nature, which enable us to anticipate the future. Thus
we must, consciously or unconsciously, have made use of the law of
causality. Moreover, the more sharply the idea of efficient causality is
defined in our mind, the more it takes the form of a _mechanical_
causality. And this scheme, in its turn, is the more mathematical
according as it expresses a more rigorous necessity. That is why we have
only to follow the bent of our mind to become mathematicians. But, on
the other hand, this natural mathematics is only the rigid unconscious
skeleton beneath our conscious supple habit of linking the same causes
to the same effects; and the usual object of this habit is to guide
actions inspired by intentions, or, what comes to the same, to direct
movements combined with a view to reproducing a pattern. We are born
artisans as we are born geometricians, and indeed we are geometricians
only because we are artisans. Thus the human intellect, inasmuch as it
is fashioned for the needs of human action, is an intellect which
proceeds at the same time by intention and by calculation, by adapting
means to ends and by thinking out mechanisms of more and more
geometrical form. Whether nature be conceived as an immense machine
regulated by mathematical laws, or as the realization of a plan, these
two ways of regarding it are only the consummation of two tendencies of
mind which are complementary to each other, and which have their origin
in the same vital necessities.

For that reason, radical finalism is very near radical mechanism on many
points. Both doctrines are reluctant to see in the course of things
generally, or even simply in the development of life, an unforeseeable
creation of form. In considering reality, mechanism regards only the
aspect of similarity or repetition. It is therefore dominated by this
law, that in nature there is only _like_ reproducing _like_. The more
the geometry in mechanism is emphasized, the less can mechanism admit
that anything is ever created, even pure form. In so far as we are
geometricians, then, we reject the unforeseeable. We might accept it,
assuredly, in so far as we are artists, for art lives on creation and
implies a latent belief in the spontaneity of nature. But disinterested
art is a luxury, like pure speculation. Long before being artists, we
are artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on
likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves as its
fulcrum. Fa