see
now nothing but idolatry. The haughty affirmation of yesterday appears
today, not as expressing a positive fact or a result duly established,
but as bringing forward a thesis of perilous and unconscious
metaphysics. Let us go even further. If true intelligence is mental
expansion and aptitude for understanding widely different things, each
in its originality, to the same degree, we must say that the claim to
reduce reality to one only of its modes, to know it in one only of its
forms, is an unintelligent claim. That is, in brief formula, the
verdict of the present generation. Not, of course, that it in any
way misconceives or disdains the true value of science, whether as an
instrument of action for the conquest of nature, or as intelligible
language, allowing us to know our whereabouts in things and "talk" them.

It is aware that in all circumstances positive methods have their
evidence to produce, and that, where they pronounce within the limits of
their power, nothing can stand against their verdict. But it considers
first of all that science was conceived of late under much too stiff and
narrow a form, under the obsession of too abstract a mathematical
ideal which corresponds to one aspect of reality only, and that
the shallowest. And it considers afterwards that science, even when
broadened and made flexible, being concerned only with what is, with
fact and datum, remains radically powerless to solve the problem of
human life. Nowhere does science penetrate to the very depth of things,
and there is nothing in the world but "things."

Experience has shown where the dream of universal mathematics leads us.
Number is driven to the heart of phenomena and nature dissected with
this delicate scalpel. Speaking in more general terms, we adopt spatial
relation as the perfect example of intelligible relation. I do not wish
to deny the use of such a method now and again, the services it may
render, or the beauty of construction peculiar to the systems it
inspires. But we must see what price we pay for these advantages. Do
we choose geometry for an informing and regulating science? The more
we advance towards the concrete and the living, the more we feel the
necessity of altering the pure mathematical type. The sciences, as they
get further from inert matter, unless they agree to reform, pale and
weaken; they become vague, impotent, anaemic; they touch little but
the trite surface of their object, the body, not the soul;