ct is meant for something
altogether different. Unless it does violence to itself, it takes the
opposite course; it always starts from immobility, as if this were the
ultimate reality: when it tries to form an idea of movement, it does so
by constructing movement out of immobilities put together. This
operation, whose illegitimacy and danger in the field of speculation we
shall show later on (it leads to dead-locks, and creates artificially
insoluble philosophical problems), is easily justified when we refer it
to its proper goal. Intelligence, in its natural state, aims at a
practically useful end. When it substitutes for movement immobilities
put together, it does not pretend to reconstitute the movement such as
it actually is; it merely replaces it with a practical equivalent. It is
the philosophers who are mistaken when they import into the domain of
speculation a method of thinking which is made for action. But of this
more anon. Suffice it now to say that to the stable and unchangeable our
intellect is attached by virtue of its natural disposition. _Of
immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea._

Now, fabricating consists in carving out the form of an object in
matter. What is the most important is the form to be obtained. As to
the matter, we choose that which is most convenient; but, in order to
choose it, that is to say, in order to go and seek it among many others,
we must have tried, in imagination at least, to endow every kind of
matter with the form of the object conceived. In other words, an
intelligence which aims at fabricating is an intelligence which never
stops at the actual form of things nor regards it as final, but, on the
contrary, looks upon all matter as if it were carvable at will. Plato
compares the good dialectician to the skilful cook who carves the animal
without breaking its bones, by following the articulations marked out by
nature.[64] An intelligence which always proceeded thus would really be
an intelligence turned toward speculation. But action, and in particular
fabrication, requires the opposite mental tendency: it makes us consider
every actual form of things, even the form of natural things, as
artificial and provisional; it makes our thought efface from the object
perceived, even though organized and living, the lines that outwardly
mark its inward structure; in short, it makes us regard its matter as
indifferent to its form. The whole of matter is made to appear to ou