It has been asked how far instinct is conscious. Our reply is that there

are a vast number of differences and degrees, that instinct is more or

less conscious in certain cases, unconscious in others. The plant, as we

shall see, has instincts; it is not likely that these are accompanied by

feeling. Even in the animal there is hardly any complex instinct that is

not unconscious in some part at least of its exercise. But here we must

point out a difference, not often noticed, between two kinds of

unconsciousness, viz., that in which consciousness is _absent_, and that

in which consciousness is _nullified_. Both are equal to zero, but in

one case the zero expresses the fact that there is nothing, in the other

that we have two equal quantities of opposite sign which compensate and

neutralize each other. The unconsciousness of a falling stone is of the

former kind: the stone has no feeling of its fall. Is it the same with

the unconsciousness of instinct, in the extreme cases in which instinct

is unconscious? When we mechanically perform an habitual action, when

the somnambulist automatically acts his dream, unconsciousness may be

absolute; but this is merely due to the fact that the representation of

the act is held in check by the performance of the act itself, which

resembles the idea so perfectly, and fits it so exactly, that

consciousness is unable to find room between them. _Representation is

stopped up by action._ The proof of this is, that if the accomplishment

of the act is arrested or thwarted by an obstacle, consciousness may

reappear. It was there, but neutralized by the action which fulfilled

and thereby filled the representation. The obstacle creates nothing

positive; it simply makes a void, removes a stopper. This inadequacy of

act to representation is precisely what we here call consciousness.

If we examine this point more closely, we shall find that consciousness

is the light that plays around the zone of possible actions or potential

activity which surrounds the action really performed by the living

being. It signifies hesitation or choice. Where many equally possible

actions are indicated without there being any real action (as in a

deliberation that has not come to an end), consciousness is intense.

Where the action performed is the only action possible (as in activity

of the somnambulistic or more generally automatic kind), consciousness

is reduced to nothing. Representation and knowledge exist none the less

in the case if we find a whole series of systematized movements the last

of which is already pre-figured in the first, and if, besides,

consciousness can flash out of them at the shock of an obstacle. From

this point of view, _the consciousness of a living being may be defined

as an arithmetical difference between potential and real activity_. _It

measures the interval between representation and action._

It may be inferred from this that intelligence is likely to point

towards consciousness, and instinct towards unconsciousness. For, where

the implement to be used is organized by nature, the material furnished

by nature, and the result to be obtained willed by nature, there is

little left to choice; the consciousness inherent in the representation

is therefore counterbalanced, whenever it tends to disengage itself, by

the performance of the act, identical with the representation, which

forms its counterweight. Where consciousness appears, it does not so

much light up the instinct itself as the thwartings to which instinct is

subject; it is the _deficit_ of instinct, the distance, between the act

and the idea, that becomes consciousness so that consciousness, here, is

only an accident. Essentially, consciousness only emphasizes the

starting-point of instinct, the point at which the whole series of

automatic movements is released. Deficit, on the contrary, is the normal

state of intelligence. Laboring under difficulties is its very essence.

Its original function being to construct unorganized instruments, it

must, in spite of numberless difficulties, choose for this work the

place and the time, the form and the matter. And it can never satisfy

itself entirely, because every new satisfaction creates new needs. In

short, while instinct and intelligence both involve knowledge, this

knowledge is rather _acted_ and unconscious in the case of instinct,

_thought_ and conscious in the case of intelligence. But it is a

difference rather of degree than of kind. So long as consciousness is

all we are concerned with, we close our eyes to what is, from the

psychological point of view, the cardinal difference between instinct

and intelligence.

In order to get at this essential difference we must, without stopping

at the more or less brilliant light which illumines these two modes of

internal activity, go straight to the two _objects_, profoundly

different from each other, upon which instinct and intelligence are

directed.

When the horse-fly lays its eggs on the legs or shoulders of the horse,

it acts as if it knew that its larva has to develop in the horse's

stomach and that the horse, in licking itself, will convey the larva

into its digestive tract. When a paralyzing wasp stings its victim on

just those points where the nervous centres lie, so as to render it

motionless without killing it, it acts like a learned entomologist and a

skilful surgeon rolled into one. But what shall we say of the little

beetle, the Sitaris, whose story is so often quoted? This insect lays

its eggs at the entrance of the underground passages dug by a kind of

bee, the Anthophora. Its larva, after long waiting, springs upon the

male Anthophora as it goes out of the passage, clings to it, and remains

attached until the "nuptial flight," when it seizes the opportunity to

pass from the male to the female, and quietly waits until it lays its

eggs. It then leaps on the egg, which serves as a support for it in the

honey, devours the egg in a few days, and, resting on the shell,

undergoes its first metamorphosis. Organized now to float on the honey,

it consumes this provision of nourishment, and becomes a nymph, then a

perfect insect. Everything happens _as if_ the larva of the Sitaris,

from the moment it was hatched, knew that the male Anthophora would

first emerge from the passage; that the nuptial flight would give it the

means of conveying itself to the female, who would take it to a store of

honey sufficient to feed it after its transformation; that, until this

transformation, it could gradually eat the egg of the Anthophora, in

such a way that it could at the same time feed itself, maintain itself

at the surface of the honey, and also suppress the rival that otherwise

would have come out of the egg. And equally all this happens _as if_ the

Sitaris itself knew that its larva would know all these things. The

knowledge, if knowledge there be, is only implicit. It is reflected

outwardly in exact movements instead of being reflected inwardly in

consciousness. It is none the less true that the behavior of the insect

involves, or rather evolves, the idea of definite things existing or

being produced in definite points of space and time, which the insect

knows without having learned them.

Now, if we look at intelligence from the same point of view, we find

that it also knows certain things without having learned them. But the

knowledge in the two cases is of a very different order. We must be

careful here not to revive again the old philosophical dispute on the

subject of innate ideas. So we will confine ourselves to the point on

which every one is agreed, to wit, that the young child understands

immediately things that the animal will never understand, and that in

this sense intelligence, like instinct, is an inherited function,

therefore an innate one. But this innate intelligence, although it is a

faculty of knowing, knows no object in particular. When the new-born

babe seeks for the first time its mother's breast, so showing that it

has knowledge (unconscious, no doubt) of a thing it has never seen, we

say, just because the innate knowledge is in this case of a definite

object, that it belongs to _instinct_ and not to _intelligence_.

Intelligence does not then imply the innate knowledge of any object. And

yet, if intelligence knows nothing by nature, it has nothing innate.

What, then, if it be ignorant of all things, can it know? Besides

_things_, there are _relations_. The new-born child, so far as

intelligent, knows neither definite objects nor a definite property of

any object; but when, a little later on, he will hear an epithet being

applied to a substantive, he will immediately understand what it means.

The relation of attribute to subject is therefore seized by him

naturally, and the same might be said of the general relation expressed

by the verb, a relation so immediately conceived by the mind that

language can leave it to be understood, as is instanced in rudimentary

languages which have no verb. Intelligence, therefore, naturally makes

use of relations of like with like, of content to container, of cause to

effect, etc., which are implied in every phrase in which there is a

subject, an attribute and a verb, expressed or understood. May one say

that it has _innate_ knowledge of each of these relations in particular?

It is for logicians to discover whether they are so many irreducible

relations, or whether they can be resolved into relations still more

general. But, in whatever way we make the analysis of thought, we always

end with one or several general categories, of which the mind possesses

innate knowledge since it makes a natural use of them. Let us say,

therefore, that _whatever, in instinct and intelligence, is innate

knowledge, bears in the first case on_ things _and in the second on_

relations.

Philosophers distinguish between the matter of our knowledge and its

form. The matter is what is given by the perceptive faculties taken in

the elementary state. The form is the totality of the relations set up

between these materials in order to constitute a systematic knowledge.

Can the form, without matter, be an object of knowledge? Yes, without

doubt, provided that this knowledge is not like a thing we possess so

much as like a habit we have contracted,--a direction rather than a

state: it is, if we will, a certain natural bent of attention. The

schoolboy, who knows that the master is going to dictate a fraction to

him, draws a line before he knows what numerator and what denominator

are to come; he therefore has present to his mind the general relation

between the two terms although he does not know either of them; he knows

the form without the matter. So is it, prior to experience, with the

categories into which our experience comes to be inserted. Let us adopt

then words sanctioned by usage, and give the distinction between

intelligence and instinct this more precise formula: _Intelligence, in

so far as it is innate, is the knowledge of a_ form; _instinct implies

the knowledge of a_ matter.

