Creative Evolution — Henri Bergson (trans. Arthur Mitchell, 1911)

Such, then, are the two divergent modes of knowledge by which intelligence and instinct must be defined, from the standpoint of knowledge rather than that of action. But knowledge and action are here only two aspects of one and the same faculty. It is easy to see, indeed, that L the second definition is only a new form of the first, ** If instinct is, above all, the faculty of using an organized natural instrument, it must involve innate knowledge (potential or unconscious, it is true), both of this instru- ment and of the object to which it is applied. Instinct is therefore innate knowledge of a thing. But intelligence is the faculty of constructing unorganized- — that is to say artificial — instruments. If, on its account, nature gives up endowing the living being with the instruments that may serve him, it is in order that the living being may be able to vary his construction according to circumstances. The I essential function of intelligence is therefore to see the way I out of a difficulty in any circumstances whatever, to find . what is most suitable, what answers best the question

rn.l INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT

Bsked. Hence it bears essentially on the relations between a ^ven situation and the means of utihzing it. What ia innate in intellect, therefore, is the tendency to establish relations, and this tendency implies the natural know-

I ledge of certain very general relations, a kind of stuff that the activity of each particular intellect will cut up into more special relations. Where activity is directed toward manufacture, therefore, knowledge necessarily bears on relations. But this entirely Jonnai knowledge of intelligence has an immense advantage over the material knowledge of instinct. A form, just because it is empty, may be filled at will with any number of things in turn,

I even with those that are of no use. So that a formal knowledge \s not limited to what is practically useful, al- though it is in view of practical utility that it has made its appearance in the world. An intelligent being bears ] within himself the means to transcend his own nature. He transcends himself, however, less than he wishes, less also than he imagines himself to do. The purely formal character of inteUigence deprives it of the ballast necessary to enable it to settle itself on the objects that are of the most powerful interest to speculation. Instinct, on the contrary, has the desired materiaUty, but it is incapable of going so far in quest of its object; it does not speculate. Here we reach the point that most concerns our present inquiry. The difference that we shall now proceed to denote between instinct and intelligence is what the whole of this analysis was meant to bring out. We formulate it thus: Ttiere are things thai intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it vdll never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek

them.

It is necessary here to consider some preliminary de- tails that concern the mechanism of intelligence. We

152 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichai-.-

have said that the function of intelligence is to establish relations. Let us determine more precisely the nature of these relations. On this point we are bound to be either vague or arbitrary so long as we see in the intellect a faculty intended for pure speculation. We are then reduced to taking the general frames of the understanding for some- thing absolute, irreducible and inexplicable. The under- standing must have fallen from heaven with its fonn, as each of us is bom with his face. This form may be defined, of course, but that is all; there is no asking why it is what it is rather than an>'th!ng else. Thus, it will be Baid that the function of the intellect is essentially uni- fication, that the common object of all its operations is to introduce a certain unity into the diversity of phenomena, and so forth. But, in the first place, "unification" is a vague term, less clear than "relation" or even "thought," and says nothing more. And, moreover, it might be asked if the function of intelligence is not to divide even more than to unite. Finally, if the intellect proceeds as it does because it wishes to unite, and if it seeks unification simply because it has need of unifying, the whole of our knowledge becomes relative to certain re(]uirements of the mind that probably might have been entirely different from what they are: for an intellect differently shaped, know- ledge would have been different. Intellect being no longer dependent on anything, everything becomes dependent on it; and so, having placed the understanding too high, we end by putting too low the knowledge it gives us. Knowledge becomes relative, as soon as the intellect is made a kind of absolute. — We regard the human intellect, on the contrary, as relative to the needs of action. Postu- late action, and the very form of the intellect can be deduced from it. This form is therefore neither irreducible nor inexpUcable. And, precisely because it is not independent,

knowledge cannot be said to depend on it: knowledge
ceases to be a product of the intellect and becomes, in a
certain sense, part and parcel of reality.

