time the problems that have
been raised around it will vanish.

It is true that we must begin by distinguishing, and even by opposing
one to the other, two kinds of order which we generally confuse. As
this confusion has created the principal difficulties of the problem of
knowledge, it will not be useless to dwell once more on the marks by
which the two orders are distinguished.

In a general way, reality is _ordered_ exactly to the degree in which it
satisfies our thought. Order is therefore a certain agreement between
subject and object. It is the mind finding itself again in things. But
the mind, we said, can go in two opposite ways. Sometimes it follows its
natural direction: there is then progress in the form of tension,
continuous creation, free activity. Sometimes it inverts it, and this
inversion, pushed to the end, leads to extension, to the necessary
reciprocal determination of elements externalized each by relation to
the others, in short, to geometrical mechanism. Now, whether experience
seems to us to adopt the first direction or whether it is drawn in the
direction of the second, in both cases we say there is order, for in the
two processes the mind finds itself again. The confusion between them is
therefore natural. To escape it, different names would have to be given
to the two kinds of order, and that is not easy, because of the variety
and variability of the forms they take. The order of the second kind may
be defined as geometry, which is its extreme limit; more generally, it
is that kind of order that is concerned whenever a relation of necessary
determination is found between causes and effects. It evokes ideas of
inertia, of passivity, of automatism. As to the first kind of order, it
oscillates no doubt around finality; and yet we cannot define it as
finality, for it is sometimes above, sometimes below. In its highest
forms, it is more than finality, for of a free action or a work of art
we may say that they show a perfect order, and yet they can only be
expressed in terms of ideas approximately, and after the event. Life in
its entirety, regarded as a creative evolution, is something analogous;
it transcends finality, if we understand by finality the realization of
an idea conceived or conceivable in advance. The category of finality is
therefore too narrow for life in its entirety. It is, on the other hand,
often too wide for a particular manifestation of life taken separately.
Be that as it ma