Consider continuity. The aspect of life that is accessible to our intellect — as indeed to our senses, of which our intellect is the extension — is that wliieh offers a hold to our action. Now, to modify an object, we have to perceive it as divisible and discontinuous. From the pomt of view of positive science, an incomparable progress was realized when the organized tissues were resolved into cells. The study of the cell, in its turn, has shown it to be an organism whose complexity seems to grow, the more thoroughly it is examined. The more science advances, the more it sees the number grow of heterogeneous elements which are placed together, outside each other, to make up a living being. Does science thus get any nearer to life? Does it not, on the contrary, find that what is really life in the living seems to recede with every step by which it pushes further the detail of the parts combined? There is indeed already among scientists a tendency to regard the substance of the organism as continuous, and the cell as an artificial entity.' But, supposing this view were finally to prevail, it could only lead, on deeper study, to some other mode of analyzing of the living being, and so to a new discontinuity — although less removed, perhaps, from the real continuity of life. The truth is that this continuity cannot be thought by the intellect while it follows its natural movement. It implies at once the multiplicity of elements and the interpenetration of all by all, two conditions that can hardly be reconciled > We shall return to this point in chapter iii., p, 2fi9.
n.] THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 163
in the field id which our industry, and consequently our
intellect, is engaged.
Just as we separate in space, we fix in time. The in- tellect is not made to think evolvHon, in the proper sense of the word — that is to say, the continuity of a. change that is pure mobility. We shall not dwell here on this point, which we propose to study in a special chapter. Suffice it to say that the intellect represents becoming aa a series of states, each of which is homogeneous with itself and consequently does not change. Is our attention called to the internal change of one of these states? At once we decompose it into another series of states which, reunited, will be supposed to make up this internal modi- fication. Each of these new states must be invariable, or else their internal change, if we are forced to notice it, must be resolved again into a fresh series of invariable states, and so on to infinity. Here again, thinking con- sists in reconstituting, and, naturally, it is with given elements, and consequently with stable elements, that we reconstitute. So that, though we may do our beat to imitate the mobility of becoming by an addition that is ever going on, becoming itself slips through our fingers just when we think we are holding it tight.
Precisely because it is always trying to reconstitute, and to reconstitute with what is given, the intellect lets what is new in each moment of a history escape. It does not admit the unforeseeable. It rejects all creation. That definite antecedents bring forth a definite consequent, calculable as a function of them, is what satisfies our intellect. That a definite end calls forth definite means to attain it, is what we also understand. In both cases we have to do with the known which is combined with the known, in short, with the old which is repeated. Our intellect is there at its ease; and, whatever be the object,
{OHAF.
it will abstract, separate, eliminate, so as to substitute for the object itself, if necessary, an approximate equivalent in which things will happen in this way. But that each instant is a fresh endowment, that the new is ever upspring- ing, that the form just come into existence {although, when once produced, it may be regarded as an efEect de- termined by its causes) could never have been foreseen — because the causes here, unique in their kind, are part of the effect, have come into existence with it, and are de- termined by it as raucli as they determine it — all this we can feel within ourselves and also divine, by sympathy, outside ourselves, but we cannot think it, in the strict sense of the word, nor express it in terms of pure understanding. No wonder at that: we must remember what our intellect U meant for. The causality it seelcs and finds everywhere expresses the very mechanism of our industrj', in which we go on recomposing the same whole with the same parts, repeating the same movements to obtain the same result. The finality it understands tiest is the finality of our in- dustry, in which we worlc on a model given in advance, that is to say, old or composed of elements already known. As to invention properly so called, which is, however, the point of departure of industry itself, our intellect does not succeed in grasping it in its upspringing, that is to say, in its indivisibihty, nor in its fervor, that is to say, in its creativeness. Explaining it always consists in re- solving it, it the unforeseeable and new, into elements old or Imown, arranged in a different order. The intellect can no more admit complete novelty than real trecoming; that is to say, here again it lets an essential aspect of life escape, as if it were not intended to think such an object. All our analyses bring us to this conclusion. But it is hardly necessarj" to go into such long details concerning the mechanism of intellectual working; it is enough to
n.i THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 165
consider the results. We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkwai-d the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiff- ness and the brutality of an instrument not designed for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter. When we think of the cardinal, urgent and constant need we have to preserve our bodies and to raise our souls, of the special facilities given to each of us, in this field, to experiment continually on ourselves and on others, of the palpable injury by which the wrong- ness of a medical or pedagogical practise is both made manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stu- pidity and especially at the persistence of errors. We may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy with which we treat the li\-ing hke the lifeless and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the sharply defined solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The inleUed is characterized by a natural inabiiUy to comprehend life.
Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form of life. While intelligence treats ever>-thing mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically. If the con- sciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off into action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give up to us the most intimate secrets of life. For it only carries out further the work by which life organizes matter — so that we cannot' say, as has often been shown, where organization ends and where instinct begins. When the Uttle chick is breaking its shell with a peck of its beak, it is acting by instinct, and yet it does but carry on the movement which has borne it through embryonic life.
Inversely, in the course of embryonic life itself (especially when the embrj'o lives freely io the form of a larva), many of the acts accompUshed must be referred to instinct. The most essential of the primary instincts are really, therefore, vital processes. The potential consciousness that accompanies them is generally actualized only at the outset of the act, and leaves the rest of the process to go on by itself. It would only have to expand more widely, and then dive into its own depth completely, to be one with the generative force of life.
When we see in a living body thousands of cells work- ing together to a common end, dividing the task between them, Uving each for itself at the same time as for the others, preserving itself, feeding itself, reproducing itself, respond- ing to the menace of danger by appropriate defensive reactions, how can we help thinking of so many instincts? And yet these are the natural functions of the cell, the constitutive elements of ita vitality. On the other hand, when we see the bees of a hive forming a system so strictly organized that no individual can live apart from the others beyond a certain time, even though furnished with food and shelter, how can we help recognizing that the hive is really, and not metaphorically, a single organism, of which each bee is a cell united to the others by invisible bonds? The instinct that animates the bee is indistinguish- able, then, from the force that animates the cell, or is only a prolongation of that force. In extreme cases like this, instinct coincides with the work of organization.
Of course there are degrees of perfection in the same
instinct. Between the humble-bee, and the honey-bee,
for instance, the distance is great; and we pass from
one to the other through a great number of intermediaries,
which correspond to so many complications of the social
life. But the same diversity is found in the functioniog
THE NATURE OF rNSTINCT 167
of histological elements belonging to different tissues more or less akin. In both cases there are manifold variations on one and the same theme. The constancy of the theme is manifest, however, and the variations only fit it to the diversity of the circumstances.
Now, in both cases, in the instinct of the animal and in the vital properties of the cell, the same knowledge and the same ignorance are shown. AH goes on as if the cell knew, of the other cells, what concerns itself; as if the animal knew, of the other animals, what it can utilize — all else remaining in shade. It seems as if life, as soon as it has become bouad up in a species, is cut off from the rest of its own work, save at one or two points that are of vital concern to the species just arisen. Is it not plain that life goes to work here exactly Uke conscious- ness, exactly like memorj'? We trail behind us, unawares, the whole of our past; but our memory pours into the present only the odd recollection or two that in some way complete our present situation. Thus the instinctive knowledge which one species possesses of another on a certain particular point has its root in the very unity of life, which is, to use the expression of an ancient philoso- pher, a "whole sympathetic to itself." It is impossible to consider some of the special instincts of the animal and of the plant, evidently arisen in extraordinary cireumstances, without relating them to those recollections, seemingly forgotten, which spring up suddenly under the pressure of an urgent need.
No doubt many secondary instincts, and also many
varieties of primary instinct, admit of a scientific ex-
planation. Yet it is doubtful whether science, with
its present methods of explanation, will ever succeed in
analyzing instinct completely. The reason is that in-
stinct and intelligence are two divergent developments
Creatr^ Evolution
of one and the same principle, which in the one case re- mains within itself, in the other steps out of itself and becomes absorbed in the utilization of inert matter. This gradual divergence testihes to a radical incompatibihty, and points to the fact that it is impossible for intelligence to re-absorb instinct. That which is instinctive in instinct cannot be expressed in terms of intelligence, nor, conse- quently, can it be anaJyzed,