d to the
second order of reality all that applies to the first. The physicist
legitimates this operation later on by reducing, as far as possible,
differences of quality to differences of magnitude; but, prior to all
science, I incline to liken qualities to quantities, as if I perceived
behind the qualities, as through a transparency, a geometrical
mechanism.[83] The more complete this transparency, the more it seems to
me that in the same conditions there must be a repetition of the same
fact. Our inductions are certain, to our eyes, in the exact degree in
which we make the qualitative differences melt into the homogeneity of
the space which subtends them, so that geometry is the ideal limit of
our inductions as well as of our deductions. The movement at the end of
which is spatiality lays down along its course the faculty of induction
as well as that of deduction, in fact, intellectuality entire.

* * * * *

It creates them in the mind. But it creates also, in things, the "order"
which our induction, aided by deduction, finds there. This order, on
which our action leans and in which our intellect recognizes itself,
seems to us marvelous. Not only do the same general causes always
produce the same general effects, but beneath the visible causes and
effects our science discovers an infinity of infinitesimal changes which
work more and more exactly into one another, the further we push the
analysis: so much so that, at the end of this analysis, matter becomes,
it seems to us, geometry itself. Certainly, the intellect is right in
admiring here the growing order in the growing complexity; both the one
and the other must have a positive reality for it, since it looks upon
itself as positive. But things change their aspect when we consider the
whole of reality as an undivided advance forward to successive
creations. It seems to us, then, that the complexity of the material
elements and the mathematical order that binds them together must arise
automatically when within the whole a partial interruption or inversion
is produced. Moreover, as the intellect itself is cut out of mind by a
process of the same kind, it is attuned to this order and complexity,
and admires them because it recognizes itself in them. But what is
admirable _in itself_, what really deserves to provoke wonder, is the
ever-renewed creation which reality, whole and undivided, accomplishes
in advancing; for no complication of