From this second point of view, which is that of knowledge instead of

action, the force immanent in life in general appears to us again as a

limited principle, in which originally two different and even divergent

modes of knowing coexisted and intermingled. The first gets at definite

objects immediately, in their materiality itself. It says, "This is what

is." The second gets at no object in particular; it is only a natural

power of relating an object to an object, or a part to a part, or an

aspect to an aspect--in short, of drawing conclusions when in possession

of the premisses, of proceeding from what has been learnt to what is

still unknown. It does not say, "This _is_;" it says only that "_if_ the

conditions are such, such will be the conditioned." In short, the first

kind of knowledge, the instinctive, would be formulated in what

philosophers call _categorical_ propositions, while the second kind, the

intellectual, would always be expressed _hypothetically_. Of these two

faculties, the former seems, at first, much preferable to the other. And

it would be so, in truth, if it extended to an endless number of

objects. But, in fact, it applies only to one special object, and indeed

only to a restricted part of that object. Of this, at least, its

knowledge is intimate and full; not explicit, but implied in the

accomplished action. The intellectual faculty, on the contrary,

possesses naturally only an external and empty knowledge; but it has

thereby the advantage of supplying a frame in which an infinity of

objects may find room in turn. It is as if the force evolving in living

forms, being a limited force, had had to choose between two kinds of

limitation in the field of natural or innate knowledge, one applying to

the _extension_ of knowledge, the other to its _intension_. In the first

case, the knowledge may be packed and full, but it will then be confined

to one specific object; in the second, it is no longer limited by its

object, but that is because it contains nothing, being only a form

without matter. The two tendencies, at first implied in each other, had

to separate in order to grow. They both went to seek their fortune in

the world, and turned out to be instinct and intelligence.

Such, then, are the two divergent modes of knowledge by which

intelligence and instinct must be defined, from the standpoint of

knowledge rather than that of action. But knowledge and action are here

only two aspects of one and the same faculty. It is easy to see, indeed,

that the second definition is only a new form of the first.

If instinct is, above all, the faculty of using an organized natural

instrument, it must involve innate knowledge (potential or unconscious,

it is true), both of this instrument and of the object to which it is

applied. Instinct is therefore innate knowledge of a _thing_. But

intelligence is the faculty of constructing unorganized--that is to say

artificial--instruments. If, on its account, nature gives up endowing

the living being with the instruments that may serve him, it is in order

that the living being may be able to vary his construction according to

circumstances. The essential function of intelligence is therefore to

see the way out of a difficulty in any circumstances whatever, to find

what is most suitable, what answers best the question asked. Hence it

bears essentially on the relations between a given situation and the

means of utilizing it. What is innate in intellect, therefore, is the

tendency to establish relations, and this tendency implies the natural

knowledge of certain very general relations, a kind of stuff that the

activity of each particular intellect will cut up into more special

relations. Where activity is directed toward manufacture, therefore,

knowledge necessarily bears on relations. But this entirely _formal_

knowledge of intelligence has an immense advantage over the _material_

knowledge of instinct. A form, just because it is empty, may be filled

at will with any number of things in turn, even with those that are of

no use. So that a formal knowledge is not limited to what is practically

useful, although it is in view of practical utility that it has made its

appearance in the world. An intelligent being bears within himself the

means to transcend his own nature.

He transcends himself, however, less than he wishes, less also than he

imagines himself to do. The purely formal character of intelligence

deprives it of the ballast necessary to enable it to settle itself on

the objects that are of the most powerful interest to speculation.

Instinct, on the contrary, has the desired materiality, but it is

incapable of going so far in quest of its object; it does not speculate.

Here we reach the point that most concerns our present inquiry. The

difference that we shall now proceed to denote between instinct and

intelligence is what the whole of this analysis was meant to bring out.

We formulate it thus: _There are things that intelligence alone is able

to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct

alone could find; but it will never seek them._

It is necessary here to consider some preliminary details that concern

the mechanism of intelligence. We have said that the function of

intelligence is to establish relations. Let us determine more precisely

the nature of these relations. On this point we are bound to be either

vague or arbitrary so long as we see in the intellect a faculty intended

for pure speculation. We are then reduced to taking the general frames

of the understanding for something absolute, irreducible and

inexplicable. The understanding must have fallen from heaven with its

form, as each of us is born with his face. This form may be defined, of

course, but that is all; there is no asking why it is what it is rather

than anything else. Thus, it will be said that the function of the

intellect is essentially unification, that the common object of all its

operations is to introduce a certain unity into the diversity of

phenomena, and so forth. But, in the first place, "unification" is a

vague term, less clear than "relation" or even "thought," and says

nothing more. And, moreover, it might be asked if the function of

intelligence is not to divide even more than to unite. Finally, if the

intellect proceeds as it does because it wishes to unite, and if it

seeks unification simply because it has need of unifying, the whole of

our knowledge becomes relative to certain requirements of the mind that

probably might have been entirely different from what they are: for an

intellect differently shaped, knowledge would have been different.

Intellect being no longer dependent on anything, everything becomes

dependent on it; and so, having placed the understanding too high, we

end by putting too low the knowledge it gives us. Knowledge becomes

relative, as soon as the intellect is made a kind of absolute.--We

regard the human intellect, on the contrary, as relative to the needs of

action. Postulate action, and the very form of the intellect can be

deduced from it. This form is therefore neither irreducible nor

inexplicable. And, precisely because it is not independent, knowledge

cannot be said to depend on it: knowledge ceases to be a product of the

intellect and becomes, in a certain sense, part and parcel of reality.

Philosophers will reply that action takes place in an _ordered_ world,

that this order is itself thought, and that we beg the question when we

explain the intellect by action, which presupposes it. They would be

right if our point of view in the present chapter was to be our final

one. We should then be dupes of an illusion like that of Spencer, who

believed that the intellect is sufficiently explained as the impression

left on us by the general characters of matter: as if the order inherent

in matter were not intelligence itself! But we reserve for the next

chapter the question up to what point and with what method philosophy

can attempt a real genesis of the intellect at the same time as of

matter. For the moment, the problem that engages our attention is of a

psychological order. We are asking what is the portion of the material

world to which our intellect is specially adapted. To reply to this

question, there is no need to choose a system of philosophy: it is

enough to take up the point of view of common sense.

Let us start, then, from action, and lay down that the intellect aims,

first of all, at constructing. This fabrication is exercised exclusively

on inert matter, in this sense, that even if it makes use of organized

material, it treats it as inert, without troubling about the life which

animated it. And of inert matter itself, fabrication deals only with the

solid; the rest escapes by its very fluidity. If, therefore, the

tendency of the intellect is to fabricate, we may expect to find that

whatever is fluid in the real will escape it in part, and whatever is

life in the living will escape it altogether. _Our intelligence, as it

leaves the hands of nature, has for its chief object the unorganized

solid._

When we pass in review the intellectual functions, we see that the

intellect is never quite at its ease, never entirely at home, except

when it is working upon inert matter, more particularly upon solids.

What is the most general property of the material world? It is extended:

it presents to us objects external to other objects, and, in these

objects, parts external to parts. No doubt, it is useful to us, in view

of our ulterior manipulation, to regard each object as divisible into

parts arbitrarily cut up, each part being again divisible as we like,

and so on _ad infinitum_. But it is above all necessary, for our present

manipulation, to regard the real object in hand, or the real elements

into which we have resolved it, as _provisionally final_, and to treat

them as so many _units_. To this possibility of decomposing matter as

much as we please, and in any way we please, we allude when we speak of

the _continuity_ of material extension; but this continuity, as we see

it, is nothing else but our ability, an ability that matter allows to us

to choose the mode of discontinuity we shall find in it. It is always,

in fact, the mode of discontinuity once chosen that appears to us as the

actually real one and that which fixes our attention, just because it

rules our action. Thus discontinuity is thought for itself; it is

thinkable in itself; we form an idea of it by a positive act of our

mind; while the intellectual representation of continuity is negative,

being, at bottom, only the refusal of our mind, before any actually

given system of decomposition, to regard it as the only possible one.

