sign which compensate and neutralize each other. The UDConsciotisness of a falling stone is of the former kind: the stone has no feeling of its faU. 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 re- presentation 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. RepresenCalion is stopped up by action. The proof of this is, that if the accomplishment of the act is arrested or thwarted by an obstacle, con- sciousness may reappear. It was there, but neutralized by the action which fulfiled and thereby filled the repre- eentation. 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 sur- rounds 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 deliberatioD that has not come to an end), consciousness is intense. 'WTiere the action performed is the only action possible (as in activity of the somnam- bulistic 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 B)rstematized movements the last of which is already pre- figured in the first, and if, besides, consciousness can flash 4ut of them at the shock of an obstacle. From this point
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of view, the consciousness of a living being may be defined as an arilkmelical difference between potential aTid real activity. It measuTes the interval betioeen representation aTid action.
It may be inferred from this that intelligence is likely to point towards conaciousness, and instinct towards un- consciousness. 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 consciousnesss 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 counter- weight. 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. Ea- sentially, consciousness only emphasizes the starting- point of instinct, the point at which the whole series of automatic movements is released. Deficit, on the con- trary, 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 intelli- gence 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 la, from the psychological point of view, the cardinal difference between instinct and inteUigeuce.
146 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap.
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 lege or shoulders of the horse, it acts as if it knew that its lar\'a 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 under- ground passages dug by a kind of bee, the Anthophora. Its larva, after long waiting, spring upon the male Antho- phora as it goes out of the passage, clings to it, and re- mains 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 aa 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 nu[]tial 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
^B of the honey, and also suppress the rival that otherwise ^m would have come out of the egg. And equally all this H happens as if the Sitaris itself knew that its larva would H know all these things. The knowledge, if knowledge there ^1 be, is only implicit. It is reflected outwardly in exact H movements instead of being reflected inwardly in conscious- V ness. 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
tand time, which the insect knows without having learned
them.
Now, if we look at inteUigence from the same point
of view, we find that it also knows certain things with-
out 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 our- selves 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 mtelligence, like instinct, is an inherited function, there- fore an innate one. But this innate intelligence, although it is a faculty of knowing, knows no object in particular. When the new-bom 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 inslinct and not to intelligence. Intelli- gence does not then imply the innate knowledge of any object. And yet, if inteUigence 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 inteUigent, knows neither definite objects nor a definite property of any object;
[CH.^r.
but when, a little later on, he will hear an epithet being applied to a substantive, be 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 re- lation 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 con- tent 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 inivite 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 wfiaiever, in instinct and intelli- gence, is innale 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 know- ledge. 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
n.i
what numerator and what denominator are to come; he therefore has present to his mind the general relation be- tween 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 ua adopt then words sanctioned by usage, and give the distinction between intelligence and instinct this more precise formula: In- teUigeiice, in so far as it is innale, is the knowledge of a form; vistinct implies the knowledge of a matter.
From this second point of view, which is that of know- ledge instead of action, the force immanent in life in general appears to us again as a limited principle, in which origin- ally 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 particu- lar; 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 fonnulated in what philosophers call categorical propositions, while the second kind, the intellectual, would always be expressed hypolheticcdly. 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 know- ledge is intimate and full; not explicit, but implied in the accomplished action. The intellectual faculty, on the
lOHAP.
contrary, possesses naturally only an externa! 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 itdension. 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.