174 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



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 wrongness of a medical or 

 pedagogical practice is both made manifest and 

 punished at once, we are amazed at the stupidity 

 and especially at the persistence of errors. We 

 may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy 

 with which we treat the living like 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 intellect is characterized by a natural inability to 

 comprehend life. 



Instinct, on the contrary, is moulded on the very 

 form of life. While intelligence treats everything 

 mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organi 

 cally. If the consciousness 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 little 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 