_Of the discontinuous alone does the intellect form a clear idea._

On the other hand, the objects we act on are certainly mobile objects,

but the important thing for us to know is _whither_ the mobile object is

going and _where_ it is at any moment of its passage. In other words,

our interest is directed, before all, to its actual or future positions,

and not to the _progress_ by which it passes from one position to

another, progress which is the movement itself. In our actions, which

are systematized movements, what we fix our mind on is the end or

meaning of the movement, its design as a whole--in a word, the immobile

plan of its execution. That which really moves in action interests us

only so far as the whole can be advanced, retarded, or stopped by any

incident that may happen on the way. From mobility itself our intellect

turns aside, because it has nothing to gain in dealing with it. If the

intellect were meant for pure theorizing, it would take its place within

movement, for movement is reality itself, and immobility is always only

apparent or relative. But the intellect is meant for something

altogether different. Unless it does violence to itself, it takes the

opposite course; it always starts from immobility, as if this were the

ultimate reality: when it tries to form an idea of movement, it does so

by constructing movement out of immobilities put together. This

operation, whose illegitimacy and danger in the field of speculation we

shall show later on (it leads to dead-locks, and creates artificially

insoluble philosophical problems), is easily justified when we refer it

to its proper goal. Intelligence, in its natural state, aims at a

practically useful end. When it substitutes for movement immobilities

put together, it does not pretend to reconstitute the movement such as

it actually is; it merely replaces it with a practical equivalent. It is

the philosophers who are mistaken when they import into the domain of

speculation a method of thinking which is made for action. But of this

more anon. Suffice it now to say that to the stable and unchangeable our

intellect is attached by virtue of its natural disposition. _Of

immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea._

Now, fabricating consists in carving out the form of an object in

matter. What is the most important is the form to be obtained. As to

the matter, we choose that which is most convenient; but, in order to

choose it, that is to say, in order to go and seek it among many others,

we must have tried, in imagination at least, to endow every kind of

matter with the form of the object conceived. In other words, an

intelligence which aims at fabricating is an intelligence which never

stops at the actual form of things nor regards it as final, but, on the

contrary, looks upon all matter as if it were carvable at will. Plato

compares the good dialectician to the skilful cook who carves the animal

without breaking its bones, by following the articulations marked out by

nature.[64] An intelligence which always proceeded thus would really be

an intelligence turned toward speculation. But action, and in particular

fabrication, requires the opposite mental tendency: it makes us consider

every actual form of things, even the form of natural things, as

artificial and provisional; it makes our thought efface from the object

perceived, even though organized and living, the lines that outwardly

mark its inward structure; in short, it makes us regard its matter as

indifferent to its form. The whole of matter is made to appear to our

thought as an immense piece of cloth in which we can cut out what we

will and sew it together again as we please. Let us note, in passing,

that it is this power that we affirm when we say that there is a

_space_, that is to say, a homogeneous and empty medium, infinite and

infinitely divisible, lending itself indifferently to any mode of

decomposition whatsoever. A medium of this kind is never perceived; it

is only conceived. What is perceived is extension colored, resistant,

divided according to the lines which mark out the boundaries of real

bodies or of their real elements. But when we think of our power over

this matter, that is to say, of our faculty of decomposing and

recomposing it as we please, we project the whole of these possible

decompositions and recompositions behind real extension in the form of a

homogeneous space, empty and indifferent, which is supposed to underlie

it. This space is therefore, pre-eminently, the plan of our possible

action on things, although, indeed, things have a natural tendency, as

we shall explain further on, to enter into a frame of this kind. It is a

view taken by mind. The animal has probably no idea of it, even when,

like us, it perceives extended things. It is an idea that symbolizes the

tendency of the human intellect to fabrication. But this point must not

detain us now. Suffice it to say that _the intellect is characterized by

the unlimited power of decomposing according to any law and of

recomposing into any system_.

We have now enumerated a few of the essential features of human

intelligence. But we have hitherto considered the individual in

isolation, without taking account of social life. In reality, man is a

being who lives in society. If it be true that the human intellect aims

at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well as for other

purposes, it is associated with other intellects. Now, it is difficult

to imagine a society whose members do not communicate by signs. Insect

societies probably have a language, and this language must be adapted,

like that of man, to the necessities of life in common. By language

community of action is made possible. But the requirements of joint

action are not at all the same in a colony of ants and in a human

society. In insect societies there is generally polymorphism, the

subdivision of labor is natural, and each individual is riveted by its

structure to the function it performs. In any case, these societies are

based on instinct, and consequently on certain actions or fabrications

that are more or less dependent on the form of the organs. So if the

ants, for instance, have a language, the signs which compose it must be

very limited in number, and each of them, once the species is formed,

must remain invariably attached to a certain object or a certain

operation: the sign is adherent to the thing signified. In human

society, on the contrary, fabrication and action are of variable form,

and, moreover, each individual must learn his part, because he is not

preordained to it by his structure. So a language is required which

makes it possible to be always passing from what is known to what is yet

to be known. There must be a language whose signs--which cannot be

infinite in number--are extensible to an infinity of things. This

tendency of the sign to transfer itself from one object to another is

characteristic of human language. It is observable in the little child

as soon as he begins to speak. Immediately and naturally he extends the

meaning of the words he learns, availing himself of the most accidental

connection or the most distant analogy to detach and transfer elsewhere

the sign that had been associated in his hearing with a particular

object. "Anything can designate anything;" such is the latent principle

of infantine language. This tendency has been wrongly confused with the

faculty of generalizing. The animals themselves generalize; and,

moreover, a sign--even an instinctive sign--always to some degree

represents a genus. But what characterizes the signs of human language

is not so much their generality as their mobility. _The instinctive sign

is_ adherent, _the intelligent sign is_ mobile.

Now, this mobility of words, that makes them able to pass from one thing

to another, has enabled them to be extended from things to ideas.

Certainly, language would not have given the faculty of reflecting to an

intelligence entirely externalized and incapable of turning homeward.

An intelligence which reflects is one that originally had a surplus of

energy to spend, over and above practically useful efforts. It is a

consciousness that has virtually reconquered itself. But still the

virtual has to become actual. Without language, intelligence would

probably have remained riveted to the material objects which it was

interested in considering. It would have lived in a state of

somnambulism, outside itself, hypnotized on its own work. Language has

greatly contributed to its liberation. The word, made to pass from one

thing to another, is, in fact, by nature transferable and free. It can

therefore be extended, not only from one perceived thing to another, but

even from a perceived thing to a recollection of that thing, from the

precise recollection to a more fleeting image, and finally from an image

fleeting, though still pictured, to the picturing of the act by which

the image is pictured, that is to say, to the idea. Thus is revealed to

the intelligence, hitherto always turned outwards, a whole internal

world--the spectacle of its own workings. It required only this

opportunity, at length offered by language. It profits by the fact that

the word is an external thing, which the intelligence can catch hold of

and cling to, and at the same time an immaterial thing, by means of

which the intelligence can penetrate even to the inwardness of its own

work. Its first business was indeed to make instruments, but this

fabrication is possible only by the employment of certain means which

are not cut to the exact measure of their object, but go beyond it and

thus allow intelligence a supplementary--that is to say disinterested

work. From the moment that the intellect, reflecting upon its own

doings, perceives itself as a creator of ideas, as a faculty of

representation in general, there is no object of which it may not wish

to have the idea, even though that object be without direct relation to

practical action. That is why we said there are things that intellect

alone can seek. Intellect alone, indeed, troubles itself about theory;

and its theory would fain embrace everything--not only inanimate matter,

over which it has a natural hold, but even life and thought.

By what means, what instruments, in short by what method it will

approach these problems, we can easily guess. Originally, it was

fashioned to the form of matter. Language itself, which has enabled it

to extend its field of operations, is made to designate things, and

nought but things: it is only because the word is mobile, because it

flies from one thing to another, that the intellect was sure to take it,

sooner or later, on the wing, while it was not settled on anything, and

apply it to an object which is not a thing and which, concealed till

then, awaited the coming of the word to pass from darkness to light. But

the word, by covering up this object, again converts it into a thing. So

intelligence, even when it no longer operates upon its own object,

follows habits it has contracted in that operation: it applies forms

that are indeed those of unorganized matter. It is made for this kind of

work. With this kind of work alone is it fully satisfied. And that is

what intelligence expresses by saying that thus only it arrives at

_distinctness_ and _clearness_.

