Philosophy, in consequence, is no longer anything but the science of problems already solved, the science which is confined to saying why knowledge is knowledge and action action, of such and such a kind, and such and such a quality. And in consequence also reason can no longer appear anything but an original datum postulated as a simple fact, as a complete system come down ready-made from heaven, at bottom a kind of non-temporal essence, definable without respect to duration, evolution, or history, of which all genesis and all progress are absurd. In vain do we persist in maintaining that it is originally an act; we always come round to the fact that the method followed compels us to consider this act only when once accomplished, and when once expressed in results. The inevitable consequence is that we imprison ourselves hopelessly in the affirmation of Kantian relativism. Such a system can only be true as a partial and temporary truth: at the most, it is a moment of truth. "If we read the "Critique of Pure Reason" closely, we become aware that Kant has made the critique, not of reason in general, but of a reason fashioned to the habits and demands of Cartesian mechanism or Newtonian physics." (H. Bergson, "Report of French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.) Moreover, he plainly studies only adult reason, its present state, a plane of thought, a sectional view of becoming. For Kant, men progress perhaps in reason, but reason itself has no duration: it is the fixed spot, the atmosphere of dead eternity in which every mental action is displayed. But this could not be the final and complete truth. Is it not a fact that human intelligence has been slowly constituted in the course of biological evolution? To know it, we have not so much to separate it statically from its works, as to replace it in its history. Let us begin with life, since, in any case, whether we will or no, it is always in life and by life that we are. Life is not a brute force, a blind mechanism, from which one could never conceive that thought would spring. From its first pulsation, life is consciousness, spiritual activity, creative effort tending towards liberty; that is, discernment already luminous, although the quality is at first faint and diffused. In other terms, life is at bottom of the psychological nature of a tendency. But "the essence of a tendency is to develop in sheaf-form, creating, by the mere fact of its growth, diverging directions between which its impulse will be divided." ("Creative Evolution", page 108.) Along these different paths the complementary potentialities are produced and intensified, separating in the very process, their original interpretation being possible only in the state of birth. One of them ends in what we call intelligence. This latter therefore has become gradually detached from a less intense but fuller luminous condition, of which it has retained only certain characteristics to accentuate them.