Whether it makes instinct a "compound reflex," or a habit formed intelligently that has become automatism, or a sura of small accidental advantages accumulated and fixed by selection, in every case science claims to resolve instinct completely either into intelligent actions, or into mechanisms built up piece by piece like those combined by our intelligence. I agree indeed that science is here within its function. It gives us, in default of a real analysis of the object, a translation of this object in terms of intelligence. But is it not plain that science itself invites philosophy to consider things in another way? If our biology was still that of Aristotle, if it regarded the series of Uving beings as unilinear, if it showed us the whole of life evolving towards intelligence and passing, to that end, through sensibility and instinct, we should be right, we, the intelligent beings, in turning back towards the earher and consequently inferior manifestations of life and in claiming to fit them, without deforming them, into the molds of our understanding. But one of the clearest results of biologj' has been to show that evolution has taken place along divergent lines. It is at the extremity of two of these lines — the two principal — that we find
intelligence and instinct in forms almost pure. Why, then, should instinct be resolvable into intelligent elements? Why, even, into terms entirely intelligible? Is it not obvious that to think here of the intelligent, or of the abao- lutely intelligible, is to go back to the Aristotelian theory of nature? No doubt it is better to go back to that than to stop short before instinct as before an unfathomable mystery. But, though instinct is not within the domain of intelligence, it is not situated beyond the limits of mind. In the phenomena of feeling, in unreflecting sympathy and antipathy, we experience in ourselves — though under a much vaguer form, and one too much penetrated with intelligence — something of what must happen in the consciousness of an insect acting by instinct. Evolu- tion does but sunder, in order to develop them to the end, elements which, at their origin, interpenetrated each other. More precisely, inteUigence is, before anj-thing else, the faculty of relating one point of space to another, one material object to another; it appUes to all things, but remains outside them; and of a deep cause it perceives only the effects spread out side by side. Whatever be the force that is at work in the genesis of the nervous system of the caterpillar, to our eyes and our intelligence it is only a juxtaposition of nerves and nervous centres. It is true that we thus get the whole outer effect of it. The Ammophila, no doubt, discerns but a very little of that force, just what concerns itself; but at least it discerns it from within, quite otherwise than by a process of know- ledge — by an intuition {lived rather than represented), which is probably like what we call divining sympathy.
A very significant fact is the swing to and fro of scientific theories of instinct, from regarding it as intelligent to regarding it as simply intelligible, or, shall I say, between likening it to an intelligence "lapsed" and reducmg it
to a pure mechanism.' Each of these systems of explana- tion triumphs in its criticism of the other, the first when it shows us that instinct cannot be a mere reflex, the oEffei" when it declares that instinct is something different from intelligence, even fallen into unconsciousness. What can this mean but that they are two symbolisms, equally acceptable in certain respects, and, in other respects, equally inadequate to their object? The concrete explana- tion, no longer scientific, but metaphysical, must be sought along quite another path, not in the direction of iytelligence, but in that of "sympathy."
Instinct is sympathy. If this sympathy could extend its object and also reflect upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operations — just as intelligence, developed and disciplined, guides us into matter. For — we cannot too often repeat it — intelligence and instinct are turned in opposite directions, the former towards inert matter, the latter towards life. Intelligence, by means of science, which is its work, will deLver up to us more and more completely the secret of physical operations; of life it brings us, and moreover only claims to bring us, a transla^ tion in terms of inertia. It goes all round life, taking from outside the greatest possible number of ■views of it, draw- ing it into itself instead of entering into it. But it is to the very inwardness of life that inhdiion leads us^by intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlai^ng it indefinitely.
That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved
' See. in purticiikr, among recent worka, Bethe. "Diirfen wir den Ameisen und Bieuen paychiache QualiUftea euachreibea7" (Areh. j. d. gti. PhyiioUtgie, 189S), and Purel, "Uq Apergu de p^chobgie oom- fftito" iAnnit jayehotogiqut, 1895).
