owers of the
individual mind. Whether it is dogmatic or critical, whether it admits
the relativity of our knowledge or claims to be established within the
absolute, a philosophy is generally the work of a philosopher, a single
and unitary vision of the whole. It is to be taken or left.

More modest, and also alone capable of being completed and perfected, is
the philosophy we advocate. Human intelligence, as we represent it, is
not at all what Plato taught in the allegory of the cave. Its function
is not to look at passing shadows nor yet to turn itself round and
contemplate the glaring sun. It has something else to do. Harnessed,
like yoked oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the play of our muscles and
joints, the weight of the plow and the resistance of the soil. To act
and to know that we are acting, to come into touch with reality and even
to live it, but only in the measure in which it concerns the work that
is being accomplished and the furrow that is being plowed, such is the
function of human intelligence. Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence
we draw the very force to labor and to live. From this ocean of life, in
which we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, and we feel
that our being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has been
formed therein by a kind of local concentration. Philosophy can only be
an effort to dissolve again into the Whole. Intelligence, reabsorbed
into its principle, may thus live back again its own genesis. But the
enterprise cannot be achieved in one stroke; it is necessarily
collective and progressive. It consists in an interchange of impressions
which, correcting and adding to each other, will end by expanding the
humanity in us and making us even transcend it.

But this method has against it the most inveterate habits of the mind.
It at once suggests the idea of a vicious circle. In vain, we shall be
told, you claim to go beyond intelligence: how can you do that except by
intelligence? All that is clear in your consciousness is intelligence.
You are inside your own thought; you cannot get out of it. Say, if you
like, that the intellect is capable of progress, that it will see more
and more clearly into a greater and greater number of things; but do not
speak of engendering it, for it is with your intellect itself that you
would have to do the work.

The objection presents itself naturally to the mind. But the same
reasoning would prove also the impossibility of a