But there is the same confusion in the moderns, with this difference,

however, that the relation between the two terms is inverted: laws are

no longer reduced to genera, but genera to laws; and science, still

supposed to be uniquely one, becomes altogether relative, instead of

being, as the ancients wished, altogether at one with the absolute. A

noteworthy fact is the eclipse of the problem of genera in modern

philosophy. Our theory of knowledge turns almost entirely on the

question of laws: genera are left to make shift with laws as best they

can. The reason is, that modern philosophy has its point of departure in

the great astronomical and physical discoveries of modern times. The

laws of Kepler and of Galileo have remained for it the ideal and unique

type of all knowledge. Now, a law is a relation between things or

between facts. More precisely, a law of mathematical form expresses the

fact that a certain magnitude is a function of one or several other

variables appropriately chosen. Now, the choice of the variable

magnitudes, the distribution of nature into objects and into facts, has

already something of the contingent and the conventional. But, admitting

that the choice is hinted at, if not prescribed, by experience, the law

remains none the less a relation, and a relation is essentially a

comparison; it has objective reality only for an intelligence that

represents to itself several terms at the same time. This intelligence

may be neither mine nor yours: a science which bears on laws may

therefore be an objective science, which experience contains in advance

and which we simply make it disgorge; but it is none the less true that

a comparison of some kind must be effected here, impersonally if not by

any one in particular, and that an experience made of laws, that is, of

terms _related_ to other terms, is an experience made of comparisons,

which, before we receive it, has already had to pass through an

atmosphere of intellectuality. The idea of a science and of an

experience entirely relative to the human understanding was therefore

implicitly contained in the conception of a science one and integral,

composed of laws: Kant only brought it to light. But this conception is

the result of an arbitrary confusion between the generality of laws and

that of genera. Though an intelligence be necessary to condition terms

by relation to each other, we may conceive that in certain cases the

terms themselves may exist independently. And if, beside relations of

term to term, experience also presents to us independent terms, the

living genera being something quite different from systems of laws, one

half, at least, of our knowledge bears on the "thing-in-itself," the

very reality. This knowledge may be very difficult, just because it no

longer builds up its own object and is obliged, on the contrary, to

submit to it; but, however little it cuts into its object, it is into

the absolute itself that it bites. We may go further: the other half of

knowledge is no longer so radically, so definitely relative as certain

philosophers say, if we can establish that it bears on a reality of

inverse order, a reality which we always express in mathematical laws,

that is to say in relations that imply comparisons, but which lends

itself to this work only because it is weighted with spatiality and

consequently with geometry. Be that as it may, it is the confusion of

two kinds of order that lies behind the relativism of the moderns, as it

lay behind the dogmatism of the ancients.

We have said enough to mark the origin of this confusion. It is due to

the fact that the "vital" order, which is essentially creation, is

manifested to us less in its essence than in some of its accidents,

those which _imitate_ the physical and geometrical order; like it, they

present to us repetitions that make generalization possible, and in that

we have all that interests us. There is no doubt that life as a whole is

an evolution, that is, an unceasing transformation. But life can

progress only by means of the living, which are its depositaries.

Innumerable living beings, almost alike, have to repeat each other in

space and in time for the novelty they are working out to grow and

mature. It is like a book that advances towards a new edition by going

through thousands of reprints with thousands of copies. There is,

however, this difference between the two cases, that the successive

impressions are identical, as well as the simultaneous copies of the

same impression, whereas representatives of one and the same species are

never entirely the same, either in different points of space or at

different moments of time. Heredity does not only transmit characters;

it transmits also the impetus in virtue of which the characters are

modified, and this impetus is vitality itself. That is why we say that

the repetition which serves as the base of our generalizations is

essential in the physical order, accidental in the vital order. The

physical order is "automatic;" the vital order is, I will not say

voluntary, but analogous to the order "willed."

Now, as soon as we have clearly distinguished between the order that is

"willed" and the order that is "automatic," the ambiguity that underlies

the idea of _disorder_ is dissipated, and, with it, one of the principal

difficulties of the problem of knowledge.

The main problem of the theory of knowledge is to know how science is

possible, that is to say, in effect, why there is order and not disorder

in things. That order exists is a _fact_. But, on the other hand,

disorder, _which appears to us to be less than order_, is, it seems, of

_right_. The existence of order is then a mystery to be cleared up, at

any rate a problem to be solved. More simply, when we undertake to found

order, we regard it as contingent, if not in things, at least as viewed

by the mind: of a thing that we do not judge to be contingent we do not

require an explanation. If order did not appear to us as a conquest over

something, or as an addition to something (which something is thought to

be the "absence of order"), ancient realism would not have spoken of a

"matter" to which the Idea superadded itself, nor would modern idealism

have supposed a "sensuous manifold" that the understanding organizes

into nature. Now, it is unquestionable that all order is contingent, and

conceived as such. But contingent in relation to what?

The reply, to our thinking, is not doubtful. An order is contingent, and

seems so, in relation to the inverse order, as verse is contingent in

relation to prose and prose in relation to verse. But, just as all

speech which is not prose is verse and necessarily conceived as verse,

just as all speech which is not verse is prose and necessarily conceived

as prose, so any state of things that is not one of the two orders is

the other and is necessarily conceived as the other. But it may happen

that we do not realize what we are actually thinking of, and perceive

the idea really present to our mind only through a mist of affective

states. Any one can be convinced of this by considering the use we make

of the idea of disorder in daily life. When I enter a room and pronounce

it to be "in disorder," what do I mean? The position of each object is

explained by the automatic movements of the person who has slept in the

room, or by the efficient causes, whatever they may be, that have caused

each article of furniture, clothing, etc., to be where it is: the order,

in the second sense of the word, is perfect. But it is order of the

first kind that I am expecting, the order that a methodical person

consciously puts into his life, the willed order and not the automatic:

so I call the absence of this order "disorder." At bottom, all there is

that is real, perceived and even conceived, in this absence of one of

the two kinds of order, is the presence of the other. But the second is

indifferent to me, _I am interested only in the first_, and I express

the presence of the second as a function of the first, instead of

expressing it, so to speak, as a function of itself, by saying it is

_disorder_. Inversely, when we affirm that we are imagining a chaos,

that is to say a state of things in which the physical world no longer

obeys laws, what are we thinking of? We imagine facts that appear and

disappear _capriciously_. First we think of the physical universe as we

know it, with effects and causes well proportioned to each other; then,

by a series of arbitrary decrees, we augment, diminish, suppress, so as

to obtain what we call disorder. In reality we have substituted _will_

for the mechanism of nature; we have replaced the "automatic order" by a

multitude of elementary wills, just to the extent that we imagine the

apparition or vanishing of phenomena. No doubt, for all these little

wills to constitute a "willed order," they must have accepted the

direction of a higher will. But, on looking closely at them, we see that

that is just what they do: our own will is there, which objectifies

itself in each of these capricious wills in turn, and takes good care

not to connect the same with the same, nor to permit the effect to be

proportional to the cause--in fact makes one simple intention hover over

the whole of the elementary volitions. Thus, here again, the absence of

one of the two orders consists in the presence of the other. In

analyzing the idea of chance, which is closely akin to the idea of

disorder, we find the same elements. When the wholly mechanical play of

the causes which stop the wheel on a number makes me win, and

consequently acts like a good genius, careful of my interests, or when

the wholly mechanical force of the wind tears a tile off the roof and

throws it on to my head, that is to say acts like a bad genius,

conspiring against my person: in both cases I find a mechanism where I

should have looked for, where, indeed, it seems as if I ought to have

found, an intention. That is what I express in speaking of _chance_. And

of an anarchical world, in which phenomena succeed each other

capriciously, I should say again that it is a realm of chance, meaning

that I find before me wills, or rather _decrees_, when what I am

expecting is mechanism. Thus is explained the singular vacillation of

the mind when it tries to define chance. Neither efficient cause nor

final cause can furnish the definition sought. The mind swings to and

fro, unable to rest, between the idea of an absence of final cause and

that of an absence of efficient cause, each of these definitions sending

it back to the other. The problem remains insoluble, in fact, so long as

the idea of chance is regarded as a pure idea, without mixture of

feeling. But, in reality, chance merely objectifies the state of mind of

one who, expecting one of the two kinds of order, finds himself

confronted with the other. Chance and disorder are therefore necessarily

conceived as relative. So if we wish to represent them to ourselves as

absolute, we perceive that we are going to and fro like a shuttle

between the two kinds of order, passing into the one just at the moment

at which we might catch ourself in the other, and that the supposed

absence of all order is really the presence of both, with, besides, the

swaying of a mind that cannot rest finally in either. Neither in things

nor in our idea of things can there be any question of presenting this

disorder as the substratum of order, since it implies the two kinds of

order and is made of their combination.