It must, therefore, in order to think itself clearly and distinctly,

perceive itself under the form of discontinuity. Concepts, in fact, are

outside each other, like objects in space; and they have the same

stability as such objects, on which they have been modeled. Taken

together, they constitute an "intelligible world," that resembles the

world of solids in its essential characters, but whose elements are

lighter, more diaphanous, easier for the intellect to deal with than the

image of concrete things: they are not, indeed, the perception itself

of things, but the representation of the act by which the intellect is

fixed on them. They are, therefore, not images, but symbols. Our logic

is the complete set of rules that must be followed in using symbols. As

these symbols are derived from the consideration of solids, as the rules

for combining these symbols hardly do more than express the most general

relations among solids, our logic triumphs in that science which takes

the solidity of bodies for its object, that is, in geometry. Logic and

geometry engender each other, as we shall see a little further on. It is

from the extension of a certain natural geometry, suggested by the most

general and immediately perceived properties of solids, that natural

logic has arisen; then from this natural logic, in its turn, has sprung

scientific geometry, which extends further and further the knowledge of

the external properties of solids.[65] Geometry and logic are strictly

applicable to matter; in it they are at home, and in it they can proceed

quite alone. But, outside this domain, pure reasoning needs to be

supervised by common sense, which is an altogether different thing.

Thus, all the elementary forces of the intellect tend to transform

matter into an instrument of action, that is, in the etymological sense

of the word, into an _organ_. Life, not content with producing

organisms, would fain give them as an appendage inorganic matter itself,

converted into an immense organ by the industry of the living being.

Such is the initial task it assigns to intelligence. That is why the

intellect always behaves as if it were fascinated by the contemplation

of inert matter. It is life looking outward, putting itself outside

itself, adopting the ways of unorganized nature in principle, in order

to direct them in fact. Hence its bewilderment when it turns to the

living and is confronted with organization. It does what it can, it

resolves the organized into the unorganized, for it cannot, without

reversing its natural direction and twisting about on itself, think true

continuity, real mobility, reciprocal penetration--in a word, that

creative evolution which is life.

Consider continuity. The aspect of life that is accessible to our

intellect--as indeed to our senses, of which our intellect is the

extension--is that which offers a hold to our action. Now, to modify an

object, we have to perceive it as divisible and discontinuous. From the

point of view of positive science, an incomparable progress was realized

when the organized tissues were resolved into cells. The study of the

cell, in its turn, has shown it to be an organism whose complexity seems

to grow, the more thoroughly it is examined. The more science advances,

the more it sees the number grow of heterogeneous elements which are

placed together, outside each other, to make up a living being. Does

science thus get any nearer to life? Does it not, on the contrary, find

that what is really life in the living seems to recede with every step

by which it pushes further the detail of the parts combined? There is

indeed already among scientists a tendency to regard the substance of

the organism as continuous, and the cell as an artificial entity.[66]

But, supposing this view were finally to prevail, it could only lead, on

deeper study, to some other mode of analyzing of the living being, and

so to a new discontinuity--although less removed, perhaps, from the real

continuity of life. The truth is that this continuity cannot be thought

by the intellect while it follows its natural movement. It implies at

once the multiplicity of elements and the interpenetration of all by

all, two conditions that can hardly be reconciled in the field in which

our industry, and consequently our intellect, is engaged.

Just as we separate in space, we fix in time. The intellect is not made

to think _evolution_, in the proper sense of the word--that is to say,

the continuity of a change that is pure mobility. We shall not dwell

here on this point, which we propose to study in a special chapter.

Suffice it to say that the intellect represents _becoming_ as a series

of _states_, each of which is homogeneous with itself and consequently

does not change. Is our attention called to the internal change of one

of these states? At once we decompose it into another series of states

which, reunited, will be supposed to make up this internal modification.

Each of these new states must be invariable, or else their internal

change, if we are forced to notice it, must be resolved again into a

fresh series of invariable states, and so on to infinity. Here again,

thinking consists in reconstituting, and, naturally, it is with _given_

elements, and consequently with _stable_ elements, that we reconstitute.

So that, though we may do our best to imitate the mobility of becoming

by an addition that is ever going on, becoming itself slips through our

fingers just when we think we are holding it tight.

Precisely because it is always trying to reconstitute, and to

reconstitute with what is given, the intellect lets what is _new_ in

each moment of a history escape. It does not admit the unforeseeable. It

rejects all creation. That definite antecedents bring forth a definite

consequent, calculable as a function of them, is what satisfies our

intellect. That a definite end calls forth definite means to attain it,

is what we also understand. In both cases we have to do with the known

which is combined with the known, in short, with the old which is

repeated. Our intellect is there at its ease; and, whatever be the

object, it will abstract, separate, eliminate, so as to substitute for

the object itself, if necessary, an approximate equivalent in which

things will happen in this way. But that each instant is a fresh

endowment, that the new is ever upspringing, that the form just come

into existence (although, _when once produced_, it may be regarded as an

effect determined by its causes) could never have been foreseen--because

the causes here, unique in their kind, are part of the effect, have come

into existence with it, and are determined by it as much as they

determine it--all this we can feel within ourselves and also divine, by

sympathy, outside ourselves, but we cannot think it, in the strict sense

of the word, nor express it in terms of pure understanding. No wonder at

that: we must remember what our intellect is meant for. The causality it

seeks and finds everywhere expresses the very mechanism of our industry,

in which we go on recomposing the same whole with the same parts,

repeating the same movements to obtain the same result. The finality it

understands best is the finality of our industry, in which we work on a

model given in advance, that is to say, old or composed of elements

already known. As to invention properly so called, which is, however,

the point of departure of industry itself, our intellect does not

succeed in grasping it in its _upspringing_, that is to say, in its

indivisibility, nor in its _fervor_, that is to say, in its

creativeness. Explaining it always consists in resolving it, it the

unforeseeable and new, into elements old or known, arranged in a

different order. The intellect can no more admit complete novelty than

real becoming; that is to say, here again it lets an essential aspect of

life escape, as if it were not intended to think such an object.

All our analyses bring us to this conclusion. But it is hardly necessary

to go into such long details concerning the mechanism of intellectual

working; it is enough to consider the results. We see that the

intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment

it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or

the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness and the

brutality of an instrument not designed for such use. The history of

hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter. When we think of

the cardinal, urgent and constant need we have to preserve our bodies

and to raise our souls, of the special facilities given to each of us,

in this field, to experiment continually on ourselves and on others, of

the palpable injury by which the wrongness of a medical or pedagogical

practise is both made manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at

the stupidity and especially at the persistence of errors. We may easily

find their origin in the natural obstinacy with which we treat the

living like the lifeless and think all reality, however fluid, under the

form of the sharply defined solid. We are at ease only in the

discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. _The intellect is

characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life._

* * * * *

Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form of life. While

intelligence treats everything mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to

speak, organically. If the consciousness that slumbers in it should

awake, if it were wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off

into action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give up to us

the most intimate secrets of life. For it only carries out further the

work by which life organizes matter--so that we cannot say, as has often

been shown, where organization ends and where instinct begins. When the

little chick is breaking its shell with a peck of its beak, it is acting

by instinct, and yet it does but carry on the movement which has borne

it through embryonic life. Inversely, in the course of embryonic life

itself (especially when the embryo lives freely in the form of a larva),

many of the acts accomplished must be referred to instinct. The most

essential of the primary instincts are really, therefore, vital

processes. The potential consciousness that accompanies them is

generally actualized only at the outset of the act, and leaves the rest

of the process to go on by itself. It would only have to expand more

widely, and then dive into its own depth completely, to be one with the

generative force of life.

