ntellect always behaves as if it were fascinated by the contemplation
of inert matter. It is life looking outward, putting itself outside
itself, adopting the ways of unorganized nature in principle, in order
to direct them in fact. Hence its bewilderment when it turns to the
living and is confronted with organization. It does what it can, it
resolves the organized into the unorganized, for it cannot, without
reversing its natural direction and twisting about on itself, think true
continuity, real mobility, reciprocal penetration--in a word, that
creative evolution which is life.

Consider continuity. The aspect of life that is accessible to our
intellect--as indeed to our senses, of which our intellect is the
extension--is that which offers a hold to our action. Now, to modify an
object, we have to perceive it as divisible and discontinuous. From the
point of view of positive science, an incomparable progress was realized
when the organized tissues were resolved into cells. The study of the
cell, in its turn, has shown it to be an organism whose complexity seems
to grow, the more thoroughly it is examined. The more science advances,
the more it sees the number grow of heterogeneous elements which are
placed together, outside each other, to make up a living being. Does
science thus get any nearer to life? Does it not, on the contrary, find
that what is really life in the living seems to recede with every step
by which it pushes further the detail of the parts combined? There is
indeed already among scientists a tendency to regard the substance of
the organism as continuous, and the cell as an artificial entity.[66]
But, supposing this view were finally to prevail, it could only lead, on
deeper study, to some other mode of analyzing of the living being, and
so to a new discontinuity--although less removed, perhaps, from the real
continuity of life. The truth is that this continuity cannot be thought
by the intellect while it follows its natural movement. It implies at
once the multiplicity of elements and the interpenetration of all by
all, two conditions that can hardly be reconciled in the field in which
our industry, and consequently our intellect, is engaged.

Just as we separate in space, we fix in time. The intellect is not made
to think _evolution_, in the proper sense of the word--that is to say,
the continuity of a change that is pure mobility. We shall not dwell
here on this point, which we propose to study in