Life and Consciousness
by the existence in man of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception. Our eye perceives the features of the living being, merely as assembled, not as mutually organized. The intention of Jife, the simple movement that runs through the lines, that binds them together and pves them significance, escapes it. This intention is just what the artist tries to regain, in placing himself back within the object by a Idnd of sympathy, in breaking down, by an effort of intuition, the barrier that space puts up between him and his model. It is true that this aesthetic intuition, like external perception, only attains the individual. But we can conceive an inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would take life in general for its object, just as physical science, in following to the end the direction pointed out by external perception, pro- longs the individual facta into general laws. No doubt this philosophy will never obtain a knowledge of its object comparable to that which science has of its own. In- telligence remains the luminous nucleus around which instinct, even enlarged and purified into intuition, forms only a vague nebulosity. But, in default of knowledge properly so called, reserved to pure intelligence, intuition may enable us to grasp what it is that intelligence fails to give us, and indicate the means of supplementing it. On the one hand, it will utilize the mechanism of intelli- gence itself to show how intellectual molds cease to be strictly applicable; and on the other hand, by its own work, it will suggest to us the vague feeling, if nothing more, of what must take the place of intellectual molds. Thus, intuition may bring the intellect to recognize that life does not quite go into the category of the many nor yet into that of the one; that neither mechanical causality nor finality can give a sufficient interpretation of the vital process. Then, by the sympathetic communication which
C11eati\'E Evolution
it estBbUshte between us and the rest of the living, by the expansion of our consciousness which it brings about, it introduces us into life's own domain, which is reciprocal interpenetration, endlessly continued creation. But, though it thereby transcends intelligence, it is from intelligence that has come the push that has made it rise to the point it has reached. Without Intelligence, it would have remained in the form of instinct, riveted to the special object of its practical interest, and turned outward by it into movements of locomotion.
How theory of knowledge must take account of these two faculties, intellect and intuition, and how also, for want of establishing a sufficiently clear distinction between them, it becomes involved in inextricable difficulties, creat- ing phantoms of ideas to which there cling phantoms of problems, we shall endeavor to show a little further on. We shall see that the problem of knowledge, from this point of view, is one with the metaphysical problem, and that both one and the other depend upon experience. On the one hand, indeed, if intelligence is charged with matter and instinct with life, we must squeeze them both in order to get the double essence from them; meta phyRics ia t herefore dependent u|xin thwirv nf knnwlpH f rp But, on the other hand, if consciousness has thus split up into intuition and intelligence, it is because of the need it had to apply itself to matter at the same time as it had to follow tlie stream of life. The double form of consciousness is then due to the double form of the real, and theory of knowledge must be dependent upon metaphysics. In fact, each of these two lines of thought leads to the other; they form a circle, and there can be no other centre to the circle but the empirical study of evolution. It is only in seeing consciousness run through matter, lose itself tiiere and find itself there again, divide and reconstitute
Life and Consciousness
itself, that we shall form an idea of the mutual opposition
of the two terms, as also, perhaps, of their common origin. But, on the other hand, by dwelling on this opposition of the two elements and on this identity of origin, perhaps we shall bring out more clearly the meaning of evolution itself.
Such will be the aim of our next chapter. But the
facts that we have just noticed must have already sug-
gested to us the idea that life is connected either with
consciousness or with something that resembles it.
Throughout the whole extent of the animal kingdom, we have said, consciousness seems proportionate to the) living being's power of choice. It lights up the zone of potentialities that surrounds the act. It fills the interval between what is done and what might be done. Looked at from without, we may regard it as a simple aid to action, a light that action kindles, a momentary spark flying up from the friction of real action against possible actions. But we must also point out that things would go on in just the same way if consciousness, instead of being the effect, were the cause. We might suppose that consciousness, even in the most rudimentary animal, covers by right an enormous field, but is compressed in fact in a kind of vise: each advance of the nervous centres, by giving the organism a choice between a larger number of actions, calls forth the potentialities that are capable of surrounding the real, thus opening the vise wider and allowing consciousness to pass more freely. In this second hypothesis, as in the first, consciousness is still the instrument of action; but it is even more true to say that action is the instrument of consciousness; for the complicating of action with action, and the opposing of action to action, are for the imprisoned consciousness the only possible means to set itself free. How, then, shall we choose between the two hypotheses?
If the first IS true, consciousness must express exactly, at each instant, the state of the brain; there is strict parallelism (so far as intelligible) between the psychical and the cerebral state. On the second hypothesis, on the contrary, there is indeed solidaiity and interdependence between the brain and consciousness, but not parallelism: the more comphcated the brain becomes, thus giving the organism greater choice of possible actions, the more does consciousness outrun its physical concomitant. Thus, the recollection of the same spectacle probably modifies in the same way a dog's brain and a man's brain, if the perception has been the same; yet the recollection must be very different in the man's consciousness from what it is in the dog's. In the dog, the recollection remains the captive of perception; it is brought back to conscious- ness only when an analogous perception recalls it by re- producing the same spectacle, and then it is manifested by the recognition, acted rather than Ihoughi, of the present perception much more than by an actual reappearance of the recollection itself, Man, on the contrary, is capable of calling up the recollection at will, at any moment, in- dependently of the present perception. He is not limited to playing his past life again; he represents and dreams it. The local modification of the brain to which the recollection is attached being the same in each case, the psychological difference between the two recollections cannot have its ground in a particular difference of detail between the two cerebral mechanisms, but in the difference between the two brains taken each as a whole. The more complex of the two, in putting a greater number of mechanisms in opposition to one another, has enabled consciousness to disengage itself from the restraint of one and all and to reach independence. That things do happen in this way, that the second of the two hypotheses is that which must
fSCTOUSNESS