Philosophers will reply that action takes place in an ordered world, that this order is itself thought, and that we beg the question when we explain the intellect by action, which presupposes it. They would be right if our point of view in the present chapter was to be our final one. We should then be dupes of an illusion like that of Spencer, who believed that the intellect is sufficiently explained as the impression left on us by the general characters of matter: as if the order inherent in matter were not intelligence itself! But we reserve for the nejtt chapter the question up to what point and with what method philosophy can attempt a real genesis of the intellect at the same time as of matter. For the moment, the problem that engages our attention is of a psychological order. We are asking what is the portion of the material world to which our in- tellect is specially adapted. To reply to this question, there is no need to choose a system of philosophy: it is enough to take up the point of ■view of common sense.

Let us start, then, from action, and lay down that the intellect aims, first of all, at constructing. This fabrication \a exercised exclusively on inert matter, in this sense, that even if it makes use of organized material, it treats it as inert, without troubling about the life which animated it. And of inert matter itself, fabrication 'deals only with the sohd; the rest escapes by its very fluidity. If, therefore, the tendency of the intellect is to fabricate, we may expect to find that whatever is fluid in the real will escape it in part, and whatever is life in the living will escape it altogether. Our inUlligence, as it leaves the hands of nature, has for Us chief diject the unorganized solid.

When we pass in review the intellectual functions,

we see that the intellect is never quite at its ease, never entirely at home, except when it is working upon inert matter, more particularly upon solids, ^\^lat is the most gCQeral property of the materia! world? It is extended: it presents to us objects external to other objects, and, in these objects, parts external to parts. No doubt, it is useful to us, in view of our ulterior manipulation, to regard each object as divisible into parts arbitrarily cut up, each part being again divisible as we like, and so on ad infinitum. But it is above all necessary, for our present manipulation, to regard the real object in hand, or the real elements into which we have resolved it, as provisionally final, and to treat them as so many units. To this possibiUty of de- composing matter as much as we please, and in any way we please, we allude when we speak of the continuily of material extension; but this continuity, as we see it, is nothing else but our ability, an ability that matter allows to us to choose the mode of discontinuity we shall find in it. It is always, in fact, the mode of discontinuity once chosen that appears to us as the actually real one and that which fixes our attention, just because it rules our action. Thus discontinuity is thought for itself; it is thinkable in itself; we form an idea of it by a positive act of our mind; while the intellectual representation of continuity is negative, being, at bottom, only the refusal of our mind, before any actually given system of decompo- sitioD, to regard it as the only possible one. Of the discontinuous alone does the intellect form a clear idea.

On the other hand, the objects we act on are certainly mobile objects, but the important thing for us to know ia whither the mobile object is going and where it is at any moment of its passage. In other words, our interest is directed, before all, to its actual or future positions, and not to the progress by which it passes from one position

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The Function of the Intellect 155

to another, progress which is the movement itself. In our actions, which are systematized movements, what we fix our mind on is the end or meaning of the movement, its design as a whole — in a word, the immobile plan of its execution. That which really moves in action interests us only so far as the whole can be advanced, retarded, or stopped by any incident that may happen on the way. From mobihty itself our intellect turns aside, because it has nothing to gain in dealing with it. If the intellect were meant for pure theorizing, it would take its place within movement, for movement is reality itself, and immobility is always only apparent or relative. But the intellect is meant for something altogether different. Unless it docs violence to itself, it takes the opposite course; it always starts from immobility, as if this were the ultimate reality: when it tries to form an idea of movement, it does so by constructing movement out of immobilities put together. This operation, whose illegitimacy and danger in the field of speculation we shall show later on (it leads to dead-locks, and creates artificially insoluble philosophical problems), is easily justified when we refer it to its proper goal. Intelligence, in its natural state, aims at a practically useful end. When it substitutes for movement immobUities put together, it does not pretend to reconstitute the move- ment such as it actually is; it merely replaces it with a practical equivalent. It is the philosophers who are mis- taken when they import into the domain of speculation a method of thinking which is made for action. But of this more anon. Suffice it now to say that to the stable and unchangeable our intellect is attached by virtue of its natural disposition. Of immobility alone does the in- tellect farm a clear idea.

Now, fabricating consists in carving out the fonn of an object in matter. What is the most important is