With such a philosophy of science, it is evident that all progress in
the understanding of nature would cease, as it ceased after Aristotle.
The attempt would again be abandoned to reduce gross and obvious
cycles of change, such as generation, growth, and death, to minute
latent cycles, so that natural history should offer a picturesque
approach to universal physics. If for the magic power of types,
invoked by Aristotle, we substituted with M. Bergson the magic power
of the _elan vital_, that is, of evolution in general, we should be
referring events not to finer, more familiar, more pervasive
processes, but to one all-embracing process, unique and always
incomplete. Our understanding would end in something far vaguer and
looser than what our observation began with. Aristotle at least could
refer particulars to their specific types, as medicine and social
science are still glad enough to do, to help them in guessing and in
making a learned show before the public. But if divination and
eloquence--for science is out of the question--were to invoke nothing
but a fluid tendency to grow, we should be left with a flat history of
phenomena and no means of prediction or even classification. All
knowledge would be reduced to gossip, infinitely diffuse, perhaps
enlisting our dramatic feelings, but yielding no intellectual mastery
of experience, no practical competence, and no moral lesson.
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