When we see in a living body thousands of cells working together to a

common end, dividing the task between them, living each for itself at

the same time as for the others, preserving itself, feeding itself,

reproducing itself, responding to the menace of danger by appropriate

defensive reactions, how can we help thinking of so many instincts? And

yet these are the natural functions of the cell, the constitutive

elements of its vitality. On the other hand, when we see the bees of a

hive forming a system so strictly organized that no individual can live

apart from the others beyond a certain time, even though furnished with

food and shelter, how can we help recognizing that the hive is really,

and not metaphorically, a single organism, of which each bee is a cell

united to the others by invisible bonds? The instinct that animates the

bee is indistinguishable, then, from the force that animates the cell,

or is only a prolongation of that force. In extreme cases like this,

instinct coincides with the work of organization.

Of course there are degrees of perfection in the same instinct. Between

the humble-bee, and the honey-bee, for instance, the distance is great;

and we pass from one to the other through a great number of

intermediaries, which correspond to so many complications of the social

life. But the same diversity is found in the functioning of

histological elements belonging to different tissues more or less akin.

In both cases there are manifold variations on one and the same theme.

The constancy of the theme is manifest, however, and the variations only

fit it to the diversity of the circumstances.

Now, in both cases, in the instinct of the animal and in the vital

properties of the cell, the same knowledge and the same ignorance are

shown. All goes on as if the cell knew, of the other cells, what

concerns itself; as if the animal knew, of the other animals, what it

can utilize--all else remaining in shade. It seems as if life, as soon

as it has become bound up in a species, is cut off from the rest of its

own work, save at one or two points that are of vital concern to the

species just arisen. Is it not plain that life goes to work here exactly

like consciousness, exactly like memory? We trail behind us, unawares,

the whole of our past; but our memory pours into the present only the

odd recollection or two that in some way complete our present situation.

Thus the instinctive knowledge which one species possesses of another on

a certain particular point has its root in the very unity of life, which

is, to use the expression of an ancient philosopher, a "whole

sympathetic to itself." It is impossible to consider some of the special

instincts of the animal and of the plant, evidently arisen in

extraordinary circumstances, without relating them to those

recollections, seemingly forgotten, which spring up suddenly under the

pressure of an urgent need.

No doubt many secondary instincts, and also many varieties of primary

instinct, admit of a scientific explanation. Yet it is doubtful whether

science, with its present methods of explanation, will ever succeed in

analyzing instinct completely. The reason is that instinct and

intelligence are two divergent developments of one and the same

principle, which in the one case remains within itself, in the other

steps out of itself and becomes absorbed in the utilization of inert

matter. This gradual divergence testifies to a radical incompatibility,

and points to the fact that it is impossible for intelligence to

reabsorb instinct. That which is instinctive in instinct cannot be

expressed in terms of intelligence, nor, consequently, can it be

analyzed.

A man born blind, who had lived among others born blind, could not be

made to believe in the possibility of perceiving a distant object

without first perceiving all the objects in between. Yet vision performs

this miracle. In a certain sense the blind man is right, since vision,

having its origin in the stimulation of the retina, by the vibrations of

the light, is nothing else, in fact, but a retinal touch. Such is indeed

the _scientific_ explanation, for the function of science is just to

express all perceptions in terms of touch. But we have shown elsewhere

that the philosophical explanation of perception (if it may still be

called an explanation) must be of another kind.[67] Now instinct also is

a knowledge at a distance. It has the same relation to intelligence that

vision has to touch. Science cannot do otherwise than express it in

terms of intelligence; but in so doing it constructs an imitation of

instinct rather than penetrates within it.

Any one can convince himself of this by studying the ingenious theories

of evolutionist biology. They may be reduced to two types, which are

often intermingled. One type, following the principles of neo-Darwinism,

regards instinct as a sum of accidental differences preserved by

selection: such and such a useful behavior, naturally adopted by the

individual in virtue of an accidental predisposition of the germ, has

been transmitted from germ to germ, waiting for chance to add fresh

improvements to it by the same method. The other type regards instinct

as lapsed intelligence: the action, found useful by the species or by

certain of its representatives, is supposed to have engendered a habit,

which, by hereditary transmission, has become an instinct. Of these two

types of theory, the first has the advantage of being able to bring in

hereditary transmission without raising grave objection; for the

accidental modification which it places at the origin of the instinct is

not supposed to have been acquired by the individual, but to have been

inherent in the germ. But, on the other hand, it is absolutely incapable

of explaining instincts as sagacious as those of most insects. These

instincts surely could not have attained, all at once, their present

degree of complexity; they have probably evolved; but, in a hypothesis

like that of the neo-Darwinians, the evolution of instinct could have

come to pass only by the progressive addition of new pieces which, in

some way, by happy accidents, came to fit into the old. Now it is

evident that, in most cases, instinct could not have perfected itself by

simple accretion: each new piece really requires, if all is not to be

spoiled, a complete recasting of the whole. How could mere chance work a

recasting of the kind? I agree that an accidental modification of the

germ may be passed on hereditarily, and may somehow wait for fresh

accidental modifications to come and complicate it. I agree also that

natural selection may eliminate all those of the more complicated forms

of instinct that are not fit to survive. Still, in order that the life

of the instinct may evolve, complications fit to survive have to be

produced. Now they will be produced only if, in certain cases, the

addition of a new element brings about the correlative change of all the

old elements. No one will maintain that chance could perform such a

miracle: in one form or another we shall appeal to intelligence. We

shall suppose that it is by an effort, more or less conscious, that the

living being develops a higher instinct. But then we shall have to admit

that an acquired habit can become hereditary, and that it does so

regularly enough to ensure an evolution. The thing is doubtful, to put

it mildly. Even if we could refer the instincts of animals to habits

intelligently acquired and hereditarily transmitted, it is not clear how

this sort of explanation could be extended to the vegetable world, where

effort is never intelligent, even supposing it is sometimes conscious.

And yet, when we see with what sureness and precision climbing plants

use their tendrils, what marvelously combined manoeuvres the orchids

perform to procure their fertilization by means of insects,[68] how can

we help thinking that these are so many instincts?

This is not saying that the theory of the neo-Darwinians must be

altogether rejected, any more than that of the neo-Lamarckians. The

first are probably right in holding that evolution takes place from germ

to germ rather than from individual to individual; the second are right

in saying that at the origin of instinct there is an effort (although it

is something quite different, we believe, from an _intelligent_ effort).

But the former are probably wrong when they make the evolution of

instinct an _accidental_ evolution, and the latter when they regard the

effort from which instinct proceeds as an _individual_ effort. The

effort by which a species modifies its instinct, and modifies itself as

well, must be a much deeper thing, dependent solely neither on

circumstances nor on individuals. It is not purely accidental, although

accident has a large place in it; and it does not depend solely on the

initiative of individuals, although individuals collaborate in it.

Compare the different forms of the same instinct in different species of

hymenoptera. The impression derived is not always that of an increasing

complexity made of elements that have been added together one after the

other. Nor does it suggest the idea of steps up a ladder. Rather do we

think, in many cases at least, of the circumference of a circle, from

different points of which these different varieties have started, all

facing the same centre, all making an effort in that direction, but each

approaching it only to the extent of its means, and to the extent also

to which this central point has been illumined for it. In other words,

instinct is everywhere complete, but it is more or less simplified, and,

above all, simplified _differently_. On the other hand, in cases where

we do get the impression of an ascending scale, as if one and the same

instinct had gone on complicating itself more and more in one direction

and along a straight line, the species which are thus arranged by their

instincts into a linear series are by no means always akin. Thus, the

comparative study, in recent years, of the social instinct in the

different apidae proves that the instinct of the meliponines is

intermediary in complexity between the still rudimentary tendency of the

humble bees and the consummate science of the true bees; yet there can

be no kinship between the bees and the meliponines.[69] Most likely, the

degree of complexity of these different societies has nothing to do with

any greater or smaller number of added elements. We seem rather to be

before a _musical theme_, which had first been transposed, the theme as

a whole, into a certain number of tones and on which, still the whole

theme, different variations had been played, some very simple, others

very skilful. As to the original theme, it is everywhere and nowhere.

