pths of _life_, the
more symbolic, the more relative to the contingencies of action, the
knowledge it supplies to us becomes. On this new ground philosophy ought
then to follow science, in order to superpose on scientific truth a
knowledge of another kind, which may be called metaphysical. Thus
combined, all our knowledge, both scientific and metaphysical, is
heightened. In the absolute we live and move and have our being. The
knowledge we possess of it is incomplete, no doubt, but not external or
relative. It is reality itself, in the profoundest meaning of the word,
that we reach by the combined and progressive development of science and
of philosophy.

Thus, in renouncing the factitious unity which the understanding imposes
on nature from outside, we shall perhaps find its true, inward and
living unity. For the effort we make to transcend the pure understanding
introduces us into that more vast something out of which our
understanding is cut, and from which it has detached itself. And, as
matter is determined by intelligence, as there is between them an
evident agreement, we cannot make the genesis of the one without making
the genesis of the other. An identical process must have cut out matter
and the intellect, at the same time, from a stuff that contained both.
Into this reality we shall get back more and more completely, in
proportion as we compel ourselves to transcend pure intelligence.

* * * * *

Let us then concentrate attention on that which we have that is at the
same time the most removed from externality and the least penetrated
with intellectuality. Let us seek, in the depths of our experience, the
point where we feel ourselves most intimately within our own life. It is
into pure duration that we then plunge back, a duration in which the
past, always moving on, is swelling unceasingly with a present that is
absolutely new. But, at the same time, we feel the spring of our will
strained to its utmost limit. We must, by a strong recoil of our
personality on itself, gather up our past which is slipping away, in
order to thrust it, compact and undivided, into a present which it will
create by entering. Rare indeed are the moments when we are
self-possessed to this extent: it is then that our actions are truly
free. And even at these moments we do not completely possess ourselves.
Our feeling of duration, I should say the actual coinciding of ourself
with itself, admits of de