But our intelligence is not stopped by this. By a simple _sic jubeo_ it

posits a disorder which is an "absence of order." In so doing it thinks

a word or a set of words, nothing more. If it seeks to attach an idea

to the word, it finds that disorder may indeed be the negation of order,

but that this negation is then the implicit affirmation of the presence

of the opposite order, which we shut our eyes to because it does not

interest us, or which we evade by denying the second order in its

turn--that is, at bottom, by re-establishing the first. How can we

speak, then, of an incoherent diversity which an understanding

organizes? It is no use for us to say that no one supposes this

incoherence to be realized or realizable: when we speak of it, we

believe we are thinking of it; now, in analyzing the idea actually

present, we find, as we said before, only the disappointment of the mind

confronted with an order that does not interest it, or a swaying of the

mind between two kinds of order, or, finally, the idea pure and simple

of the empty word that we have created by joining a negative prefix to a

word which itself signifies something. But it is this analysis that we

neglect to make. We omit it, precisely because it does not occur to us

to distinguish two kinds of order that are irreducible to one another.

We said, indeed, that all order necessarily appears as contingent. If

there are two kinds of order, this contingency of order is explained:

one of the forms is contingent in relation to the other. Where I find

the geometrical order, the vital was possible; where the order is vital,

it might have been geometrical. But suppose that the order is everywhere

of the same kind, and simply admits of degrees which go from the

geometrical to the vital: if a determinate order still appears to me to

be contingent, and can no longer be so by relation to an order of

another kind, I shall necessarily believe that the order is contingent

by relation to an _absence of itself_, that is to say by relation to a

state of things "in which there is no order at all." And this state of

things I shall believe that I am thinking of, because it is implied, it

seems, in the very contingency of order, which is an unquestionable

fact. I shall therefore place at the summit of the hierarchy the vital

order; then, as a diminution or lower complication of it, the

geometrical order; and finally, at the bottom of all, an absence of

order, incoherence itself, on which order is superposed. This is why

incoherence has the effect on me of a word behind which there must be

something real, if not in things, at least in thought. But if I observe

that the state of things implied by the contingency of a determinate

order is simply the presence of the contrary order, and if by this very

fact I posit two kinds of order, each the inverse of the other, I

perceive that no intermediate degrees can be imagined between the two

orders, and that there is no going down from the two orders to the

"incoherent." Either the incoherent is only a word, devoid of meaning,

or, if I give it a meaning, it is on condition of putting incoherence

midway between the two orders, and not below both of them. There is not

first the incoherent, then the geometrical, then the vital; there is

only the geometrical and the vital, and then, by a swaying of the mind

between them, the idea of the incoherent. To speak of an uncoördinated

diversity to which order is superadded is therefore to commit a

veritable _petitio principii_; for in imagining the uncoördinated we

really posit an order, or rather two.

* * * * *

This long analysis was necessary to show how the real can pass from

tension to extension and from freedom to mechanical necessity by way of

inversion. It was not enough to prove that this relation between the two

terms is suggested to us, at once, by consciousness and by sensible

experience. It was necessary to prove that the geometrical order has no

need of explanation, being purely and simply the suppression of the

inverse order. And, for that, it was indispensable to prove that

suppression is always a substitution and is even necessarily conceived

as such: it is the requirements of practical life alone that suggest to

us here a way of speaking that deceives us both as to what happens in

things and as to what is present to our thought. We must now examine

more closely the inversion whose consequences we have just described.

What, then, is the principle that has only to let go its tension--may we

say to _detend_--in order to _extend_, the interruption of the cause

here being equivalent to a reversal of the effect?

For want of a better word we have called it consciousness. But we do not

mean the narrowed consciousness that functions in each of us. Our own

consciousness is the consciousness of a certain living being, placed in

a certain point of space; and though it does indeed move in the same

direction as its principle, it is continually drawn the opposite way,

obliged, though it goes forward, to look behind. This retrospective

vision is, as we have shown, the natural function of the intellect, and

consequently of distinct consciousness. In order that our consciousness

shall coincide with something of its principle, it must detach itself

from the _already-made_ and attach itself to the _being-made_. It needs

that, turning back on itself and twisting on itself, the faculty of

_seeing_ should be made to be one with the act of _willing_--a painful

effort which we can make suddenly, doing violence to our nature, but

cannot sustain more than a few moments. In free action, when we contract

our whole being in order to thrust it forward, we have the more or less

clear consciousness of motives and of impelling forces, and even, at

rare moments, of the becoming by which they are organized into an act:

but the pure willing, the current that runs through this matter,

communicating life to it, is a thing which we hardly feel, which at most

we brush lightly as it passes. Let us try, however, to instal ourselves

within it, if only for a moment; even then it is an individual and

fragmentary will that we grasp. To get to the principle of all life, as

also of all materiality, we must go further still. Is it impossible? No,

by no means; the history of philosophy is there to bear witness. There

is no durable system that is not, at least in some of its parts,

vivified by intuition. Dialectic is necessary to put intuition to the

proof, necessary also in order that intuition should break itself up

into concepts and so be propagated to other men; but all it does, often

enough, is to develop the result of that intuition which transcends it.

The truth is, the two procedures are of opposite direction: the same

effort, by which ideas are connected with ideas, causes the intuition

which the ideas were storing up to vanish. The philosopher is obliged to

abandon intuition, once he has received from it the impetus, and to rely

on himself to carry on the movement by pushing the concepts one after

another. But he soon feels he has lost foothold; he must come into touch

with intuition again; he must undo most of what he has done. In short,

dialectic is what ensures the agreement of our thought with itself. But

by dialectic--which is only a relaxation of intuition--many different

agreements are possible, while there is only one truth. Intuition, if it

could be prolonged beyond a few instants, would not only make the

philosopher agree with his own thought, but also all philosophers with

each other. Such as it is, fugitive and incomplete, it is, in each

system, what is worth more than the system and survives it. The object

of philosophy would be reached if this intuition could be sustained,

generalized and, above all, assured of external points of reference in

order not to go astray. To that end a continual coming and going is

necessary between nature and mind.