It is in vain that we try to express it in terms of any idea: it must

have been, originally, _felt_ rather than _thought_. We get the same

impression before the paralyzing instinct of certain wasps. We know that

the different species of hymenoptera that have this paralyzing instinct

lay their eggs in spiders, beetles or caterpillars, which, having first

been subjected by the wasp to a skilful surgical operation, will go on

living motionless a certain number of days, and thus provide the larvae

with fresh meat. In the sting which they give to the nerve-centres of

their victim, in order to destroy its power of moving without killing

it, these different species of hymenoptera take into account, so to

speak, the different species of prey they respectively attack. The

Scolia, which attacks a larva of the rose-beetle, stings it in one point

only, but in this point the motor ganglia are concentrated, and those

ganglia alone: the stinging of other ganglia might cause death and

putrefaction, which it must avoid.[70] The yellow-winged Sphex, which

has chosen the cricket for its victim, knows that the cricket has three

nerve-centres which serve its three pairs of legs--or at least it acts

as if it knew this. It stings the insect first under the neck, then

behind the prothorax, and then where the thorax joins the abdomen.[71]

The Ammophila Hirsuta gives nine successive strokes of its sting upon

nine nerve-centres of its caterpillar, and then seizes the head and

squeezes it in its mandibles, enough to cause paralysis without

death.[72] The general theme is "the necessity of paralyzing without

killing"; the variations are subordinated to the structure of the victim

on which they are played. No doubt the operation is not always perfect.

It has recently been shown that the Ammophila sometimes kills the

caterpillar instead of paralyzing it, that sometimes also it paralyzes

it incompletely.[73] But, because instinct is, like intelligence,

fallible, because it also shows individual deviations, it does not at

all follow that the instinct of the Ammophila has been acquired, as has

been claimed, by tentative intelligent experiments. Even supposing that

the Ammophila has come in course of time to recognize, one after

another, by tentative experiment, the points of its victim which must be

stung to render it motionless, and also the special treatment that must

be inflicted on the head to bring about paralysis without death, how can

we imagine that elements so special of a knowledge so precise have been

regularly transmitted, one by one, by heredity? If, in all our present

experience, there were a single indisputable example of a transmission

of this kind, the inheritance of acquired characters would be questioned

by no one. As a matter of fact, the hereditary transmission of a

contracted habit is effected in an irregular and far from precise

manner, supposing it is ever really effected at all.

But the whole difficulty comes from our desire to express the knowledge

of the hymenoptera in terms of intelligence. It is this that compels us

to compare the Ammophila with the entomologist, who knows the

caterpillar as he knows everything else--from the outside, and without

having on his part a special or vital interest. The Ammophila, we

imagine, must learn, one by one, like the entomologist, the positions of

the nerve-centres of the caterpillar--must acquire at least the

practical knowledge of these positions by trying the effects of its

sting. But there is no need for such a view if we suppose a _sympathy_

(in the etymological sense of the word) between the Ammophila and its

victim, which teaches it from within, so to say, concerning the

vulnerability of the caterpillar. This feeling of vulnerability might

owe nothing to outward perception, but result from the mere presence

together of the Ammophila and the caterpillar, considered no longer as

two organisms, but as two activities. It would express, in a concrete

form, the _relation_ of the one to the other. Certainly, a scientific

theory cannot appeal to considerations of this kind. It must not put

action before organization, sympathy before perception and knowledge.

But, once more, either philosophy has nothing to see here, or its rôle

begins where that of science ends.

Whether it makes instinct a "compound reflex," or a habit formed

intelligently that has become automatism, or a sum of small accidental

advantages accumulated and fixed by selection, in every case science

claims to resolve instinct completely either into _intelligent_ actions,

or into mechanisms built up piece by piece like those combined by our

_intelligence_. I agree indeed that science is here within its function.

It gives us, in default of a real analysis of the object, a translation

of this object in terms of intelligence. But is it not plain that

science itself invites philosophy to consider things in another way? If

our biology was still that of Aristotle, if it regarded the series of

living beings as unilinear, if it showed us the whole of life evolving

towards intelligence and passing, to that end, through sensibility and

instinct, we should be right, we, the intelligent beings, in turning

back towards the earlier and consequently inferior manifestations of

life and in claiming to fit them, without deforming them, into the molds

of our understanding. But one of the clearest results of biology has

been to show that evolution has taken place along divergent lines. It is

at the extremity of two of these lines--the two principal--that we find

intelligence and instinct in forms almost pure. Why, then, should

instinct be resolvable into intelligent elements? Why, even, into terms

entirely intelligible? Is it not obvious that to think here of the

intelligent, or of the absolutely intelligible, is to go back to the

Aristotelian theory of nature? No doubt it is better to go back to that

than to stop short before instinct as before an unfathomable mystery.

But, though instinct is not within the domain of intelligence, it is not

situated beyond the limits of mind. In the phenomena of feeling, in

unreflecting sympathy and antipathy, we experience in ourselves--though

under a much vaguer form, and one too much penetrated with

intelligence--something of what must happen in the consciousness of an

insect acting by instinct. Evolution does but sunder, in order to

develop them to the end, elements which, at their origin,

interpenetrated each other. More precisely, intelligence is, before

anything else, the faculty of relating one point of space to another,

one material object to another; it applies to all things, but remains

outside them; and of a deep cause it perceives only the effects spread

out side by side. Whatever be the force that is at work in the genesis

of the nervous system of the caterpillar, to our eyes and our

intelligence it is only a juxtaposition of nerves and nervous centres.

It is true that we thus get the whole outer effect of it. The Ammophila,

no doubt, discerns but a very little of that force, just what concerns

itself; but at least it discerns it from within, quite otherwise than by

a process of knowledge--by an intuition (_lived_ rather than

_represented_), which is probably like what we call divining sympathy.

A very significant fact is the swing to and fro of scientific theories

of instinct, from regarding it as intelligent to regarding it as simply

intelligible, or, shall I say, between likening it to an intelligence

"lapsed" and reducing it to a pure mechanism.[74] Each of these systems

of explanation triumphs in its criticism of the other, the first when it

shows us that instinct cannot be a mere reflex, the other when it

declares that instinct is something different from intelligence, even

fallen into unconsciousness. What can this mean but that they are two

symbolisms, equally acceptable in certain respects, and, in other

respects, equally inadequate to their object? The concrete explanation,

no longer scientific, but metaphysical, must be sought along quite

another path, not in the direction of intelligence, but in that of

"sympathy."

* * * * *

Instinct is sympathy. If this sympathy could extend its object and also

reflect upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operations--just

as intelligence, developed and disciplined, guides us into matter.

For--we cannot too often repeat it--intelligence and instinct are turned

in opposite directions, the former towards inert matter, the latter

towards life. Intelligence, by means of science, which is its work, will

deliver up to us more and more completely the secret of physical

operations; of life it brings us, and moreover only claims to bring us,

a translation in terms of inertia. It goes all round life, taking from

outside the greatest possible number of views of it, drawing it into

itself instead of entering into it. But it is to the very inwardness of

life that _intuition_ leads us--by intuition I mean instinct that has

become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its

object and of enlarging it indefinitely.

That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved by the

existence in man of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception.

Our eye perceives the features of the living being, merely as assembled,

not as mutually organized. The intention of life, the simple movement

that runs through the lines, that binds them together and gives them

significance, escapes it. This intention is just what the artist tries

to regain, in placing himself back within the object by a kind of

sympathy, in breaking down, by an effort of intuition, the barrier that

space puts up between him and his model. It is true that this aesthetic

intuition, like external perception, only attains the individual. But we

can conceive an inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would

take life _in general_ for its object, just as physical science, in

following to the end the direction pointed out by external perception,

prolongs the individual facts into general laws. No doubt this

philosophy will never obtain a knowledge of its object comparable to

that which science has of its own. Intelligence remains the luminous

nucleus around which instinct, even enlarged and purified into

intuition, forms only a vague nebulosity. But, in default of knowledge

properly so called, reserved to pure intelligence, intuition may enable

us to grasp what it is that intelligence fails to give us, and indicate

the means of supplementing it. On the one hand, it will utilize the

mechanism of intelligence itself to show how intellectual molds cease to

be strictly applicable; and on the other hand, by its own work, it will

suggest to us the vague feeling, if nothing more, of what must take the

place of intellectual molds. Thus, intuition may bring the intellect to

recognize that life does not quite go into the category of the many nor

yet into that of the one; that neither mechanical causality nor finality

can give a sufficient interpretation of the vital process. Then, by the

sympathetic communication which it establishes between us and the rest

of the living, by the expansion of our consciousness which it brings

about, it introduces us into life's own domain, which is reciprocal

interpenetration, endlessly continued creation. But, though it thereby

transcends intelligence, it is from intelligence that has come the push

that has made it rise to the point it has reached. Without intelligence,

it would have remained in the form of instinct, riveted to the special

object of its practical interest, and turned outward by it into

movements of locomotion.

