omposing them: bodies and corpuscles
tend to dissolve into a universal interaction. Our perceptions give us
the plan of our eventual action on things much more than that of things
themselves. The outlines we find in objects simply mark what we can
attain and modify in them. The lines we see traced through matter are
just the paths on which we are called to move. Outlines and paths have
declared themselves in the measure and proportion that consciousness has
prepared for action on unorganized matter--that is to say, in the
measure and proportion that intelligence has been formed. It is doubtful
whether animals built on a different plan--a mollusc or an insect, for
instance--cut matter up along the same articulations. It is not indeed
necessary that they should separate it into bodies at all. In order to
follow the indications of instinct, there is no need to perceive
_objects_, it is enough to distinguish _properties_. Intelligence, on
the contrary, even in its humblest form, already aims at getting matter
to act on matter. If on one side matter lends itself to a division into
active and passive bodies, or more simply into coexistent and distinct
fragments, it is from this side that intelligence will regard it; and
the more it busies itself with dividing, the more it will spread out in
space, in the form of extension adjoining extension, a matter that
undoubtedly itself has a tendency to spatiality, but whose parts are yet
in a state of reciprocal implication and interpenetration. Thus the same
movement by which the mind is brought to form itself into intellect,
that is to say, into distinct concepts, brings matter to break itself up
into objects excluding one another. _The more consciousness is
intellectualized, the more is matter spatialized._ So that the
evolutionist philosophy, when it imagines in space a matter cut up on
the very lines that our action will follow, has given itself in advance,
ready made, the intelligence of which it claims to show the genesis.

Metaphysics applies itself to a work of the same kind, though subtler
and more self-conscious, when it deduces _a priori_ the categories of
thought. It compresses intellect, reduces it to its quintessence, holds
it tight in a principle so simple that it can be thought empty: from
this principle we then draw out what we have virtually put into it. In
this way we may no doubt show the coherence of intelligence, define
intellect, give its formula, but we do not t