i 9 o CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP 



there is indeed solidarity and interdependence between 

 the brain and consciousness, but not parallelism : the 

 more complicated the brain becomes, thus giving the 

 organism greater choice of possible actions, the more 

 does consciousness outrun its physical concomitant. 

 Thus, the recollection of the same spectacle probably 

 modifies in the same way a dog s brain and a man s 

 brain, if the perception has been the same ; yet the 

 recollection must be very different in the man s con 

 sciousness from what it is in the dog s. In the dog, 

 the recollection remains the captive of perception ; 

 it is brought back to consciousness only when an 

 analogous perception recalls it by reproducing the same 

 spectacle, and then it is manifested by the recognition, 

 acted rather than thought^ of the present perception 

 much more than by an actual reappearance of the 

 recollection itseli&quot;. Man, on the contrary, is capable 

 of calling up the recollection at will, at any moment, 

 independently of the present perception. He is not 

 limited to -playing his past life again ; he represents and 

 dreams it. The local modification of the brain to 

 which the recollection is attached being the same in each 

 case, the psychological difference between the two 

 recollections cannot have its ground in a particular 

 difference of detail between the two cerebral mechanisms, 

 but in the difference between the two brains taken each 

 as a whole. The more complex of the two, in putting 

 a greater number of mechanisms in opposition to one 

 another, has enabled consciousness to disengage itself 

 from the restraint of one and all and to reach inde 

 pendence. That things do happen in this way, that the 

 second of the two hypotheses is that which must be 

 chosen, is what we have tried to prove, in a former 

 work, by the study of facts that best bring into relief 



