inert matter,
presents to itself the rest of reality in this single respect. What must
the result be, if it leave biological and psychological facts to
positive science alone, as it has left, and rightly left, physical
facts? It will accept _a priori_ a mechanistic conception of all nature,
a conception unreflected and even unconscious, the outcome of the
material need. It will _a priori_ accept the doctrine of the simple
unity of knowledge and of the abstract unity of nature.

The moment it does so, its fate is sealed. The philosopher has no longer
any choice save between a metaphysical dogmatism and a metaphysical
skepticism, both of which rest, at bottom, on the same postulate, and
neither of which adds anything to positive science. He may hypostasize
the unity of nature, or, what comes to the same thing, the unity of
science, in a being who is nothing since he does nothing, an ineffectual
God who simply sums up in himself all the given; or in an eternal Matter
from whose womb have been poured out the properties of things and the
laws of nature; or, again, in a pure Form which endeavors to seize an
unseizable multiplicity, and which is, as we will, the form of nature
or the form of thought. All these philosophies tell us, in their
different languages, that science is right to treat the living as the
inert, and that there is no difference of value, no distinction to be
made between the results which intellect arrives at in applying its
categories, whether it rests on inert matter or attacks life.

In many cases, however, we feel the frame cracking. But as we did not
begin by distinguishing between the inert and the living, the one
adapted in advance to the frame in which we insert it, the other
incapable of being held in the frame otherwise than by a convention
which eliminates from it all that is essential, we find ourselves, in
the end, reduced to regarding everything the frame contains with equal
suspicion. To a metaphysical dogmatism, which has erected into an
absolute the factitious unity of science, there succeeds a skepticism or
a relativism that universalizes and extends to all the results of
science the artificial character of some among them. So philosophy
swings to and fro between the doctrine that regards absolute reality as
unknowable and that which, in the idea it gives us of this reality, says
nothing more than science has said. For having wished to prevent all
conflict between science and philosophy,