he
facts and relative to the lines that have been followed in cutting the
real into distinct facts. We cannot describe the outward appearance of
the object without prejudging its inner nature and its organization.
Form is no longer entirely isolable from matter, and he who has begun by
reserving to philosophy questions of principle, and who has thereby
tried to put philosophy above the sciences, as a "court of cassation" is
above the courts of assizes and of appeal, will gradually come to make
no more of philosophy than a registration court, charged at most with
wording more precisely the sentences that are brought to it, pronounced
and irrevocable.

Positive science is, in fact, a work of pure intellect. Now, whether our
conception of the intellect be accepted or rejected, there is one point
on which everybody will agree with us, and that is that the intellect is
at home in the presence of unorganized matter. This matter it makes use
of more and more by mechanical inventions, and mechanical inventions
become the easier to it the more it thinks matter as mechanism. The
intellect bears within itself, in the form of natural logic, a latent
geometrism that is set free in the measure and proportion that the
intellect penetrates into the inner nature of inert matter. Intelligence
is in tune with this matter, and that is why the physics and metaphysics
of inert matter are so near each other. Now, when the intellect
undertakes the study of life, it necessarily treats the living like the
inert, applying the same forms to this new object, carrying over into
this new field the same habits that have succeeded so well in the old;
and it is right to do so, for only on such terms does the living offer
to our action the same hold as inert matter. But the truth we thus
arrive at becomes altogether relative to our faculty of action. It is no
more than a _symbolic_ verity. It cannot have the same value as the
physical verity, being only an extension of physics to an object which
we are _a priori_ agreed to look at only in its external aspect. The
duty of philosophy should be to intervene here actively, to examine the
living without any reservation as to practical utility, by freeing
itself from forms and habits that are strictly intellectual. Its own
special object is to speculate, that is to say, to see; its attitude
toward the living should not be that of science, which aims only at
action, and which, being able to act only by means of