184 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP 



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 living 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 earlier 

 and consequently inferior manifestations of life and in 

 claiming to fit them, without deforming them, into the 

 moulds of our understanding. But one of the clearest 

 results of biology has been to show that evolution has 

 taken place along divergent lines. It is at the ex 

 tremity 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 absolutely 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 pheno 

 mena of feeling, in unreflecting sympathy and anti 

 pathy, we experience in ourselves, though under a 

 much vaguer form, and one too much penetrated with 

 intelligence, something of what must happen in the 



