al: it can but enclose the
facts, willing or not, in pre-existing frames which it regards as
ultimate. It thus obtains a symbolism which is convenient, perhaps even
necessary to positive science, but not a direct vision of its object. On
the other hand, a theory of knowledge which does not replace the
intellect in the general evolution of life will teach us neither how the
frames of knowledge have been constructed nor how we can enlarge or go
beyond them. It is necessary that these two inquiries, theory of
knowledge and theory of life, should join each other, and, by a circular
process, push each other on unceasingly.
Together, they may solve by a method more sure, brought nearer to
experience, the great problems that philosophy poses. For, if they
should succeed in their common enterprise, they would show us the
formation of the intellect, and thereby the genesis of that matter of
which our intellect traces the general configuration. They would dig to
the very root of nature and of mind. They would substitute for the false
evolutionism of Spencer--which consists in cutting up present reality,
already evolved, into little bits no less evolved, and then recomposing
it with these fragments, thus positing in advance everything that is to
be explained--a true evolutionism, in which reality would be followed in
its generation and its growth.
But a philosophy of this kind will not be made in a day. Unlike the
philosophical systems properly so called, each of which was the
individual work of a man of genius and sprang up as a whole, to be taken
or left, it will only be built up by the collective and progressive
effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting
and improving one another. So the present essay does not aim at
resolving at once the greatest problems. It simply desires to define the
method and to permit a glimpse, on some essential points, of the
possibility of its application.
Its plan is traced by the subject itself. In the first chapter, we try
on the evolutionary progress the two ready-made garments that our
understanding puts at our disposal, mechanism and finality;[2] we show
that they do not fit, neither the one nor the other, but that one of
them might be recut and resewn, and in this new form fit less badly than
the other. In order to transcend the point of view of the understanding,
we try, in our second chapter, to reconstruct the main lines of
evolution along which life has t
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