Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/143

No. 2.] dead, static world for its work-shop; it is not baffled by life and change and evolution, even by creative evolution and novelty, provided creation and novelty are not absolutely capricious: in a topsy-turvy world reason would grow dizzy and shut its eyes. With absolute caprice, with novelty that is utterly without rhyme or reason, that appears and disappears at random and is absolutely unrelated to anything else, neither intelligence nor intuition can do anything whatsoever. There is no meaning in novelty except in relation with the old: where there is no oldness there can be no newness. And one looks in vain for any such miracles in the recent philosophies. Even Bergson's creative principle does not really create out of nothing, like a bolt from the blue; it contains in itself an infinite number of possibilities, potentialities; it is big with the past, and, like the Aristotelian entelechies and the Leibnizian monads, it is big with the future. And it is not absolutely capricious: it battles with obstreperous matter and it cannot help pushing through, so much of law there is in it, and, what is more, it is bound to win the fight. The metaphysical reality changes, it is true, but its changes are not irrational; it has developed into instinct in animals and into intelligence in man; its march is upward, it corrects its mistakes, eradicates the evil, and perfects itself. In man it has succeeded in breaking through the rigid mechanism of matter and in raising itself to freedom. New creations arise, but they are not unrelated to the demands of the situation; they come when and where they are needed. "From thorns men do not gather grapes or figs from thistles." An absolutely irrational durée might suddenly stop creating, explode, go into nothing and refuse to come back; its creations might be like the frenzies of a madman. It is true, rationalism would still seek to find some uniformity in its whims, it would indeed attempt to rationalize its freakish behavior, to find some method in its madness, or abandon the task of knowing altogether. The entrance of novelty will not, however, put a quietus on rational inquiry. The phenomena of life and the phenomena of consciousness may be unique events in comparison with mechanical occurrence, and rationalism will have to admit their uniqueness if it cannot reduce them to a