When we put back our being into our will, and our will itself into the

impulsion it prolongs, we understand, we feel, that reality is a

perpetual growth, a creation pursued without end. Our will already

performs this miracle. Every human work in which there is invention,

every voluntary act in which there is freedom, every movement of an

organism that manifests spontaneity, brings something new into the

world. True, these are only creations of form. How could they be

anything else? We are not the vital current itself; we are this current

already loaded with matter, that is, with congealed parts of its own

substance which it carries along its course. In the composition of a

work of genius, as in a simple free decision, we do, indeed, stretch the

spring of our activity to the utmost and thus create what no mere

assemblage of materials could have given (what assemblage of curves

already known can ever be equivalent to the pencil-stroke of a great

artist?) but there are, none the less, elements here that pre-exist and

survive their organization. But if a simple arrest of the action that

generates form could constitute matter (are not the original lines drawn

by the artist themselves already the fixation and, as it were,

congealment of a movement?), a creation of matter would be neither

incomprehensible nor inadmissible. For we seize from within, we live at

every instant, a creation of form, and it is just in those cases in

which the form is pure, and in which the creative current is momentarily

interrupted, that there is a creation of matter. Consider the letters of

the alphabet that enter into the composition of everything that has ever

been written: we do not conceive that new letters spring up and come to

join themselves to the others in order to make a new poem. But that the

poet creates the poem and that human thought is thereby made richer, we

understand very well: this creation is a simple act of the mind, and

action has only to make a pause, instead of continuing into a new

creation, in order that, of itself, it may break up into words which

dissociate themselves into letters which are added to all the letters

there are already in the world. Thus, that the number of atoms composing

the material universe at a given moment should increase runs counter to

our habits of mind, contradicts the whole of our experience; but that a

reality of quite another order, which contrasts with the atom as the

thought of the poet with the letters of the alphabet, should increase by

sudden additions, is not inadmissible; and the reverse of each addition

might indeed be a world, which we then represent to ourselves,

symbolically, as an assemblage of atoms.

The mystery that spreads over the existence of the universe comes in

great part from this, that we want the genesis of it to have been

accomplished at one stroke or the whole of matter to be eternal. Whether

we speak of creation or posit an uncreated matter, it is the totality of

the universe that we are considering at once. At the root of this habit

of mind lies the prejudice which we will analyze in our next chapter,

the idea, common to materialists and to their opponents, that there is

no really acting duration, and that the absolute--matter or mind--can

have no place in concrete time, in the time which we feel to be the very

stuff of our life. From which it follows that everything is given once

for all, and that it is necessary to posit from all eternity either

material multiplicity itself, or the act creating this multiplicity,

given in block in the divine essence. Once this prejudice is eradicated,

the idea of creation becomes more clear, for it is merged in that of

growth. But it is no longer then of the universe in its totality that we

must speak.

Why should we speak of it? The universe is an assemblage of solar

systems which we have every reason to believe analogous to our own. No

doubt they are not absolutely independent of one another. Our sun

radiates heat and light beyond the farthest planet, and, on the other

hand, our entire solar system is moving in a definite direction as if it

were drawn. There is, then, a bond between the worlds. But this bond may

be regarded as infinitely loose in comparison with the mutual dependence

which unites the parts of the same world among themselves; so that it is

not artificially, for reasons of mere convenience, that we isolate our

solar system: nature itself invites us to isolate it. As living beings,

we depend on the planet on which we are, and on the sun that provides

for it, but on nothing else. As thinking beings, we may apply the laws

of our physics to our own world, and extend them to each of the worlds

taken separately; but nothing tells us that they apply to the entire

universe, nor even that such an affirmation has any meaning; for the

universe is not made, but is being made continually. It is growing,

perhaps indefinitely, by the addition of new worlds.

Let us extend, then, to the whole of our solar system the two most

general laws of our science, the principle of conservation of energy and

that of its degradation--limiting them, however, to this relatively

closed system and to other systems relatively closed. Let us see what

will follow. We must remark, first of all, that these two principles

have not the same metaphysical scope. The first is a quantitative law,

and consequently relative, in part, to our methods of measurement. It

says that, in a system presumed to be closed, the total energy, that is

to say the sum of its kinetic and potential energy, remains constant.

Now, if there were only kinetic energy in the world, or even if there

were, besides kinetic energy, only one single kind of potential energy,

but no more, the artifice of measurement would not make the law

artificial. The law of the conservation of energy would express indeed

that _something_ is preserved in constant quantity. But there are, in

fact, energies of various kinds,[88] and the measurement of each of them

has evidently been so chosen as to justify the principle of conservation

of energy. Convention, therefore, plays a large part in this principle,

although there is undoubtedly, between the variations of the different

energies composing one and the same system, a mutual dependence which is

just what has made the extension of the principle possible by

measurements suitably chosen. If, therefore, the philosopher applies

this principle to the solar system complete, he must at least soften its

outlines. The law of the conservation of energy cannot here express the

objective permanence of a certain quantity of a certain thing, but

rather the necessity for every change that is brought about to be

counterbalanced in some way by a change in an opposite direction. That

is to say, even if it governs the whole of our solar system, the law of

the conservation of energy is concerned with the relationship of a

fragment of this world to another fragment rather than with the nature

of the whole.

It is otherwise with the second principle of thermodynamics. The law of

the degradation of energy does not bear essentially on magnitudes. No

doubt the first idea of it arose, in the thought of Carnot, out of

certain quantitative considerations on the yield of thermic machines.

Unquestionably, too, the terms in which Clausius generalized it were

mathematical, and a calculable magnitude, "entropy," was, in fact, the

final conception to which he was led. Such precision is necessary for

practical applications. But the law might have been vaguely conceived,

and, if absolutely necessary, it might have been roughly formulated,

even though no one had ever thought of measuring the different energies

of the physical world, even though the concept of energy had not been

created. Essentially, it expresses the fact that all physical changes

have a tendency to be degraded into heat, and that heat tends to be

distributed among bodies in a uniform manner. In this less precise form,

it becomes independent of any convention; it is the most metaphysical of

the laws of physics since it points out without interposed symbols,

without artificial devices of measurements, the direction in which the

world is going. It tells us that changes that are visible and

heterogeneous will be more and more diluted into changes that are

invisible and homogeneous, and that the instability to which we owe the

richness and variety of the changes taking place in our solar system

will gradually give way to the relative stability of elementary

vibrations continually and perpetually repeated. Just so with a man who

keeps up his strength as he grows old, but spends it less and less in

actions, and comes, in the end, to employ it entirely in making his

lungs breathe and his heart beat.

From this point of view, a world like our solar system is seen to be

ever exhausting something of the mutability it contains. In the

beginning, it had the maximum of possible utilization of energy: this

mutability has gone on diminishing unceasingly. Whence does it come? We

might at first suppose that it has come from some other point of space,

but the difficulty is only set back, and for this external source of

mutability the same question springs up. True, it might be added that

the number of worlds capable of passing mutability to each other is

unlimited, that the sum of mutability contained in the universe is

infinite, that there is therefore no ground on which to seek its origin

or to foresee its end. A hypothesis of this kind is as irrefutable as it

is indemonstrable; but to speak of an infinite universe is to admit a

perfect coincidence of matter with abstract space, and consequently an

absolute externality of all the parts of matter in relation to one

another. We have seen above what we must think of this theory, and how

difficult it is to reconcile with the idea of a reciprocal influence of

all the parts of matter on one another, an influence to which indeed it

itself makes appeal. Again it might be supposed that the general

instability has arisen from a general state of stability; that the

period in which we now are, and in which the utilizable energy is

diminishing, has been preceded by a period in which the mutability was

increasing, and that the alternations of increase and diminution succeed

each other for ever. This hypothesis is theoretically conceivable, as

has been demonstrated quite recently; but, according to the calculations

of Boltzmann, the mathematical improbability of it passes all

imagination and practically amounts to absolute impossibility.[89] In

reality, the problem remains insoluble as long as we keep on the ground

of physics, for the physicist is obliged to attach energy to extended

particles, and, even if he regards the particles only as reservoirs of

energy, he remains in space: he would belie his rôle if he sought the

origin of these energies in an extra-spatial process. It is there,

however, in our opinion, that it must be sought.

Is it extension in general that we are considering _in abstracto_?

_Extension_, we said, appears only as a _tension_ which is interrupted.

Or, are we considering the concrete reality that fills this extension?

