may get something more complex, but not something higher nor
even something different. You must take things by storm: you must thrust
intelligence outside itself by an act of will.

So the vicious circle is only apparent. It is, on the contrary, real, we
think, in every other method of philosophy. This we must try to show in
a few words, if only to prove that philosophy cannot and must not
accept the relation established by pure intellectualism between the
theory of knowledge and the theory of the known, between metaphysics and
science.

* * * * *

At first sight, it may seem prudent to leave the consideration of facts
to positive science, to let physics and chemistry busy themselves with
matter, the biological and psychological sciences with life. The task of
the philosopher is then clearly defined. He takes facts and laws from
the scientists' hand; and whether he tries to go beyond them in order to
reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to go
further and even proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge, in
both cases he has for the facts and relations, handed over by science,
the sort of respect that is due to a final verdict. To this knowledge he
adds a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks
proper, a metaphysic; but the _matter_ of knowledge he regards as the
affair of science and not of philosophy.

But how does he fail to see that the real result of this so-called
division of labor is to mix up everything and confuse everything? The
metaphysic or the critique that the philosopher has reserved for himself
he has to receive, ready-made, from positive science, it being already
contained in the descriptions and analyses, the whole care of which he
left to the scientists. For not having wished to intervene, at the
beginning, in questions of fact, he finds himself reduced, in questions
of principle, to formulating purely and simply in more precise terms the
unconscious and consequently inconsistent metaphysic and critique which
the very attitude of science to reality marks out. Let us not be
deceived by an apparent analogy between natural things and human things.
Here we are not in the judiciary domain, where the description of fact
and the judgment on the fact are two distinct things, distinct for the
very simple reason that above the fact, and independent of it, there is
a law promulgated by a legislator. Here the laws are internal to t