uestion how the "sensuous manifold" is
adapted to it. It is for the same reason that he has supposed matter
wholly developed into parts absolutely external to one another;--whence
antinomies, of which we may plainly see that the thesis and antithesis
suppose the perfect coincidence of matter with geometrical space, but
which vanish the moment we cease to extend to matter what is true only
of pure space. Whence, finally, the conclusion that there are three
alternatives, and three only, among which to choose a theory of
knowledge: either the mind is determined by things, or things are
determined by the mind, or between mind and things we must suppose a
mysterious agreement.

But the truth is that there is a fourth, which does not seem to have
occurred to Kant--in the first place because he did not think that the
mind overflowed the intellect, and in the second place (and this is at
bottom the same thing) because he did not attribute to duration an
absolute existence, having put time, _a priori_, on the same plane as
space. This alternative consists, first of all, in regarding the
intellect as a special function of the mind, essentially turned toward
inert matter; then in saying that neither does matter determine the form
of the intellect, nor does the intellect impose its form on matter, nor
have matter and intellect been regulated in regard to one another by we
know not what pre-established harmony, but that intellect and matter
have progressively adapted themselves one to the other in order to
attain at last a common form. _This adaptation has, moreover, been
brought about quite naturally, because it is the same inversion of the
same movement which creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the
materiality of things._

From this point of view the knowledge of matter that our perception on
one hand and science on the other give to us appears, no doubt, as
approximative, but not as relative. Our perception, whose role it is to
hold up a light to our actions, works a dividing up of matter that is
always too sharply defined, always subordinated to practical needs,
consequently always requiring revision. Our science, which aspires to
the mathematical form, over-accentuates the spatiality of matter; its
formulae are, in general, too precise, and ever need remaking. For a
scientific theory to be final, the mind would have to embrace the
totality of things in block and place each thing in its exact relation
to every othe