the universe to a
thing given, which a superhuman intelligence would embrace at once in a
moment or in eternity. In following the second, on the contrary, he
would have been led to all the consequences which the intuition of true
duration implies. Creation would have appeared not simply as
_continued_, but also as _continuous_. The universe, regarded as a
whole, would really evolve. The future would no longer be determinable
by the present; at most we might say that, once realized, it can be
found again in its antecedents, as the sounds of a new language can be
expressed with the letters of an old alphabet if we agree to enlarge the
value of the letters and to attribute to them, retro-actively, sounds
which no combination of the old sounds could have produced beforehand.
Finally, the mechanistic explanation might have remained universal in
this, that it can indeed be extended to as many systems as we choose to
cut out in the continuity of the universe; but mechanism would then have
become a _method_ rather than a _doctrine_. It would have expressed the
fact that science must proceed after the cinematographical manner, that
the function of science is to scan the rhythm of the flow of things and
not to fit itself into that flow.--Such were the two opposite
conceptions of metaphysics which were offered to philosophy.

It chose the first. The reason of this choice is undoubtedly the mind's
tendency to follow the cinematographical method, a method so natural to
our intellect, and so well adjusted also to the requirements of our
science, that we must feel doubly sure of its speculative impotence to
renounce it in metaphysics. But ancient philosophy also influenced the
choice. Artists for ever admirable, the Greeks created a type of
supra-sensible truth, as of sensible beauty, whose attraction is hard to
resist. As soon as we incline to make metaphysics a systematization of
science, we glide in the direction of Plato and of Aristotle. And, once
in the zone of attraction in which the Greek philosophers moved, we are
drawn along in their orbit.

Such was the case with Leibniz, as also with Spinoza. We are not blind
to the treasures of originality their doctrines contain. Spinoza and
Leibniz have poured into them the whole content of their souls, rich
with the inventions of their genius and the acquisitions of modern
thought. And there are in each of them, especially in Spinoza, flashes
of intuition that break through the system