ness, that at every moment it is creating
something.[11]

But against this idea of the absolute originality and unforeseeability
of forms our whole intellect rises in revolt. The essential function of
our intellect, as the evolution of life has fashioned it, is to be a
light for our conduct, to make ready for our action on things, to
foresee, for a given situation, the events, favorable or unfavorable,
which may follow thereupon. Intellect therefore instinctively selects in
a given situation whatever is like something already known; it seeks
this out, in order that it may apply its principle that "like produces
like." In just this does the prevision of the future by common sense
consist. Science carries this faculty to the highest possible degree of
exactitude and precision, but does not alter its essential character.
Like ordinary knowledge, in dealing with things science is concerned
only with the aspect of _repetition_. Though the whole be original,
science will always manage to analyze it into elements or aspects which
are approximately a reproduction of the past. Science can work only on
what is supposed to repeat itself--that is to say, on what is withdrawn,
by hypothesis, from the action of real time. Anything that is
irreducible and irreversible in the successive moments of a history
eludes science. To get a notion of this irreducibility and
irreversibility, we must break with scientific habits which are adapted
to the fundamental requirements of thought, we must do violence to the
mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect. But that is just
the function of philosophy.

In vain, therefore, does life evolve before our eyes as a continuous
creation of unforeseeable form: the idea always persists that form,
unforeseeability and continuity are mere appearance--the outward
reflection of our own ignorance. What is presented to the senses as a
continuous history would break up, we are told, into a series of
successive states. "What gives you the impression of an original state
resolves, upon analysis, into elementary facts, each of which is the
repetition of a fact already known. What you call an unforeseeable form
is only a new arrangement of old elements. The elementary causes, which
in their totality have determined this arrangement, are themselves old
causes repeated in a new order. Knowledge of the elements and of the
elementary causes would have made it possible to foretell the living
form which is t