of our planet, a life directed the same way
as that of the universe, and inverse of materiality. To intellect, in
short, there will be added intuition.

The more we reflect on it, the more we shall find that this conception
of metaphysics is that which modern science suggests.

For the ancients, indeed, time is theoretically negligible, because the
duration of a thing only manifests the degradation of its essence: it is
with this motionless essence that science has to deal. Change being only
the effort of a form toward its own realization, the realization is all
that it concerns us to know. No doubt the realization is never complete:
it is this that ancient philosophy expresses by saying that we do not
perceive form without matter. But if we consider the changing object at
a certain essential moment, at its apogee, we may say that there it
just touches its intelligible form. This intelligible form, this ideal
and, so to speak, limiting form, our science seizes upon. And possessing
in this the gold-piece, it holds eminently the small money which we call
becoming or change. This change is less than being. The knowledge that
would take it for object, supposing such knowledge were possible, would
be less than science.

But, for a science that places all the moments of time in the same rank,
that admits no essential moment, no culminating point, no apogee, change
is no longer a diminution of essence, duration is not a dilution of
eternity. The flux of time is the reality itself, and the things which
we study are the things which flow. It is true that of this flowing
reality we are limited to taking instantaneous views. But, just because
of this, scientific knowledge must appeal to another knowledge to
complete it. While the ancient conception of scientific knowledge ended
in making time a degradation, and change the diminution of a form given
from all eternity--on the contrary, by following the new conception to
the end, we should come to see in time a progressive growth of the
absolute, and in the evolution of things a continual invention of forms
ever new.

It is true that it would be to break with the metaphysics of the
ancients. They saw only one way of knowing definitely. Their science
consisted in a scattered and fragmentary metaphysics, their metaphysics
in a concentrated and systematic science. Their science and metaphysics
were, at most, two species of one and the same genus. In our hypothesis,
on the contrary,