The order which reigns there, and which is manifested by the laws of

nature, is an order which must be born of itself when the inverse order

is suppressed; a detension of the will would produce precisely this

suppression. Lastly, we find that the direction, which this reality

takes, suggests to us the idea of a thing _unmaking itself_; such, no

doubt, is one of the essential characters of materiality. What

conclusion are we to draw from all this, if not that the process by

which this thing _makes itself_ is directed in a contrary way to that of

physical processes, and that it is therefore, by its very definition,

immaterial? The vision we have of the material world is that of a weight

which falls: no image drawn from matter, properly so called, will ever

give us the idea of the weight rising. But this conclusion will come

home to us with still greater force if we press nearer to the concrete

reality, and if we consider, no longer only matter in general, but,

within this matter, living bodies.

All our analyses show us, in life, an effort to remount the incline that

matter descends. In that, they reveal to us the possibility, the

necessity even of a process the inverse of materiality, creative of

matter by its interruption alone. The life that evolves on the surface

of our planet is indeed attached to matter. If it were pure

consciousness, _a fortiori_ if it were supra-consciousness, it would be

pure creative activity. In fact, it is riveted to an organism that

subjects it to the general laws of inert matter. But everything happens

as if it were doing its utmost to set itself free from these laws. It

has not the power to reverse the direction of physical changes, such as

the principle of Carnot determines it. It does, however, behave

absolutely as a force would behave which, left to itself, would work in

the inverse direction. Incapable of _stopping_ the course of material

changes downwards, it succeeds in _retarding_ it. The evolution of life

really continues, as we have shown, an initial impulsion: this

impulsion, which has determined the development of the chlorophyllian

function in the plant and of the sensori-motor system in the animal,

brings life to more and more efficient acts by the fabrication and use

of more and more powerful explosives. Now, what do these explosives

represent if not a storing-up of the solar energy, the degradation of

which energy is thus provisionally suspended on some of the points where

it was being poured forth? The usable energy which the explosive

conceals will be expended, of course, at the moment of the explosion;

but it would have been expended sooner if an organism had not happened

to be there to arrest its dissipation, in order to retain it and save it

up. As we see it to-day, at the point to which it was brought by a

scission of the mutually complementary tendencies which it contained

within itself, life is entirely dependent on the chlorophyllian function

of the plant. This means that, looked at in its initial impulsion,

before any scission, life was a tendency to accumulate in a reservoir,

as do especially the green parts of vegetables, with a view to an

instantaneous effective discharge, like that which an animal brings

about, something that would have otherwise flowed away. It is like an

effort to raise the weight which falls. True, it succeeds only in

retarding the fall. But at least it can give us an idea of what the

raising of the weight was.[90]

Let us imagine a vessel full of steam at a high pressure, and here and

there in its sides a crack through which the steam is escaping in a jet.

The steam thrown into the air is nearly all condensed into little drops

which fall back, and this condensation and this fall represent simply

the loss of something, an interruption, a deficit. But a small part of

the jet of steam subsists, uncondensed, for some seconds; it is making

an effort to raise the drops which are falling; it succeeds at most in

retarding their fall. So, from an immense reservoir of life, jets must

be gushing out unceasingly, of which each, falling back, is a world. The

evolution of living species within this world represents what subsists

of the primitive direction of the original jet, and of an impulsion

which continues itself in a direction the inverse of materiality. But

let us not carry too far this comparison. It gives us but a feeble and

even deceptive image of reality, for the crack, the jet of steam, the

forming of the drops, are determined necessarily, whereas the creation

of a world is a free act, and the life within the material world

participates in this liberty. Let us think rather of an action like that

of raising the arm; then let us suppose that the arm, left to itself,

falls back, and yet that there subsists in it, striving to raise it up

again, something of the will that animates it. In this image of a

_creative action which unmakes itself_ we have already a more exact

representation of matter. In vital activity we see, then, that which

subsists of the direct movement in the inverted movement, _a reality

which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself_.

Everything is obscure in the idea of creation if we think of _things_

which are created and a _thing_ which creates, as we habitually do, as

the understanding cannot help doing. We shall show the origin of this

illusion in our next chapter. It is natural to our intellect, whose

function is essentially practical, made to present to us things and

states rather than changes and acts. But things and states are only

views, taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, there are

only actions. More particularly, if I consider the world in which we

live, I find that the automatic and strictly determined evolution of

this well-knit whole is action which is unmaking itself, and that the

unforeseen forms which life cuts out in it, forms capable of being

themselves prolonged into unforeseen movements, represent the action

that is making itself. Now, I have every reason to believe that the

other worlds are analogous to ours, that things happen there in the same

way. And I know they were not all constructed at the same time, since

observation shows me, even to-day, nebulae in course of concentration.

Now, if the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether it is

that which is unmaking itself or whether it is that which is striving to

remake itself, I simply express this probable similitude when I speak of

a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fireworks

display--provided, however, that I do not present this centre as a

_thing_, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus defined, has

nothing of the already made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom.

Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves

when we act freely. That new things can join things already existing is

absurd, no doubt, since the _thing_ results from a solidification

performed by our understanding, and there are never any things other

than those that the understanding has thus constituted. To speak of

things creating themselves would therefore amount to saying that the

understanding presents to itself more than it presents to itself--a

self-contradictory affirmation, an empty and vain idea. But that action

increases as it goes on, that it creates in the measure of its advance,

is what each of us finds when he watches himself act. Things are

constituted by the instantaneous cut which the understanding practices,

at a given moment, on a flux of this kind, and what is mysterious when

we compare the cuts together becomes clear when we relate them to the

flux. Indeed, the modalities of creative action, in so far as it is

still going on in the organization of living forms, are much simplified

when they are taken in this way. Before the complexity of an organism

and the practically infinite multitude of interwoven analyses and

syntheses it presupposes, our understanding recoils disconcerted. That

the simple play of physical and chemical forces, left to themselves,

should have worked this marvel, we find hard to believe. And if it is a

profound science which is at work, how are we to understand the

influence exercised on this matter without form by this form without

matter? But the difficulty arises from this, that we represent

statically ready-made material particles juxtaposed to one another, and,

also statically, an external cause which plasters upon them a skilfully

contrived organization. In reality, life is a movement, materiality is

the inverse movement, and each of these two movements is simple, the

matter which forms a world being an undivided flux, and undivided also

the life that runs through it, cutting out in it living beings all along

its track. Of these two currents the second runs counter to the first,

but the first obtains, all the same, something from the second. There

results between them a _modus vivendi_, which is organization. This

organization takes, for our senses and for our intellect, the form of

parts entirely external to other parts in space and in time. Not only do

we shut our eyes to the unity of the impulse which, passing through

generations, links individuals with individuals, species with species,

and makes of the whole series of the living one single immense wave

flowing over matter, but each individual itself seems to us as an

aggregate, aggregate of molecules and aggregate of facts. The reason of

this lies in the structure of our intellect, which is formed to act on

matter from without, and which succeeds by making, in the flux of the

real, instantaneous cuts, each of which becomes, in its fixity,

endlessly decomposable. Perceiving, in an organism, only parts external

to parts, the understanding has the choice between two systems of

explanation only: either to regard the infinitely complex (and thereby

infinitely well-contrived) organization as a fortuitous concatenation of

atoms, or to relate it to the incomprehensible influence of an external

force that has grouped its elements together. But this complexity is the

work of the understanding; this incomprehensibility is also its work.

Let us try to see, no longer with the eyes of the intellect alone, which

grasps only the already made and which looks from the outside, but with

the spirit, I mean with that faculty of seeing which is immanent in the

faculty of acting and which springs up, somehow, by the twisting of the

will on itself, when action is turned into knowledge, like heat, so to

say, into light. To movement, then, everything will be restored, and

into movement everything will be resolved. Where the understanding,

working on the image supposed to be fixed of the progressing action,

shows us parts infinitely manifold and an order infinitely well

contrived, we catch a glimpse of a simple process, an action which is

making itself across an action of the same kind which is unmaking

itself, like the fiery path torn by the last rocket of a fireworks

display through the black cinders of the spent rockets that are falling

dead.

* * * * *

From this point of view, the general considerations we have presented

concerning the evolution of life will be cleared up and completed. We

will distinguish more sharply what is accidental from what is essential

in this evolution.

