believes that its
ignorance consists only in not knowing which one of its time-honored
categories suits the new object. In what drawer, ready to open, shall we
put it? In what garment, already cut out, shall we clothe it? Is it
this, or that, or the other thing? And "this," and "that," and "the
other thing" are always something already conceived, already known. The
idea that for a new object we might have to create a new concept,
perhaps a new method of thinking, is deeply repugnant to us. The history
of philosophy is there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of
systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the
ready-made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity of making
to measure. But, rather than go to this extremity, our reason prefers to
announce once for all, with a proud modesty, that it has to do only with
the relative, and that the absolute is not in its province. This
preliminary declaration enables it to apply its habitual method of
thought without any scruple, and thus, under pretense that it does not
touch the absolute, to make absolute judgments upon everything. Plato
was the first to set up the theory that to know the real consists in
finding its Idea, that is to say, in forcing it into a pre-existing
frame already at our disposal--as if we implicitly possessed universal
knowledge. But this belief is natural to the human intellect, always
engaged as it is in determining under what former heading it shall
catalogue any new object; and it may be said that, in a certain sense,
we are all born Platonists.

Nowhere is the inadequacy of this method so obvious as in theories of
life. If, in evolving in the direction of the vertebrates in general, of
man and intellect in particular, life has had to abandon by the way many
elements incompatible with this particular mode of organization and
consign them, as we shall show, to other lines of development, it is the
totality of these elements that we must find again and rejoin to the
intellect proper, in order to grasp the true nature of vital activity.
And we shall probably be aided in this by the fringe of vague intuition
that surrounds our distinct--that is, intellectual--representation. For
what can this useless fringe be, if not that part of the evolving
principle which has not shrunk to the peculiar form of our organization,
but has settled around it unasked for, unwanted? It is there,
accordingly, that we must look for hi