such as that according to which consciousness is attached to certain neurons, and is thrown off from their work hke 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 reaUty, a hving 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 Ls accumulated in the muscles rather than in the nervous system itself) ; its nervous centres indicate, by their developmejit and their configuration, the more or less extended choice it will have among more or less numerous and compUcated actions. Now, since the awakening ot 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 mod- eled on that of the cerebral activity. In reality, conscious- ness does not spring from the brain; but brain and con- ficiousness 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 clurice that the living being has at its disposal. It is precisely because a cerebral state expresses simply
m.i THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 263
what there is of nascent actiori in the corresponding psychical state, that the psychical state tells us more than the cerebral state. The consciousness of a hving being, as we have tried to prove elsewhere, is inseparable from its brain in the sense in which a sharp knife is in- separable 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, Hke that of the ape and that of the man, are very much alike, we cannot conclude that the correspond- ing 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 exer- cise, of constructing any sort of object, in short of ac- quiring 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 ^ves 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 ani- mal consciousness, even the most intelligent, and human consciousness. For consciousness corresponds exactly to the hving being's power of choice; it is co-extensive with the fringe of possible action that surrounds the real action:
264 Cre.\Tive Evolution
consciousness is syTionymoiis with invention and with freedom. Now, in tlie animal, invention is never any- thing but a variation on the theme of routine. Shut up in the habits of the species, it succeeds, no doubt, in en- lar^g them by its individual initiative; but it escapes automatism only for an instant, for just the time to create a new automatism. Th« 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 com- plete 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, end to use the determmism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this very determinism had spread. But, everj-where 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
On
itself, to nile it. He owes it to his language, which . furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in which . to incarnate itseK 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 in- dividuals must raise themselves at the outset, and by this initial stimulation prevents the average man from slum- bering 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 hfe has talien its leap, all the others have stepped down, finding the cord stretched too high, man alone has cleared the obstacle.
It is in tills 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 es- sentially 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 abun- dantly evident that the rest of nature is not for the sake of man: we struggle hke the other species, we have struggled against other species. Moreover, if the evolution of hfe 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 r^ard humanity, such as we have it before our eyes, as
(CHAP.
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 Hnes 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 circum- ference 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. Everj-where 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 in- definitely, 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, doubt- less, kept something, but of which he has kept only very little. It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may coil, as we wUl, man or superman, had sought to realize kiinself, 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 sijcctacio 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
m.i
The Meaning Op Evolution
to it, have none the less been useful traveling companions, on whom consciousness has unloaded whatever encum- brances 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 in- verse 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 con- scious 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 inteJIigence and of intuition. In this hes 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 beat part of its power. This conquest, in the particular conditions in which it has been accompUshed, has required that consciousness should adapt itself to the habits of matter and concentrate all its attention on them, in fact determine itself more espe- cially as intellect. Intuition is there, however, but vague and above all discontinuous. It is a lamp almost ex- tinguished, which only glimmers now and then, for a few momenta at most. But it glimmers wherever a vital
interest is at stake. On our personality, on our litierty, on the place we occupy in the wliole 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 ua.
These fleeting intuitions, which hght 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 hfe. We recog- nize it only when we place ourselves in uituition in order to go from intuition to the intellect, for from the intellect we shall never pass to intuition.