The impetus of life, of which we are speaking, consists in a need of

creation. It cannot create absolutely, because it is confronted with

matter, that is to say with the movement that is the inverse of its own.

But it seizes upon this matter, which is necessity itself, and strives

to introduce into it the largest possible amount of indetermination and

liberty. How does it go to work?

An animal high in the scale may be represented in a general way, we

said, as a sensori-motor nervous system imposed on digestive,

respiratory, circulatory systems, etc. The function of these latter is

to cleanse, repair and protect the nervous system, to make it as

independent as possible of external circumstances, but, above all, to

furnish it with energy to be expended in movements. The increasing

complexity of the organism is therefore due theoretically (in spite of

innumerable exceptions due to accidents of evolution) to the necessity

of complexity in the nervous system. No doubt, each complication of any

part of the organism involves many others in addition, because this part

itself must live, and every change in one point of the body

reverberates, as it were, throughout. The complication may therefore go

on to infinity in all directions; but it is the complication of the

nervous system which conditions the others in right, if not always in

fact. Now, in what does the progress of the nervous system itself

consist? In a simultaneous development of automatic activity and of

voluntary activity, the first furnishing the second with an appropriate

instrument. Thus, in an organism such as ours, a considerable number of

motor mechanisms are set up in the medulla and in the spinal cord,

awaiting only a signal to release the corresponding act: the will is

employed, in some cases, in setting up the mechanism itself, and in the

others in choosing the mechanisms to be released, the manner of

combining them and the moment of releasing them. The will of an animal

is the more effective and the more intense, the greater the number of

the mechanisms it can choose from, the more complicated the switchboard

on which all the motor paths cross, or, in other words, the more

developed its brain. Thus, the progress of the nervous system assures to

the act increasing precision, increasing variety, increasing efficiency

and independence. The organism behaves more and more like a machine for

action, which reconstructs itself entirely for every new act, as if it

were made of india-rubber and could, at any moment, change the shape of

all its parts. But, prior to the nervous system, prior even to the

organism properly so called, already in the undifferentiated mass of the

amoeba, this essential property of animal life is found. The amoeba

deforms itself in varying directions; its entire mass does what the

differentiation of parts will localize in a sensori-motor system in the

developed animal. Doing it only in a rudimentary manner, it is dispensed

from the complexity of the higher organisms; there is no need here of

the auxiliary elements that pass on to motor elements the energy to

expend; the animal moves as a whole, and, as a whole also, procures

energy by means of the organic substances it assimilates. Thus, whether

low or high in the animal scale, we always find that animal life

consists (1) in procuring a provision of energy; (2) in expending it, by

means of a matter as supple as possible, in directions variable and

unforeseen.

Now, whence comes the energy? From the ingested food, for food is a kind

of explosive, which needs only the spark to discharge the energy it

stores. Who has made this explosive? The food may be the flesh of an

animal nourished on animals and so on; but, in the end it is to the

vegetable we always come back. Vegetables alone gather in the solar

energy, and the animals do but borrow it from them, either directly or

by some passing it on to others. How then has the plant stored up this

energy? Chiefly by the chlorophyllian function, a chemicism _sui

generis_ of which we do not possess the key, and which is probably

unlike that of our laboratories. The process consists in using solar

energy to fix the carbon of carbonic acid, and thereby to store this

energy as we should store that of a water-carrier by employing him to

fill an elevated reservoir: the water, once brought up, can set in

motion a mill or a turbine, as we will and when we will. Each atom of

carbon fixed represents something like the elevation of the weight of

water, or like the stretching of an elastic thread uniting the carbon to

the oxygen in the carbonic acid. The elastic is relaxed, the weight

falls back again, in short the energy held in reserve is restored, when,

by a simple release, the carbon is permitted to rejoin its oxygen.

So that all life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an

effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible

channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish

infinitely varied kinds of work. That is what the _vital impetus_,

passing through matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, no

doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could come

to it from without. But the impetus is finite, and it has been given

once for all. It cannot overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts

is sometimes turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; and the

evolution of the organized world is the unrolling of this conflict. The

first great scission that had to be effected was that of the two

kingdoms, vegetable and animal, which thus happen to be mutually

complementary, without, however, any agreement having been made between

them. It is not for the animal that the plant accumulates energy, it is

for its own consumption; but its expenditure on itself is less

discontinuous, and less concentrated, and therefore less efficacious,

than was required by the initial impetus of life, essentially directed

toward free actions: the same organism could not with equal force

sustain the two functions at once, of gradual storage and sudden use. Of

themselves, therefore, and without any external intervention, simply by

the effect of the duality of the tendency involved in the original

impetus and of the resistance opposed by matter to this impetus, the

organisms leaned some in the first direction, others in the second. To

this scission there succeeded many others. Hence the diverging lines of

evolution, at least what is essential in them. But we must take into

account retrogressions, arrests, accidents of every kind. And we must

remember, above all, that each species behaves as if the general

movement of life stopped at it instead of passing through it. It thinks

only of itself, it lives only for itself. Hence the numberless

struggles that we behold in nature. Hence a discord, striking and

terrible, but for which the original principle of life must not be held

responsible.

The part played by contingency in evolution is therefore great.

Contingent, generally, are the forms adopted, or rather invented.

Contingent, relative to the obstacles encountered in a given place and

at a given moment, is the dissociation of the primordial tendency into

such and such complementary tendencies which create divergent lines of

evolution. Contingent the arrests and set-backs; contingent, in large

measure, the adaptations. Two things only are necessary: (1) a gradual

accumulation of energy; (2) an elastic canalization of this energy in

variable and indeterminable directions, at the end of which are free

acts.

This twofold result has been obtained in a particular way on our planet.

But it might have been obtained by entirely different means. It was not

necessary that life should fix its choice mainly upon the carbon of

carbonic acid. What was essential for it was to store solar energy; but,

instead of asking the sun to separate, for instance, atoms of oxygen and

carbon, it might (theoretically at least, and, apart from practical

difficulties possibly insurmountable) have put forth other chemical

elements, which would then have had to be associated or dissociated by

entirely different physical means. And if the element characteristic of

the substances that supply energy to the organism had been other than

carbon, the element characteristic of the plastic substances would

probably have been other than nitrogen, and the chemistry of living

bodies would then have been radically different from what it is. The

result would have been living forms without any analogy to those we

know, whose anatomy would have been different, whose physiology also

would have been different. Alone, the sensori-motor function would have

been preserved, if not in its mechanism, at least in its effects. It is

therefore probable that life goes on in other planets, in other solar

systems also, under forms of which we have no idea, in physical

conditions to which it seems to us, from the point of view of our

physiology, to be absolutely opposed. If its essential aim is to catch

up usable energy in order to expend it in explosive actions, it probably

chooses, in each solar system and on each planet, as it does on the

earth, the fittest means to get this result in the circumstances with

which it is confronted. That is at least what reasoning by analogy leads

to, and we use analogy the wrong way when we declare life to be

impossible wherever the circumstances with which it is confronted are

other than those on the earth. The truth is that life is possible

wherever energy descends the incline indicated by Carnot's law and where

a cause of inverse direction can retard the descent--that is to say,

probably, in all the worlds suspended from all the stars. We go further:

it is not even necessary that life should be concentrated and determined

in organisms properly so called, that is, in definite bodies presenting

to the flow of energy ready-made though elastic canals. It can be

conceived (although it can hardly be imagined) that energy might be

saved up, and then expended on varying lines running across a matter not

yet solidified. Every essential of life would still be there, since

there would still be slow accumulation of energy and sudden release.

There would hardly be more difference between this vitality, vague and

formless, and the definite vitality we know, than there is, in our

psychical life, between the state of dream and the state of waking. Such

may have been the condition of life in our nebula before the

condensation of matter was complete, if it be true that life springs

forward at the very moment when, as the effect of an inverse movement,

the nebular matter appears.

