we have sacrificed philosophy
without any appreciable gain to science. And for having tried to avoid
the seeming vicious circle which consists in using the intellect to
transcend the intellect, we find ourselves turning in a real circle,
that which consists in laboriously rediscovering by metaphysics a unity
that we began by positing _a priori_, a unity that we admitted blindly
and unconsciously by the very act of abandoning the whole of experience
to science and the whole of reality to the pure understanding.

Let us begin, on the contrary, by tracing a line of demarcation between
the inert and the living. We shall find that the inert enters naturally
into the frames of the intellect, but that the living is adapted to
these frames only artificially, so that we must adopt a special attitude
towards it and examine it with other eyes than those of positive
science. Philosophy, then, invades the domain of experience. She busies
herself with many things which hitherto have not concerned her. Science,
theory of knowledge, and metaphysics find themselves on the same ground.
At first there may be a certain confusion. All three may think they have
lost something. But all three will profit from the meeting.

Positive science, indeed, may pride itself on the uniform value
attributed to its affirmations in the whole field of experience. But, if
they are all placed on the same footing, they are all tainted with the
same relativity. It is not so, if we begin by making the distinction
which, in our view, is forced upon us. The understanding is at home in
the domain of unorganized matter. On this matter human action is
naturally exercised; and action, as we said above, cannot be set in
motion in the unreal. Thus, of physics--so long as we are considering
only its general form and not the particular cutting out of matter in
which it is manifested--we may say that it touches the absolute. On the
contrary, it is by accident--chance or convention, as you please--that
science obtains a hold on the living analogous to the hold it has on
matter. Here the use of conceptual frames is no longer natural. I do not
wish to say that it is not legitimate, in the scientific meaning of the
term. If science is to extend our action on things, and if we can act
only with inert matter for instrument, science can and must continue to
treat the living as it has treated the inert. But, in doing so, it must
be understood that the further it penetrates the de