How theory of knowledge must take account of these two faculties,

intellect and intuition, and how also, for want of establishing a

sufficiently clear distinction between them, it becomes involved in

inextricable difficulties, creating phantoms of ideas to which there

cling phantoms of problems, we shall endeavor to show a little further

on. We shall see that the problem of knowledge, from this point of view,

is one with the metaphysical problem, and that both one and the other

depend upon experience. On the one hand, indeed, if intelligence is

charged with matter and instinct with life, we must squeeze them both in

order to get the double essence from them; metaphysics is therefore

dependent upon theory of knowledge. But, on the other hand, if

consciousness has thus split up into intuition and intelligence, it is

because of the need it had to apply itself to matter at the same time as

it had to follow the stream of life. The double form of consciousness is

then due to the double form of the real, and theory of knowledge must be

dependent upon metaphysics. In fact, each of these two lines of thought

leads to the other; they form a circle, and there can be no other centre

to the circle but the empirical study of evolution. It is only in seeing

consciousness run through matter, lose itself there and find itself

there again, divide and reconstitute itself, that we shall form an idea

of the mutual opposition of the two terms, as also, perhaps, of their

common origin. But, on the other hand, by dwelling on this opposition of

the two elements and on this identity of origin, perhaps we shall bring

out more clearly the meaning of evolution itself.

Such will be the aim of our next chapter. But the facts that we have

just noticed must have already suggested to us the idea that life is

connected either with consciousness or with something that resembles it.

Throughout the whole extent of the animal kingdom, we have said,

consciousness seems proportionate to the living being's power of choice.

It lights up the zone of potentialities that surrounds the act. It fills

the interval between what is done and what might be done. Looked at from

without, we may regard it as a simple aid to action, a light that action

kindles, a momentary spark flying up from the friction of real action

against possible actions. But we must also point out that things would

go on in just the same way if consciousness, instead of being the

effect, were the cause. We might suppose that consciousness, even in the

most rudimentary animal, covers by right an enormous field, but is

compressed in fact in a kind of vise: each advance of the nervous

centres, by giving the organism a choice between a larger number of

actions, calls forth the potentialities that are capable of surrounding

the real, thus opening the vise wider and allowing consciousness to pass

more freely. In this second hypothesis, as in the first, consciousness

is still the instrument of action; but it is even more true to say that

action is the instrument of consciousness; for the complicating of

action with action, and the opposing of action to action, are for the

imprisoned consciousness the only possible means to set itself free.

How, then, shall we choose between the two hypotheses? If the first is

true, consciousness must express exactly, at each instant, the state of

the brain; there is strict parallelism (so far as intelligible) between

the psychical and the cerebral state. On the second hypothesis, on the

contrary, there is indeed solidarity and interdependence between the

brain and consciousness, but not parallelism: the more complicated the

brain becomes, thus giving the organism greater choice of possible

actions, the more does consciousness outrun its physical concomitant.

Thus, the recollection of the same spectacle probably modifies in the

same way a dog's brain and a man's brain, if the perception has been the

same; yet the recollection must be very different in the man's

consciousness from what it is in the dog's. In the dog, the recollection

remains the captive of perception; it is brought back to consciousness

only when an analogous perception recalls it by reproducing the same

spectacle, and then it is manifested by the recognition, _acted_ rather

than _thought_, of the present perception much more than by an actual

reappearance of the recollection itself. Man, on the contrary, is

capable of calling up the recollection at will, at any moment,

independently of the present perception. He is not limited to _playing_

his past life again; he _represents_ and _dreams_ it. The local

modification of the brain to which the recollection is attached being

the same in each case, the psychological difference between the two

recollections cannot have its ground in a particular difference of

detail between the two cerebral mechanisms, but in the difference

between the two brains taken each as a whole. The more complex of the

two, in putting a greater number of mechanisms in opposition to one

another, has enabled consciousness to disengage itself from the

restraint of one and all and to reach independence. That things do

happen in this way, that the second of the two hypotheses is that which

must be chosen, is what we have tried to prove, in a former work, by

the study of facts that best bring into relief the relation of the

conscious state to the cerebral state, the facts of normal and

pathological recognition, in particular the forms of aphasia.[75] But it

could have been proved by pure reasoning, before even it was evidenced

by facts. We have shown on what self-contradictory postulate, on what

confusion of two mutually incompatible symbolisms, the hypothesis of

equivalence between the cerebral state and the psychic state rests.[76]

The evolution of life, looked at from this point, receives a clearer

meaning, although it cannot be subsumed under any actual _idea_. It is

as if a broad current of consciousness had penetrated matter, loaded, as

all consciousness is, with an enormous multiplicity of interwoven

potentialities. It has carried matter along to organization, but its

movement has been at once infinitely retarded and infinitely divided. On

the one hand, indeed, consciousness has had to fall asleep, like the

chrysalis in the envelope in which it is preparing for itself wings;

and, on the other hand, the manifold tendencies it contained have been

distributed among divergent series of organisms which, moreover, express

these tendencies outwardly in movements rather than internally in

representations. In the course of this evolution, while some beings have

fallen more and more asleep, others have more and more completely

awakened, and the torpor of some has served the activity of others. But

the waking could be effected in two different ways. Life, that is to say

consciousness launched into matter, fixed its attention either on its

own movement or on the matter it was passing through; and it has thus

been turned either in the direction of intuition or in that of

intellect. Intuition, at first sight, seems far preferable to intellect,

since in it life and consciousness remain within themselves. But a

glance at the evolution of living beings shows us that intuition could

not go very far. On the side of intuition, consciousness found itself so

restricted by its envelope that intuition had to shrink into instinct,

that is, to embrace only the very small portion of life that interested

it; and this it embraces only in the dark, touching it while hardly

seeing it. On this side, the horizon was soon shut out. On the contrary,

consciousness, in shaping itself into intelligence, that is to say in

concentrating itself at first on matter, seems to externalize itself in

relation to itself; but, just because it adapts itself thereby to

objects from without, it succeeds in moving among them and in evading

the barriers they oppose to it, thus opening to itself an unlimited

field. Once freed, moreover, it can turn inwards on itself, and awaken

the potentialities of intuition which still slumber within it.

From this point of view, not only does consciousness appear as the

motive principle of evolution, but also, among conscious beings

themselves, man comes to occupy a privileged place. Between him and the

animals the difference is no longer one of degree, but of kind. We shall

show how this conclusion is arrived at in our next chapter. Let us now

show how the preceding analyses suggest it.

A noteworthy fact is the extraordinary disproportion between the

consequences of an invention and the invention itself. We have said that

intelligence is modeled on matter and that it aims in the first place at

fabrication. But does it fabricate in order to fabricate or does it not

pursue involuntarily, and even unconsciously, something entirely

different? Fabricating consists in shaping matter, in making it supple

and in bending it, in converting it into an instrument in order to

become master of it. It is this _mastery_ that profits humanity, much

more even than the material result of the invention itself. Though we

derive an immediate advantage from the thing made, as an intelligent

animal might do, and though this advantage be all the inventor sought,

it is a slight matter compared with the new ideas and new feelings that

the invention may give rise to in every direction, as if the essential

part of the effect were to raise us above ourselves and enlarge our

horizon. Between the effect and the cause the disproportion is so great

that it is difficult to regard the cause as _producer_ of its effect. It

releases it, whilst settling, indeed, its direction. Everything happens

as though the grip of intelligence on matter were, in its main

intention, to _let something pass_ that matter is holding back.

The same impression arises when we compare the brain of man with that of

the animals. The difference at first appears to be only a difference of

size and complexity. But, judging by function, there must be something

else besides. In the animal, the motor mechanisms that the brain

succeeds in setting up, or, in other words, the habits contracted

voluntarily, have no other object nor effect than the accomplishment of

the movements marked out in these habits, stored in these mechanisms.