It is therefore conceivable that life might have assumed a totally

different outward appearance and designed forms very different from

those we know. With another chemical substratum, in other physical

conditions, the impulsion would have remained the same, but it would

have split up very differently in course of progress; and the whole

would have traveled another road--whether shorter or longer who can

tell? In any case, in the entire series of living beings no term would

have been what it now is. Now, was it necessary that there should be a

series, or terms? Why should not the unique impetus have been impressed

on a unique body, which might have gone on evolving?

This question arises, no doubt, from the comparison of life to an

impetus. And it must be compared to an impetus, because no image

borrowed from the physical world can give more nearly the idea of it.

But it is only an image. In reality, life is of the psychological order,

and it is of the essence of the psychical to enfold a confused plurality

of interpenetrating terms. In space, and in space only, is distinct

multiplicity possible: a point is absolutely external to another point.

But pure and empty unity, also, is met with only in space; it is that of

a mathematical point. Abstract unity and abstract multiplicity are

determinations of space or categories of the understanding, whichever we

will, spatiality and intellectuality being molded on each other. But

what is of psychical nature cannot entirely correspond with space, nor

enter perfectly into the categories of the understanding. Is my own

person, at a given moment, one or manifold? If I declare it one, inner

voices arise and protest--those of the sensations, feelings, ideas,

among which my individuality is distributed. But, if I make it

distinctly manifold, my consciousness rebels quite as strongly; it

affirms that my sensations, my feelings, my thoughts are abstractions

which I effect on myself, and that each of my states implies all the

others. I am then (we must adopt the language of the understanding,

since only the understanding has a language) a unity that is multiple

and a multiplicity that is one;[91] but unity and multiplicity are only

views of my personality taken by an understanding that directs its

categories at me; I enter neither into one nor into the other nor into

both at once, although both, united, may give a fair imitation of the

mutual interpenetration and continuity that I find at the base of my own

self. Such is my inner life, and such also is life in general. While, in

its contact with matter, life is comparable to an impulsion or an

impetus, regarded in itself it is an immensity of potentiality, a mutual

encroachment of thousands and thousands of tendencies which nevertheless

are "thousands and thousands" only when once regarded as outside of each

other, that is, when spatialized. Contact with matter is what determines

this dissociation. Matter divides actually what was but potentially

manifold; and, in this sense, individuation is in part the work of

matter, in part the result of life's own inclination. Thus, a poetic

sentiment, which bursts into distinct verses, lines and words, may be

said to have already contained this multiplicity of individuated

elements, and yet, in fact, it is the materiality of language that

creates it.

But through the words, lines and verses runs the simple inspiration

which is the whole poem. So, among the dissociated individuals, one

life goes on moving: everywhere the tendency to individualize is opposed

and at the same time completed by an antagonistic and complementary

tendency to associate, as if the manifold unity of life, drawn in the

direction of multiplicity, made so much the more effort to withdraw

itself on to itself. A part is no sooner detached than it tends to

reunite itself, if not to all the rest, at least to what is nearest to

it. Hence, throughout the whole realm of life, a balancing between

individuation and association. Individuals join together into a society;

but the society, as soon as formed, tends to melt the associated

individuals into a new organism, so as to become itself an individual,

able in its turn to be part and parcel of a new association. At the

lowest degree of the scale of organisms we already find veritable

associations, microbial colonies, and in these associations, according

to a recent work, a tendency to individuate by the constitution of a

nucleus.[92] The same tendency is met with again at a higher stage, in

the protophytes, which, once having quitted the parent cell by way of

division, remain united to each other by the gelatinous substance that

surrounds them--also in those protozoa which begin by mingling their

pseudopodia and end by welding themselves together. The "colonial"

theory of the genesis of higher organisms is well known. The protozoa,

consisting of one single cell, are supposed to have formed, by

assemblage, aggregates which, relating themselves together in their

turn, have given rise to aggregates of aggregates; so organisms more and

more complicated, and also more and more differentiated, are born of the

association of organisms barely differentiated and elementary.[93] In

this extreme form, the theory is open to grave objections: more and

more the idea seems to be gaining ground, that polyzoism is an

exceptional and abnormal fact.[94] But it is none the less true that

things happen _as if_ every higher organism was born of an association

of cells that have subdivided the work between them. Very probably it is

not the cells that have made the individual by means of association; it

is rather the individual that has made the cells by means of

dissociation.[95] But this itself reveals to us, in the genesis of the

individual, a haunting of the social form, as if the individual could

develop only on the condition that its substance should be split up into

elements having themselves an appearance of individuality and united

among themselves by an appearance of sociality. There are numerous cases

in which nature seems to hesitate between the two forms, and to ask

herself if she shall make a society or an individual. The slightest push

is enough, then, to make the balance weigh on one side or the other. If

we take an infusorian sufficiently large, such as the Stentor, and cut

it into two halves each containing a part of the nucleus, each of the

two halves will generate an independent Stentor; but if we divide it

incompletely, so that a protoplasmic communication is left between the

two halves, we shall see them execute, each from its side, corresponding

movements: so that in this case it is enough that a thread should be

maintained or cut in order that life should affect the social or the

individual form. Thus, in rudimentary organisms consisting of a single

cell, we already find that the apparent individuality of the whole is

the composition of an _undefined_ number of potential individualities

potentially associated. But, from top to bottom of the series of living

beings, the same law is manifested. And it is this that we express when

we say that unity and multiplicity are categories of inert matter, that

the vital impetus is neither pure unity nor pure multiplicity, and that

if the matter to which it communicates itself compels it to choose one

of the two, its choice will never be definitive: it will leap from one

to the other indefinitely. The evolution of life in the double direction

of individuality and association has therefore nothing accidental about

it: it is due to the very nature of life.

Essential also is the progress to reflexion. If our analysis is correct,

it is consciousness, or rather supra-consciousness, that is at the

origin of life. Consciousness, or supra-consciousness, is the name for

the rocket whose extinguished fragments fall back as matter;

consciousness, again, is the name for that which subsists of the rocket

itself, passing through the fragments and lighting them up into

organisms. But this consciousness, which is a _need of creation_, is

made manifest to itself only where creation is possible. It lies dormant

when life is condemned to automatism; it wakens as soon as the

possibility of a choice is restored. That is why, in organisms

unprovided with a nervous system, it varies according to the power of

locomotion and of deformation of which the organism disposes. And in

animals with a nervous system, it is proportional to the complexity of

the switchboard on which the paths called sensory and the paths called

motor intersect--that is, of the brain. How must this solidarity between

the organism and consciousness be understood?

We will not dwell here on a point that we have dealt with in former

works. Let us merely recall that a theory such as that according to

which consciousness is attached to certain neurons, and is thrown off

from their work like a phosphorescence, may be accepted by the scientist

for the detail of analysis; it is a convenient mode of expression. But

it is nothing else. In reality, a living being is a centre of action. It

represents a certain sum of contingency entering into the world, that is

to say, a certain quantity of possible action--a quantity variable with

individuals and especially with species. The nervous system of an animal

marks out the flexible lines on which its action will run (although the

potential energy is accumulated in the muscles rather than in the

nervous system itself); its nervous centres indicate, by their

development and their configuration, the more or less extended choice it

will have among more or less numerous and complicated actions. Now,

since the awakening of consciousness in a living creature is the more

complete, the greater the latitude of choice allowed to it and the

larger the amount of action bestowed upon it, it is clear that the

development of consciousness will appear to be dependent on that of the

nervous centres. On the other hand, every state of consciousness being,

in one aspect of it, a question put to the motor activity and even the

beginning of a reply, there is no psychical event that does not imply

the entry into play of the cortical mechanisms. Everything seems,

therefore, to happen _as if_ consciousness sprang from the brain, and

_as if_ the detail of conscious activity were modeled on that of the

cerebral activity. In reality, consciousness does not spring from the

brain; but brain and consciousness correspond because equally they

measure, the one by the complexity of its structure and the other by the

intensity of its awareness, the quantity of _choice_ that the living

being has at its disposal.

