tion.

In this respect, also, Kant is very near his predecessors. Between the
non-temporal, and the time that is spread out in distinct moments, he
admits no mean. And as there is indeed no intuition that carries us into
the non-temporal, all intuition is thus found to be sensuous, by
definition. But between physical existence, which is spread out in
space, and non-temporal existence, which can only be a conceptual and
logical existence like that of which metaphysical dogmatism speaks, is
there not room for consciousness and for life? There is, unquestionably.
We perceive it when we place ourselves in duration in order to go from
that duration to moments, instead of starting from moments in order to
bind them again and to construct duration.

Yet it was to a non-temporal intuition that the immediate successors of
Kant turned, in order to escape from the Kantian relativism. Certainly,
the ideas of becoming, of progress, of evolution, seem to occupy a large
place in their philosophy. But does duration really play a part in it?
Real duration is that in which each form flows out of previous forms,
while adding to them something new, and is explained by them as much as
it explains them; but to deduce this form directly from one complete
Being which it is supposed to manifest, is to return to Spinozism. It
is, like Leibniz and Spinoza, to deny to duration all efficient action.
The post-Kantian philosophy, severe as it may have been on the
mechanistic theories, accepts from mechanism the idea of a science that
is one and the same for all kinds of reality. And it is nearer to
mechanism than it imagines; for though, in the consideration of matter,
of life and of thought, it replaces the successive degrees of
complexity, that mechanism supposed by degrees of the realization of an
Idea or by degrees of the objectification of a Will, it still speaks of
degrees, and these degrees are those of a scale which Being traverses in
a single direction. In short, it makes out the same articulations in
nature that mechanism does. Of mechanism it retains the whole design; it
merely gives it a different coloring. But it is the design itself, or at
least one half of the design, that needs to be re-made.

If we are to do that, we must give up the method of _construction_,
which was that of Kant's successors. We must appeal to experience--an
experience purified, or, in other words, released, where necessary, from
the molds that our intellect has