in them
symbolism, artifice, and relativity become increasingly evident; at
length, arbitrary and conventional elements crop up and devour them. In
a word, the claim to treat the living as inert matter conduces to the
misconception in life of life itself, and the retention of nothing but
the material waste.

This experience furnishes us with a lesson. There is not so much one
science as several sciences, each distinguished by an autonomous method,
and divided into two great kingdoms.

Let us therefore from the outset follow Mr Bergson in tracing a very
sharp line of demarcation between the inert and the living. Two orders
of knowledge will thereby become separate, one in which the frames of
geometrical understanding are in place, the other where new means and a
new attitude are required. The essential task of the present hour will
now appear to us in a precise light; it will henceforward consist,
without any disregard of a glorious past, in an effort to found as
specifically distinct methods of instruction those sciences which take
for objects the successive moments of life in its different degrees,
biology, psychology, sociology;--then in an effort to reconstruct,
setting out from these new sciences and according to their spirit, the
like of what ancient philosophy had attempted, setting out from geometry
and mechanics. By so doing we shall succeed in throwing knowledge open
to receive all the wealth of reality, while at the same time we shall
reinstate the sense of mystery and the thrill of higher anxieties.
A further result will be that the phantom of the Unknowable will be
exorcised, since it no longer represents anything but the relative and
momentary limit of each method, the portion of being which escapes its
partial grip.

This is one of the first controlling ideas of the contemporary
generation. Others result from it. More particularly, it is for the same
body of motives, in the same sense, and with the same restrictions, that
we distrust intellectualism; I mean the tendency to live uniquely by
intelligence, to think as if the whole of thought consisted in analytic,
clear and reasoning understanding.

Once again, it is not a question of some blind abandonment to sentiment,
imagination, or will, nor do we claim to restrict the legitimate rights
of intellectuality in judgment. But around critical reason there is a
quickening atmosphere in which dwell the powers of intuition, there is a
half-light of gradual