ii LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 189 



Such will be the aim of our next chapter. But 

 the facts that we have just noticed must have already 

 suggested 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 conscious 

 ness, instead of being the effect, were the cause. We 

 might suppose that consciousness, even in the most rudi 

 mentary animal, covers by right an enormous field, but 

 is compressed in fact in a kind of vice : 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 vice 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, 



