ins by showing us in the intellect a local
effect of evolution, a flame, perhaps accidental, which lights up the
coming and going of living beings in the narrow passage open to their
action; and lo! forgetting what it has just told us, it makes of this
lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun which can illuminate the world.
Boldly it proceeds, with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the
ideal reconstruction of all things, even of life. True, it hurtles in
its course against such formidable difficulties, it sees its logic end
in such strange contradictions, that it very speedily renounces its
first ambition. "It is no longer reality itself," it says, "that it will
reconstruct, but only an imitation of the real, or rather a symbolical
image; the essence of things escapes us, and will escape us always; we
move among relations; the absolute is not in our province; we are
brought to a stand before the Unknowable."--But for the human intellect,
after too much pride, this is really an excess of humility. If the
intellectual form of the living being has been gradually modeled on the
reciprocal actions and reactions of certain bodies and their material
environment, how should it not reveal to us something of the very
essence of which these bodies are made? Action cannot move in the
unreal. A mind born to speculate or to dream, I admit, might remain
outside reality, might deform or transform the real, perhaps even create
it--as we create the figures of men and animals that our imagination
cuts out of the passing cloud. But an intellect bent upon the act to be
performed and the reaction to follow, feeling its object so as to get
its mobile impression at every instant, is an intellect that touches
something of the absolute. Would the idea ever have occurred to us to
doubt this absolute value of our knowledge if philosophy had not shown
us what contradictions our speculation meets, what dead-locks it ends
in? But these difficulties and contradictions all arise from trying to
apply the usual forms of our thought to objects with which our industry
has nothing to do, and for which, therefore, our molds are not made.
Intellectual knowledge, in so far as it relates to a certain aspect of
inert matter, ought, on the contrary, to give us a faithful imprint of
it, having been stereotyped on this particular object. It becomes
relative only if it claims, such as it is, to present to us life--that
is to say, the maker of the stereotype-plate