en. Now, the choice of the variable
magnitudes, the distribution of nature into objects and into facts, has
already something of the contingent and the conventional. But, admitting
that the choice is hinted at, if not prescribed, by experience, the law
remains none the less a relation, and a relation is essentially a
comparison; it has objective reality only for an intelligence that
represents to itself several terms at the same time. This intelligence
may be neither mine nor yours: a science which bears on laws may
therefore be an objective science, which experience contains in advance
and which we simply make it disgorge; but it is none the less true that
a comparison of some kind must be effected here, impersonally if not by
any one in particular, and that an experience made of laws, that is, of
terms _related_ to other terms, is an experience made of comparisons,
which, before we receive it, has already had to pass through an
atmosphere of intellectuality. The idea of a science and of an
experience entirely relative to the human understanding was therefore
implicitly contained in the conception of a science one and integral,
composed of laws: Kant only brought it to light. But this conception is
the result of an arbitrary confusion between the generality of laws and
that of genera. Though an intelligence be necessary to condition terms
by relation to each other, we may conceive that in certain cases the
terms themselves may exist independently. And if, beside relations of
term to term, experience also presents to us independent terms, the
living genera being something quite different from systems of laws, one
half, at least, of our knowledge bears on the "thing-in-itself," the
very reality. This knowledge may be very difficult, just because it no
longer builds up its own object and is obliged, on the contrary, to
submit to it; but, however little it cuts into its object, it is into
the absolute itself that it bites. We may go further: the other half of
knowledge is no longer so radically, so definitely relative as certain
philosophers say, if we can establish that it bears on a reality of
inverse order, a reality which we always express in mathematical laws,
that is to say in relations that imply comparisons, but which lends
itself to this work only because it is weighted with spatiality and
consequently with geometry. Be that as it may, it is the confusion of
two kinds of order that lies behind the relativism of the