 220, 222-3, 224, 226, 257-9, 261, 266, 270, 271, 313, 361-2, 365 and inert matter, 166, 168, 179, 194-5, 198, 205-6, 207, 219, 355 and the ready-made, xiii, 48, 237, 250, 251, 273, 311, 321, 328-9, 354, 358 and the solid, ix unlimited scope of the, 149, 150, 152 _See_ Intellect, Intelligence, Concept, Categories, Frames of the understanding, Logic
Undone, automatic and determinate evolution is action being, 249
Unfolding cause, 73, 74
Unforeseeableness of action, 47 of duration, 6, 164, 340-2 of evolution, 47, 48, 52, 86, 224 of invention, 164 of life, 164, 184 and the willed order, 224, 342-3 _See_ Foreseeing
Unification as the function of the intellect, 152, 154, 357-8
Uniqueness of phases of duration, 164
Unity of extension, 154 of knowledge, 195-6 of life, 106-7, 250, 268, 271 of mental life, 268 and multiplicity as determinations of space, 351-3 of nature, 104-5, 189-90, 191, 195-6, 197, 199, 322, 352, 356-8 of the organism, 176-7 of science, 195-6, 197, 228-9, 230, 321, 322, 344-5, 347, 359-60, 362-3
Universal interaction, 188, 189 life, consciousness coextensive with, 186, 257, 270
Universe, continuity of, 346 Descartes's, 346 physical, and the idea of disorder, 233, 275 duration of, 10, 11, 241 evolution of, 241, 246 _note_ growth of, 342-3, 344 movement of, in Aristotle, 323 mutability of, 244, 245 as organism, 31, 241 as realization of plan, 40 rhythm of, 337, 339, 346-7 states of, considered by science, 336, 337 as unification of physics, 348-9, 357
Unknowable, the, of evolutionism, xi the, in Kant, 204, 205, 206
Unmaking, the nature of the process of materiality, 245, 248, 249, 251, 272, 342-3
Unorganized bodies, 7-8, 14, 20, 21, 186. _See_ inert matter instruments, 137-9, 140-1, 150-1 matter, cleft between, and the organized, 190, 191, 196, 197-9 matter, imitation of the organized by, 33-4, 35, 36 matter and science, 194-6 matter. _See_ inert matter
Unwinding cause, 73 of immutability in Greek philosophy, 325, 352
Upspringing of invention, 164
Utility, 4-5, 150, 152, 154-5, 158-9, 160, 168, 187, 195-6, 247-8, 297-8, 328-9, 330
_Vanessa levana_ and _Vanessa prorsa_, transformation of, 72
Variable, time as an independent, 20, 336
Variation, accidental, 55, 63-4, 68, 85, 168-9 of color, in lizards, 72, 74 by deviation, 82-3, 84 of evolutionary type, 23-4, 72 _note_, 131-2, 137-8, 167, 169, 171-2, 264 insensible, 63, 68 interest as cause of, 131-2 in plants, 85-86
Vegetable kingdom. _See_ Plants
Verb, relation expressed by, 148
Verbs, substantives and adjectives, 303
Verse and prose, in illustration of the two kinds of order, 221, 232
Vertebrate, ix, 126, 130, 131-4, 141
Vibrations, matter analyzed into elementary, 201
Vicious circle, apparent, of intuitionism, 192-4, 196-7 of intellectualism, 194, 197, 318-9, 320
View, intellectual, of becoming, 4, 90-1, 273, 298-9, 304, 305, 310, 326-7 intellectual, of matter, 203, 240, 250, 254, 255 of reality, 206
Vignon, P., 35 _note_
Virtual actions, 12. _See_ Possible action geometry, 212
Vise, consciousness compressed in a, 179
Vision of God, in Alexandrian philosophy, 322 in molluscs. See Eye of molluscs, etc. in _Salamandra maculata_, 75
Vital activity, 134-6, 139, 140, 166-9, 246, 247-8 current, 26, 27, 53-5, 80, 85, 87, 88, 96-105, 118-9, 120, 230-1, 232, 239, 257, 266, 270 impetus, 50-1, 53-5, 85, 87, 88, 98-105, 118-9, 126-7, 128, 131-2, 141-2, 148-9, 150, 218, 230-1, 232, 247-8, 250, 252, 254-5, 261 order, cause in, 34, 35, 94-5, 164 order, finality and, 223-5, 226 order, generalization in the, and in the mathematical order contrasted, 225, 226, 230-1 order, and the geometrical order, 222-3, 225, 226, 230, 231, 235, 236, 330-1 order, imitation of physical order by vital, 230 principle, 42, 43, 225, 226 order, repetition in the vital and the mathematical orders contrasted, 225, 226, 230, 231 process, 166-7
Vitalism, 42, 43
Void, representation of, 273, 274, 275, 277-8, 281, 283-4, 289-90, 291, 292, 294, 296, 298
Voisin, 80
Volition and cerebral mechanism, 253-4
Voluntary activity, 110, 252
Vries (de), 24, 63 _note_, 85
Wasps, instinct in, 140, 172
Weapons and intellect, 137
Weismann, 26, 78, 80-1
Will and caprice, 47 and cerebral mechanism, 252 current of, penetrating matter, 237 insertion of, into reality, 305-6, 307 and relaxation, 201, 207-8 and mechanism in disorder, 233 tension of, 199, 201, 207-8
Willed order, mutual contingency of willed order and mathematical order, 231-3 unforeseeability in the, 224, 342-3
Willing, coincidence of seeing and, in intuition, 237
Wilson, E.B., 36
Wolff, 75 _note_
Words and states, 4, 302-3 three classes of, corresponding to three classes of representation, 302-3, 313-4
World, intelligible, 162-3 principle: conciousness, 237, 261
Worms, in illustration of ambiguity of primitive organisms, 130
Yellow-winged sphex, paralyzing instinct in, 172
Zeno on motion, 308-13
Zone of potentialities surrounding acts, 179-80, 181, 264
Zoology, 128-9
Zoospores of algae, in illustration of mobility in plants, 112