But, in man, the motor habit may have a second result, out of proportion

to the first: it can hold other motor habits in check, and thereby, in

overcoming automatism, set consciousness free. We know what vast regions

in the human brain language occupies. The cerebral mechanisms that

correspond to the words have this in particular, that they can be made

to grapple with other mechanisms, those, for instance, that correspond

to the things themselves, or even be made to grapple with one another.

Meanwhile consciousness, which would have been dragged down and drowned

in the accomplishment of the act, is restored and set free.[77]

The difference must therefore be more radical than a superficial

examination would lead us to suppose. It is the difference between a

mechanism which engages the attention and a mechanism from which it can

be diverted. The primitive steam-engine, as Newcomen conceived it,

required the presence of a person exclusively employed to turn on and

off the taps, either to let the steam into the cylinder or to throw the

cold spray into it in order to condense the steam. It is said that a boy

employed on this work, and very tired of having to do it, got the idea

of tying the handles of the taps, with cords, to the beam of the engine.

Then the machine opened and closed the taps itself; it worked all alone.

Now, if an observer had compared the structure of this second machine

with that of the first without taking into account the two boys left to

watch over them, he would have found only a slight difference of

complexity. That is, indeed, all we can perceive when we look only at

the machines. But if we cast a glance at the two boys, we shall see that

whilst one is wholly taken up by the watching, the other is free to go

and play as he chooses, and that, from this point of view, the

difference between the two machines is radical, the first holding the

attention captive, the second setting it at liberty. A difference of the

same kind, we think, would be found between the brain of an animal and

the human brain.

If, now, we should wish to express this in terms of finality, we should

have to say that consciousness, after having been obliged, in order to

set itself free, to divide organization into two complementary parts,

vegetables on one hand and animals on the other, has sought an issue in

the double direction of instinct and of intelligence. It has not found

it with instinct, and it has not obtained it on the side of intelligence

except by a sudden leap from the animal to man. So that, in the last

analysis, man might be considered the reason for the existence of the

entire organization of life on our planet. But this would be only a

manner of speaking. There is, in reality, only a current of existence

and the opposing current; thence proceeds the whole evolution of life.

We must now grasp more closely the opposition of these two currents.

Perhaps we shall thus discover for them a common source. By this we

shall also, no doubt, penetrate the most obscure regions of metaphysics.

However, as the two directions we have to follow are clearly marked, in

intelligence on the one hand, in instinct and intuition on the other, we

are not afraid of straying. A survey of the evolution of life suggests

to us a certain conception of knowledge, and also a certain metaphysics,

which imply each other. Once made clear, this metaphysics and this

critique may throw some light, in their turn, on evolution as a whole.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 51: This view of adaptation has been noted by M.F. Marin in a

remarkable article on the origin of species, "L'Origine des espèces"

(_Revue scientifique_, Nov. 1901, p. 580).]

[Footnote 52: De Saporta and Marion, _L'Évolution des cryptogames_,

1881, p. 37.]

[Footnote 53: On fixation and parasitism in general, see the work of

Houssay, _La Forme et la vie_, Paris, 1900, pp. 721-807.]

[Footnote 54: Cope, _op. cit._ p. 76.]

[Footnote 55: Just as the plant, in certain cases, recovers the faculty

of moving actively which slumbers in it, so the animal, in exceptional

circumstances, can replace itself in the conditions of the vegetative

life and develop in itself an equivalent of the chlorophyllian function.

It appears, indeed, from recent experiments of Maria von Linden, that

the chrysalides and the caterpillars of certain lepidoptera, under the

influence of light, fix the carbon of the carbonic acid contained in the

atmosphere (M. von Linden, "L'Assimilation de l'acide carbonique par les

chrysalides de Lépidoptères," _C.R. de la Soc. de biologie_, 1905, pp.

692 ff.).]

[Footnote 56: _Archives de physiologie_, 1892.]

[Footnote 57: De Manacéine, "Quelques observations expérimentales sur

l'influence de l'insomnie absolue" (_Arch. ital. de biologie_, t. xxi.,

1894, pp. 322 ff.). Recently, analogous observations have been made on a

man who died of inanition after a fast of thirty-five days. See, on this

subject, in the _Année biologique_ of 1898, p. 338, the résumé of an

article (in Russian) by Tarakevitch and Stchasny.]

[Footnote 58: Cuvier said: "The nervous system is, at bottom, the whole

animal; the other systems are there only to serve it." ("Sur un nouveau

rapprochement à établir entre les classes qui composent le regne

animal," _Arch. du Muséum d'histoire naturelle_, Paris, 1812, pp.

73-84.) Of course, it would be necessary to apply a great many

restrictions to this formula--for example, to allow for the cases of

degradation and retrogression in which the nervous system passes into

the background. And, moreover, with the nervous system must be included

the sensorial apparatus on the one hand and the motor on the other,

between which it acts as intermediary. Cf. Foster, art. "Physiology," in

the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, Edinburgh, 1885, p. 17.]

[Footnote 59: See, on these different points, the work of Gaudry, _Essai

de paléontologie philosophique_, Paris, 1896, pp. 14-16 and 78-79.]

[Footnote 60: See, on this subject, Shaler, _The Individual_, New York,

1900, pp. 118-125.]

[Footnote 61: This point is disputed by M. René Quinton, who regards the

carnivorous and ruminant mammals, as well as certain birds, as

subsequent to man (R. Quinton, _L'Eau de mer milieu organique_, Paris,

1904, p. 435). We may say here that our general conclusions, although

very different from M. Quinton's, are not irreconcilable with them; for

if evolution has really been such as we represent it, the vertebrates

must have made an effort to maintain themselves in the most favorable

conditions of activity--the very conditions, indeed, which life had

chosen in the beginning.]

[Footnote 62: M. Paul Lacombe has laid great stress on the important

influence that great inventions have exercised on the evolution of

humanity (P. Lacombe, _De l'histoire considérée comme science_, Paris,

1894. See, in particular, pp. 168-247).]

[Footnote 63: Bouvier, "La Nidification des abeilles à l'air libre"

(_C.R. de l'Ac. des sciences_, 7 mai 1906).]

[Footnote 64: Plato, _Phaedrus_, 265 E.]

[Footnote 65: We shall return to these points in the next chapter.]

[Footnote 66: We shall return to this point in chapter iii., p. 259.]

[Footnote 67: _Matière et mémoire_, chap. i.]

[Footnote 68: See the two works of Darwin, _Climbing Plants_ and _The

Fertilization of Orchids by Insects_.]

[Footnote 69: Buttel-Reepen, "Die phylogenetische Entstehung des

Bienenstaates" (_Biol. Centralblatt_, xxiii. 1903), p. 108 in

particular.]

[Footnote 70: Fabre, _Souvenirs entomologiques_, 3^e série, Paris, 1890,

pp. 1-69.]

[Footnote 71: Fabre, _Souvenirs entomologiques_, 1^{re} série, Paris,

3^e édition, Paris, 1894, pp. 93 ff.]

[Footnote 72: Fabre, _Nouveaux souvenirs entomologiques_, Paris, 1882,

pp. 14 ff.]

[Footnote 73: Peckham, _Wasps, Solitary and Social_, Westminster, 1905,

pp. 28 ff.]

[Footnote 74: See, in particular, among recent works, Bethe, "Dürfen wir

den Ameisen und Bienen psychische Qualitäten zuschreiben?" (_Arch. f. d.

ges. Physiologie_, 1898), and Forel, "Un Aperçu de psychologie comparée"

(_Année psychologique_, 1895).]

[Footnote 75: _Matière et mémoire_, chaps. ii. and iii.]

[Footnote 76: "Le Paralogisme psycho-physiologique" (_Revue de

métaphysique_, Nov. 1904).]

[Footnote 77: A geologist whom we have already had occasion to cite,

N.S. Shaler, well says that "when we come to man, it seems as if we find

the ancient subjection of mind to body abolished, and the intellectual

parts develop with an extraordinary rapidity, the structure of the body

remaining identical in essentials" (Shaler, _The Interpretation of

Nature_, Boston, 1899, p. 187).]