elves--in
short, to think matter. Such will indeed be one of the conclusions of
the present essay. We shall see that the human intellect feels at home
among inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our action
finds its fulcrum and our industry its tools; that our concepts have
been formed on the model of solids; that our logic is, pre-eminently,
the logic of solids; that, consequently, our intellect triumphs in
geometry, wherein is revealed the kinship of logical thought with
unorganized matter, and where the intellect has only to follow its
natural movement, after the lightest possible contact with experience,
in order to go from discovery to discovery, sure that experience is
following behind it and will justify it invariably.

But from this it must also follow that our thought, in its purely
logical form, is incapable of presenting the true nature of life, the
full meaning of the evolutionary movement. Created by life, in definite
circumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of
which it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by the
evolutionary movement in the course of its way, how can it be applied to
the evolutionary movement itself? As well contend that the part is equal
to the whole, that the effect can reabsorb its cause, or that the pebble
left on the beach displays the form of the wave that brought it there.
In fact, we do indeed feel that not one of the categories of our
thought--unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, intelligent
finality, etc.--applies exactly to the things of life: who can say where
individuality begins and ends, whether the living being is one or many,
whether it is the cells which associate themselves into the organism or
the organism which dissociates itself into cells? In vain we force the
living into this or that one of our molds. All the molds crack. They are
too narrow, above all too rigid, for what we try to put into them. Our
reasoning, so sure of itself among things inert, feels ill at ease on
this new ground. It would be difficult to cite a biological discovery
due to pure reasoning. And most often, when experience has finally shown
us how life goes to work to obtain a certain result, we find its way of
working is just that of which we should never have thought.

Yet evolutionist philosophy does not hesitate to extend to the things of
life the same methods of explanation which have succeeded in the case of
unorganized matter. It beg