formed in the degree and proportion of
the progress of our action on things. An experience of this kind is not
a non-temporal experience. It only seeks, beyond the spatialized time in
which we believe we see continual rearrangements between the parts, that
concrete duration in which a radical recasting of the whole is always
going on. It follows the real in all its sinuosities. It does not lead
us, like the method of construction, to higher and higher
generalities--piled-up stories of a magnificent building. But then it
leaves no play between the explanations it suggests and the objects it
has to explain. It is the detail of the real, and no longer only the
whole in a lump, that it claims to illumine.

* * * * *

That the thought of the nineteenth century called for a philosophy of
this kind, rescued from the arbitrary, capable of coming down to the
detail of particular facts, is unquestionable. Unquestionably, also, it
felt that this philosophy ought to establish itself in what we call
concrete duration. The advent of the moral sciences, the progress of
psychology, the growing importance of embryology among the biological
sciences--all this was bound to suggest the idea of a reality which
_endures_ inwardly, which is duration itself. So, when a philosopher
arose who announced a doctrine of evolution, in which the progress of
matter toward perceptibility would be traced together with the advance
of the mind toward rationality, in which the complication of
correspondences between the external and the internal would be followed
step by step, in which change would become the very substance of
things--to him all eyes were turned. The powerful attraction that
Spencerian evolutionism has exercised on contemporary thought is due to
that very cause. However far Spencer may seem to be from Kant, however
ignorant, indeed, he may have been of Kantianism, he felt, nevertheless,
at his first contact with the biological sciences, the direction in
which philosophy could continue to advance without laying itself open to
the Kantian criticism.

But he had no sooner started to follow the path than he turned off
short. He had promised to retrace a genesis, and, lo! he was doing
something entirely different. His doctrine bore indeed the name of
evolutionism; it claimed to remount and redescend the course of the
universal becoming; but, in fact, it dealt neither with becoming nor
with evolution.

We need