&amp;gt; 



202 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



acting, to come into touch with reality and even to 

 live it, but only in the measure in which it concerns 

 the work that is being accomplished and the furrow 

 that is being ploughed, such is the function of human 

 intelligence. Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence 

 we draw the very force to labour and to live. From 

 this ocean of life, in which we are immersed, we are 

 continually drawing something, and we feel that our 

 being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has 

 been formed therein by a kind of local concentration. 

 Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve again into 

 the Whole. Intelligence, rcabsorbed into its principle, 

 may thus live back again its own genesis. But the 

 enterprise cannot be achieved in one stroke ; it is 

 necessarily collective and progressive. It consists in an 

 interchange of impressions which, correcting and adding 

 to each other, will end by expanding the humanity in 

 us and making us even transcend it. 



But this method has against it the most inveterate 

 habits of the mind. It at once suggests the idea of a 

 vicious circle. In vain, we shall be told, you claim to 

 go beyond intelligence : how can you do that except 

 by intelligence ? All that is clear in your conscious 

 ness is intelligence. You are inside your own thought; 

 you cannot get out of it. Say, if you like, that the 

 intellect is capable of progress, that it will see more 

 and more clearly into a greater and greater number 

 of things ; but do not speak of engendering it, for 

 it is with your intellect itself that you would have to 

 do the work. 



The objection presents itself naturally to the mind. 

 But the same reasoning would prove also the im 

 possibility of acquiring any new habit. It is of the 

 essence of reasoning to shut us up in trie circle of 



