y that cut the facts out in the whole of reality.
Therefore, instead of saying that the relations between facts have
generated the laws of thought, I can as well claim that it is the form
of thought that has determined the shape of the facts perceived, and
consequently their relations among themselves: the two ways of
expressing oneself are equivalent; they say at bottom the same thing.
With the second, it is true, we give up speaking of evolution. But, with
the first, we only speak of it, we do not think of it any the more. For
a true evolutionism would propose to discover by what _modus vivendi_,
gradually obtained, the intellect has adopted its plan of structure, and
matter its mode of subdivision. This structure and this subdivision work
into each other; they are mutually complementary; they must have
progressed one with the other. And, whether we posit the present
structure of mind or the present subdivision of matter, in either case
we remain in the evolved: we are told nothing of what evolves, nothing
of evolution.

And yet it is this evolution that we must discover. Already, in the
field of physics itself, the scientists who are pushing the study of
their science furthest incline to believe that we cannot reason about
the parts as we reason about the whole; that the same principles are not
applicable to the origin and to the end of a progress; that neither
creation nor annihilation, for instance, is inadmissible when we are
concerned with the constituent corpuscles of the atom. Thereby they tend
to place themselves in the concrete duration, in which alone there is
true generation and not only a composition of parts. It is true that the
creation and annihilation of which they speak concern the movement or
the energy, and not the imponderable medium through which the energy and
the movement are supposed to circulate. But what can remain of matter
when you take away everything that determines it, that is to say, just
energy and movement themselves? The philosopher must go further than the
scientist. Making a clean sweep of everything that is only an
imaginative symbol, he will see the material world melt back into a
simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming. And he will thus be
prepared to discover real duration there where it is still more useful
to find it, in the realm of life and of consciousness. For, so far as
inert matter is concerned, we may neglect the flowing without committing
a serious error: mat