We see that we must conceive the word mind--or, if we prefer the word, thought--as extending beyond intelligence. Pure intelligence, or the faculty of critical reflection and conceptual analysis, represents only one form of thought in its entirety, a function, a determination or particular adaptation, the part organised in view of practical action, the part consolidated as language. What are its characteristics? It understands only what is discontinuous, inert, and fixed, that which has neither change nor duration; it bathes in an atmosphere of spatiality; it uses mathematics continually; it feels at home only among "things," and everything is reduced by it to solid atoms; it is naturally "materialist," owing to the very fact that it naturally grasps "forms" only. What do we mean by that except that its object of election is the mechanism of matter? But it supposes life; it only remains living itself by continual loans from a vaster and fuller activity from which it is sprung. And this return to complementary powers is what we call intuition. From this point of view it becomes easy to escape Kantian relativity. We are confronted by an intelligence which is doubtless no longer a faculty universally competent, but which, on the contrary, possesses in its own domain a greater power of penetration. It is arranged for action. Now action would not be able to move in irreality. Intelligence, then, makes us acquainted, if not with all reality, at least with some of it, namely that part by which reality is a possible object of mechanical or synthetic action. More profoundly, intuition falls into analysis as life into matter: they are two aspects of the same movement. That is why, "provided we only consider the general form of physics, we can say that it touches the absolute." ("Creative Evolution", page 216.) In other terms, language and mechanism are regulated by each other. This explains at once the success of mathematical science in the order of matter, and its non-success in the order of life. For, when confronted with life, intelligence fails. "Being a deposit of the evolutive movement along its path, how could it be applied throughout the evolutive movement itself? We might as well claim that the part equals the whole, that the effect can absorb its cause into itself, or that the pebble left on the shore outlines the form of the wave which brought it." (Preface to "Creative Evolution".) Is not that as good as saying that life is unknowable? Must we conclude that it is impossible to understand it?