f. Physics understands its role
when it pushes matter in the direction of spatiality; but has
metaphysics understood its role when it has simply trodden in the steps
of physics, in the chimerical hope of going further in the same
direction? Should not its own task be, on the contrary, to remount the
incline that physics descends, to bring back matter to its origins, and
to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to speak, a
reversed psychology? All that which seems _positive_ to the physicist
and to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an
interruption or inversion of the true positivity, which would have to be
defined in psychological terms.

* * * * *

When we consider the admirable order of mathematics, the perfect
agreement of the objects it deals with, the immanent logic in numbers
and figures, our certainty of always getting the same conclusion,
however diverse and complex our reasonings on the same subject, we
hesitate to see in properties apparently so positive a system of
negations, the absence rather than the presence of a true reality. But
we must not forget that our intellect, which finds this order and
wonders at it, is directed in the same line of movement that leads to
the materiality and spatiality of its object. The more complexity the
intellect puts into its object by analyzing it, the more complex is the
order it finds there. And this order and this complexity necessarily
appear to the intellect as a positive reality, since reality and
intellectuality are turned in the same direction.

When a poet reads me his verses, I can interest myself enough in him to
enter into his thought, put myself into his feelings, live over again
the simple state he has broken into phrases and words. I sympathize then
with his inspiration, I follow it with a continuous movement which is,
like the inspiration itself, an undivided act. Now, I need only relax my
attention, let go the tension that there is in me, for the sounds,
hitherto swallowed up in the sense, to appear to me distinctly, one by
one, in their materiality. For this I have not to do anything; it is
enough to withdraw something. In proportion as I let myself go, the
successive sounds will become the more individualized; as the phrases
were broken into words, so the words will scan in syllables which I
shall perceive one after another. Let me go farther still in the
direction of dream: the le