ii LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 187 



external perception, only attains the individual. But 

 we can conceive an inquiry turned in the same direc 

 tion 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 facts into general laws. No doubt 

 this philosophy will never obtain a knowledge of its 

 object comparable to that which science has of its own. 

 Intelligence remains the luminous nucleus around 

 which instinct, even enlarged and purified into in 

 tuition, 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 intelligence itself to show how in 

 tellectual moulds 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 moulds. 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 it establishes 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 intelli 

 gence, 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 