It is precisely because a cerebral state expresses simply what there is

of nascent action in the corresponding psychical state, that the

psychical state tells us more than the cerebral state. The consciousness

of a living being, as we have tried to prove elsewhere, is inseparable

from its brain in the sense in which a sharp knife is inseparable from

its edge: the brain is the sharp edge by which consciousness cuts into

the compact tissue of events, but the brain is no more coextensive with

consciousness than the edge is with the knife. Thus, from the fact that

two brains, like that of the ape and that of the man, are very much

alike, we cannot conclude that the corresponding consciousnesses are

comparable or commensurable.

But the two brains may perhaps be less alike than we suppose. How can we

help being struck by the fact that, while man is capable of learning any

sort of exercise, of constructing any sort of object, in short of

acquiring any kind of motor habit whatsoever, the faculty of combining

new movements is strictly limited in the best-endowed animal, even in

the ape? The cerebral characteristic of man is there. The human brain is

made, like every brain, to set up motor mechanisms and to enable us to

choose among them, at any instant, the one we shall put in motion by the

pull of a trigger. But it differs from other brains in this, that the

number of mechanisms it can set up, and consequently the choice that it

gives as to which among them shall be released, is unlimited. Now, from

the limited to the unlimited there is all the distance between the

closed and the open. It is not a difference of degree, but of kind.

Radical therefore, also, is the difference between animal consciousness,

even the most intelligent, and human consciousness. For consciousness

corresponds exactly to the living being's power of choice; it is

coextensive with the fringe of possible action that surrounds the real

action: consciousness is synonymous with invention and with freedom.

Now, in the animal, invention is never anything but a variation on the

theme of routine. Shut up in the habits of the species, it succeeds, no

doubt, in enlarging them by its individual initiative; but it escapes

automatism only for an instant, for just the time to create a new

automatism. The gates of its prison close as soon as they are opened; by

pulling at its chain it succeeds only in stretching it. With man,

consciousness breaks the chain. In man, and in man alone, it sets itself

free. The whole history of life until man has been that of the effort of

consciousness to raise matter, and of the more or less complete

overwhelming of consciousness by the matter which has fallen back on it.

The enterprise was paradoxical, if, indeed, we may speak here otherwise

than by metaphor of enterprise and of effort. It was to create with

matter, which is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom, to make a

machine which should triumph over mechanism, and to use the determinism

of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this very

determinism had spread. But, everywhere except in man, consciousness has

let itself be caught in the net whose meshes it tried to pass through:

it has remained the captive of the mechanisms it has set up. Automatism,

which it tries to draw in the direction of freedom, winds about it and

drags it down. It has not the power to escape, because the energy it has

provided for acts is almost all employed in maintaining the infinitely

subtle and essentially unstable equilibrium into which it has brought

matter. But man not only maintains his machine, he succeeds in using it

as he pleases. Doubtless he owes this to the superiority of his brain,

which enables him to build an unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to

oppose new habits to the old ones unceasingly, and, by dividing

automatism against itself, to rule it. He owes it to his language,

which furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in which to

incarnate itself and thus exempts it from dwelling exclusively on

material bodies, whose flux would soon drag it along and finally swallow

it up. He owes it to social life, which stores and preserves efforts as

language stores thought, fixes thereby a mean level to which individuals

must raise themselves at the outset, and by this initial stimulation

prevents the average man from slumbering and drives the superior man to

mount still higher. But our brain, our society, and our language are

only the external and various signs of one and the same internal

superiority. They tell, each after its manner, the unique, exceptional

success which life has won at a given moment of its evolution. They

express the difference of kind, and not only of degree, which separates

man from the rest of the animal world. They let us guess that, while at

the end of the vast spring-board from which life has taken its leap, all

the others have stepped down, finding the cord stretched too high, man

alone has cleared the obstacle.

It is in this quite special sense that man is the "term" and the "end"

of evolution. Life, we have said, transcends finality as it transcends

the other categories. It is essentially a current sent through matter,

drawing from it what it can. There has not, therefore, properly

speaking, been any project or plan. On the other hand, it is abundantly

evident that the rest of nature is not for the sake of man: we struggle

like the other species, we have struggled against other species.

Moreover, if the evolution of life had encountered other accidents in

its course, if, thereby, the current of life had been otherwise divided,

we should have been, physically and morally, far different from what we

are. For these various reasons it would be wrong to regard humanity,

such as we have it before our eyes, as pre-figured in the evolutionary

movement. It cannot even be said to be the outcome of the whole of

evolution, for evolution has been accomplished on several divergent

lines, and while the human species is at the end of one of them, other

lines have been followed with other species at their end. It is in a

quite different sense that we hold humanity to be the ground of

evolution.

From our point of view, life appears in its entirety as an immense wave

which, starting from a centre, spreads outwards, and which on almost the

whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at

one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed

freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. Everywhere but

in man, consciousness has had to come to a stand; in man alone it has

kept on its way. Man, then, continues the vital movement indefinitely,

although he does not draw along with him all that life carries in

itself. On other lines of evolution there have traveled other tendencies

which life implied, and of which, since everything interpenetrates, man

has, doubtless, kept something, but of which he has kept only very

little. _It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we

will_, man _or_ superman, _had sought to realize himself, and had

succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way_. The losses

are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the

vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive and above

the accidents of evolution.

From this point of view, the discordances of which nature offers us the

spectacle are singularly weakened. The organized world as a whole

becomes as the soil on which was to grow either man himself or a being

who morally must resemble him. The animals, however distant they may be

from our species, however hostile to it, have none the less been useful

traveling companions, on whom consciousness has unloaded whatever

encumbrances it was dragging along, and who have enabled it to rise, in

man, to heights from which it sees an unlimited horizon open again

before it.

It is true that it has not only abandoned cumbersome baggage on the way;

it has also had to give up valuable goods. Consciousness, in man, is

pre-eminently intellect. It might have been, it ought, so it seems, to

have been also intuition. Intuition and intellect represent two opposite

directions of the work of consciousness: intuition goes in the very

direction of life, intellect goes in the inverse direction, and thus

finds itself naturally in accordance with the movement of matter. A

complete and perfect humanity would be that in which these two forms of

conscious activity should attain their full development. And, between

this humanity and ours, we may conceive any number of possible stages,

corresponding to all the degrees imaginable of intelligence and of

intuition. In this lies the part of contingency in the mental structure

of our species. A different evolution might have led to a humanity

either more intellectual still or more intuitive. In the humanity of

which we are a part, intuition is, in fact, almost completely sacrificed

to intellect. It seems that to conquer matter, and to reconquer its own

self, consciousness has had to exhaust the best part of its power. This

conquest, in the particular conditions in which it has been

accomplished, has required that consciousness should adapt itself to the

habits of matter and concentrate all its attention on them, in fact

determine itself more especially as intellect. Intuition is there,

however, but vague and above all discontinuous. It is a lamp almost

extinguished, which only glimmers now and then, for a few moments at

most. But it glimmers wherever a vital interest is at stake. On our

personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of

nature, on our origin and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a light

feeble and vacillating, but which none the less pierces the darkness of

the night in which the intellect leaves us.

These fleeting intuitions, which light up their object only at distant

intervals, philosophy ought to seize, first to sustain them, then to

expand them and so unite them together. The more it advances in this

work, the more will it perceive that intuition is mind itself, and, in a

certain sense, life itself: the intellect has been cut out of it by a

process resembling that which has generated matter. Thus is revealed the

unity of the spiritual life. We recognize it only when we place

ourselves in intuition in order to go from intuition to the intellect,

for from the intellect we shall never pass to intuition.

