ter, we have said, is weighted with geometry; and
matter, the reality which _descends_, endures only by its connection
with that which _ascends_. But life and consciousness are this very
ascension. When once we have grasped them in their essence by adopting
their movement, we understand how the rest of reality is derived from
them. Evolution appears and, within this evolution, the progressive
determination of materiality and intellectuality by the gradual
consolidation of the one and of the other. But, then, it is within the
evolutionary movement that we place ourselves, in order to follow it to
its present results, instead of recomposing these results artificially
with fragments of themselves. Such seems to us to be the true function
of philosophy. So understood, philosophy is not only the turning of the
mind homeward, the coincidence of human consciousness with the living
principle whence it emanates, a contact with the creative effort: it is
the study of becoming in general, it is true evolutionism and
consequently the true continuation of science--provided that we
understand by this word a set of truths either experienced or
demonstrated, and not a certain new scholasticism that has grown up
during the latter half of the nineteenth century around the physics of
Galileo, as the old scholasticism grew up around Aristotle.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 96: The part of this chapter which treats of the history of
systems, particularly of the Greek philosophy, is only the very succinct
resume of views that we developed at length, from 1900 to 1904, in our
lectures at the College de France, especially in a course on the
_History of the Idea of Time_ (1902-1903). We then compared the
mechanism of conceptual thought to that of the cinematograph. We believe
the comparison will be useful here.]

[Footnote 97: The analysis of the idea of the nought which we give here
(pp. 275-298) has appeared before in the _Revue philosophique_ (November
1906).]

[Footnote 98: Kant, _Critique of Pure Reason_, 2nd edition, p. 737:
"From the point of view of our knowledge in general ... the peculiar
function of negative propositions is simply to prevent error." Cf.
Sigwart, _Logik_, 2nd edition, vol. i. pp. 150 ff.]

[Footnote 99: That is, we do not consider the sophism of Zeno refuted by
the fact that the geometrical progression _a_(1 + 1/_n_ + 1/_n_2 +
1/_n_3 +,... etc.)--in which _a_ designates the initial distance between
Achilles and the tor