192 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



passing through ; and it has thus been turned either 

 in the direction of intuition or in that of intellect. 

 Intuition, at first sight, seems far preferable to intellect, 

 since in it life and consciousness remain within them 

 selves. But a glance at the evolution of living beings 

 shows us that intuition could not go very far. On the 



o / 



side of intuition, consciousness found itself so restricted 

 by its envelope that intuition had to shrink into 

 instinct, that is, to embrace only the very small portion 

 of life that interested it ; and this it embraces only in 

 the dark, touching it while hardly seeing it. On this 

 side, the horizon was soon shut out. On the contrary, 

 consciousness, in shaping itself into intelligence, that is 

 to say in concentrating itself at first on matter, seems 

 to externalise itself in relation to itself; but, just 

 because it adapts itself thereby to objects from without, 

 it succeeds in moving among them and in evading the 

 barriers they oppose to it, thus opening to itself an 

 unlimited field. Once freed, moreover, it can turn 

 inwards on itself, and awaken the potentialities of in 

 tuition which still slumber within it. 



From this point of view, not only does consciousness 

 appear as the motive principle of evolution, but also, 

 among conscious beings themselves, man comes to 

 occupy a privileged place. Between him and the 

 animals the difference is no longer one of degree, but 

 of kind. We shall show how this conclusion is arrived 

 at in our next chapter. Let us now show how the 

 preceding analyses suggest it. 



A noteworthy fact is the extraordinary disproportion 

 between the consequences of an invention and the 

 invention itself. We have said that intelligence is 

 modelled on matter and that it aims in the first place 

 at fabrication. But does it fabricate in order to 