Philosophy introduces us thus into the spiritual life. And it shows us

at the same time the relation of the life of the spirit to that of the

body. The great error of the doctrines on the spirit has been the idea

that by isolating the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it

in space as high as possible above the earth, they were placing it

beyond attack, as if they were not thereby simply exposing it to be

taken as an effect of mirage! Certainly they are right to listen to

conscience when conscience affirms human freedom; but the intellect is

there, which says that the cause determines its effect, that like

conditions like, that all is repeated and that all is given. They are

right to believe in the absolute reality of the person and in his

independence toward matter; but science is there, which shows the

interdependence of conscious life and cerebral activity. They are right

to attribute to man a privileged place in nature, to hold that the

distance is infinite between the animal and man; but the history of life

is there, which makes us witness the genesis of species by gradual

transformation, and seems thus to reintegrate man in animality. When a

strong instinct assures the probability of personal survival, they are

right not to close their ears to its voice; but if there exist "souls"

capable of an independent life, whence do they come? When, how and why

do they enter into this body which we see arise, quite naturally, from a

mixed cell derived from the bodies of its two parents? All these

questions will remain unanswered, a philosophy of intuition will be a

negation of science, will be sooner or later swept away by science, if

it does not resolve to see the life of the body just where it really is,

on the road that leads to the life of the spirit. But it will then no

longer have to do with definite living beings. Life as a whole, from the

initial impulsion that thrust it into the world, will appear as a wave

which rises, and which is opposed by the descending movement of matter.

On the greater part of its surface, at different heights, the current is

converted by matter into a vortex. At one point alone it passes freely,

dragging with it the obstacle which will weigh on its progress but will

not stop it. At this point is humanity; it is our privileged situation.

On the other hand, this rising wave is consciousness, and, like all

consciousness, it includes potentialities without number which

interpenetrate and to which consequently neither the category of unity

nor that of multiplicity is appropriate, made as they both are for inert

matter. The matter that it bears along with it, and in the interstices

of which it inserts itself, alone can divide it into distinct

individualities. On flows the current, running through human

generations, subdividing itself into individuals. This subdivision was

vaguely indicated in it, but could not have been made clear without

matter. Thus souls are continually being created, which, nevertheless,

in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing else than the little

rills into which the great river of life divides itself, flowing through

the body of humanity. The movement of the stream is distinct from the

river bed, although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness is

distinct from the organism it animates, although it must undergo its

vicissitudes. As the possible actions which a state of consciousness

indicates are at every instant beginning to be carried out in the

nervous centres, the brain underlines at every instant the motor

indications of the state of consciousness; but the interdependency of

consciousness and brain is limited to this; the destiny of consciousness

is not bound up on that account with the destiny of cerebral matter.

Finally, consciousness is essentially free; it is freedom itself; but it

cannot pass through matter without settling on it, without adapting

itself to it: this adaptation is what we call intellectuality; and the

intellect, turning itself back toward active, that is to say free,

consciousness, naturally makes it enter into the conceptual forms into

which it is accustomed to see matter fit. It will therefore always

perceive freedom in the form of necessity; it will always neglect the

part of novelty or of creation inherent in the free act; it will always

substitute for action itself an imitation artificial, approximative,

obtained by compounding the old with the old and the same with the same.

Thus, to the eyes of a philosophy that attempts to reabsorb intellect in

intuition, many difficulties vanish or become light. But such a doctrine

does not only facilitate speculation; it gives us also more power to act

and to live. For, with it, we feel ourselves no longer isolated in

humanity, humanity no longer seems isolated in the nature that it

dominates. As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire

solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent

which is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest

to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we

are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single

impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself

indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same

tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides

animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one

immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an

overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the

most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 78: We have developed this point in _Matière et mémoire_,

chaps. ii. and iii., notably pp. 78-80 and 169-186.]

[Footnote 79: Faraday, _A Speculation concerning Electric Conduction_

(_Philosophical Magazine_, 3d. series, vol. xxiv.).]

[Footnote 80: Our comparison does no more than develop the content of

the term [Greek: logos], as Plotinus understands it. For while the

[Greek: logos] of this philosopher is a generating and informing power,

an aspect or a fragment of the [Greek: psychê], on the other hand

Plotinus sometimes speaks of it as of a _discourse_. More generally, the

relation that we establish in the present chapter between "extension"

and "detension" resembles in some aspects that which Plotinus supposes

(some developments of which must have inspired M. Ravaisson) when he

makes extension not indeed an inversion of original Being, but an

enfeeblement of its essence, one of the last stages of the procession,

(see in particular, _Enn._ IV. iii. 9-11, and III. vi. 17-18). Yet

ancient philosophy did not see what consequences would result from this

for mathematics, for Plotinus, like Plato, erected mathematical essences

into absolute realities. Above all, it suffered itself to be deceived by

the purely superficial analogy of duration with extension. It treated

the one as it treated the other, regarding change as a degradation of

immutability, the sensible as a fall from the intelligible. Whence, as

we shall show in the next chapter, a philosophy which fails to recognize

the real function and scope of the intellect.]

[Footnote 81: Bastian, _The Brain as an Organ of the Mind_, pp. 214-16.]

[Footnote 82: We have dwelt on this point in a former work. See the

_Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience_, Paris, 1889, pp.

155-160.]

[Footnote 83: _Op. cit._ chaps. i. and ii. _passim_.]

[Footnote 84: Cf. especially the profound studies of M. Ed. Le Roy in

the _Revue de métaph. et de morale_.]

[Footnote 85: _Matière et mémoire_, chapters iii. and iv.]

[Footnote 86: See in particular, _Phys._, iv. 215 a 2; v. 230 b 12;

viii. 255 a 2; and _De Caelo_, iv. 1-5; ii. 296 b 27; iv. 308 a 34.]

[Footnote 87: _De Caelo_, iv. 310 a 34 [Greek: to d' eis ton autou topon

pherethai hekaoton to eis to autou eidos esti pheresthai].]

[Footnote 88: On these differences of quality see the work of Duhem,

_L'Évolution de la mécanique_, Paris, 1905, pp. 197 ff.]

[Footnote 89: Boltzmann, _Vorlesungen über Gastheorie_, Leipzig, 1898,

pp. 253 ff.]

[Footnote 90: In a book rich in facts and in ideas (_La Dissolution

opposée a l'évolution_, Paris, 1899), M. André Lalande shows us

everything going towards death, in spite of the momentary resistance

which organisms seem to oppose.--But, even from the side of unorganized

matter, have we the right to extend to the entire universe

considerations drawn from the present state of our solar system? Beside

the worlds which are dying, there are without doubt worlds that are

being born. On the other hand, in the organized world, the death of

individuals does not seem at all like a diminution of "life in general,"

or like a necessity which life submits to reluctantly. As has been more

than once remarked, life has never made an effort to prolong

indefinitely the existence of the individual, although on so many other

points it has made so many successful efforts. Everything is _as if_

this death had been willed, or at least accepted, for the greater

progress of life in general.]

[Footnote 91: We have dwelt on this point in an article entitled

"Introduction à la métaphysique" (_Revue de métaphysique et de morale_,

January, 1903, pp. 1-25).]

[Footnote 92: Cf. a paper written (in Russian) by Serkovski, and

reviewed in the _Année biologique_, 1898, p. 317.]

[Footnote 93: Ed. Perrier, _Les Colonies animales_, Paris, 1897 (2nd

edition).]

[Footnote 94: Delage, _L'Hérédité_, 2nd edition, Paris, 1903, p. 97. Cf.

by the same author, "La Conception polyzoïque des êtres" (_Revue

scientifique_, 1896, pp. 641-653).]

[Footnote 95: This is the theory maintained by Kunstler, Delage,

Sedgwick, Labbé, etc. Its development, with bibliographical references,

will be found in the work of Busquet, _Les êtres vivants_, Paris, 1899.]