eels at home only among "things,"
and everything is reduced by it to solid atoms; it is naturally
"materialist," owing to the very fact that it naturally grasps "forms"
only. What do we mean by that except that its object of election is the
mechanism of matter? But it supposes life; it only remains living itself
by continual loans from a vaster and fuller activity from which it
is sprung. And this return to complementary powers is what we call
intuition.

From this point of view it becomes easy to escape Kantian relativity. We
are confronted by an intelligence which is doubtless no longer a faculty
universally competent, but which, on the contrary, possesses in its own
domain a greater power of penetration. It is arranged for action. Now
action would not be able to move in irreality. Intelligence, then, makes
us acquainted, if not with all reality, at least with some of it,
namely that part by which reality is a possible object of mechanical or
synthetic action.

More profoundly, intuition falls into analysis as life into matter: they
are two aspects of the same movement. That is why, "provided we only
consider the general form of physics, we can say that it touches the
absolute." ("Creative Evolution", page 216.)

In other terms, language and mechanism are regulated by each other. This
explains at once the success of mathematical science in the order of
matter, and its non-success in the order of life.

For, when confronted with life, intelligence fails. "Being a deposit
of the evolutive movement along its path, how could it be applied
throughout the evolutive movement itself? We might as well claim that
the part equals the whole, that the effect can absorb its cause into
itself, or that the pebble left on the shore outlines the form of the
wave which brought it." (Preface to "Creative Evolution".)

Is not that as good as saying that life is unknowable? Must we conclude
that it is impossible to understand it?

"We should be forced to do so, if life had employed all the psychic
potentialities it contains in making pure understandings; that is to
say, in preparing mathematicians. But the line of evolution which ends
in man is not the only one. By other divergent ways other forms
of consciousness have developed, which have not been able to free
themselves from external constraint, nor regain the victory over
themselves as intelligence has done, but which, none the less for
that, also express something immanent and