all Thought,
but which was rather thought-object than thought-subject. When Aristotle
defined God the [Greek: noeseos noesis], it is probably on [Greek:
noeseos], and not on [Greek: noesis] that he put the emphasis. God was
the synthesis of all concepts, the idea of ideas. But modern science
turns on laws, that is, on relations. Now, a relation is a bond
established by a mind between two or more terms. A relation is nothing
outside of the intellect that relates. The universe, therefore, can only
be a system of laws if phenomena have passed beforehand through the
filter of an intellect. Of course, this intellect might be that of a
being infinitely superior to man, who would found the materiality of
things at the same time that he bound them together: such was the
hypothesis of Leibniz and of Spinoza. But it is not necessary to go so
far, and, for the effect we have here to obtain, the human intellect is
enough: such is precisely the Kantian solution. Between the dogmatism of
a Spinoza or a Leibniz and the criticism of Kant there is just the same
distance as between "it may be maintained that--" and "it suffices
that--." Kant stops this dogmatism on the incline that was making it
slip too far toward the Greek metaphysics; he reduces to the strict
minimum the hypothesis which is necessary in order to suppose the
physics of Galileo indefinitely extensible. True, when he speaks of the
human intellect, he means neither yours nor mine: the unity of nature
comes indeed from the human understanding that unifies, but the unifying
function that operates here is impersonal. It imparts itself to our
individual consciousnesses, but it transcends them. It is much less than
a substantial God; it is, however, a little more than the isolated work
of a man or even than the collective work of humanity. It does not
exactly lie within man; rather, man lies within it, as in an atmosphere
of intellectuality which his consciousness breathes. It is, if we will,
a _formal_ God, something that in Kant is not yet divine, but which
tends to become so. It became so, indeed, with Fichte. With Kant,
however, its principal role was to give to the whole of our science a
relative and _human_ character, although of a humanity already somewhat
deified. From this point of view, the criticism of Kant consisted
chiefly in limiting the dogmatism of his predecessors, accepting their
conception of science and reducing to a minimum the metaphysic it
implied.

But