278 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



is unlimited. Now, from the limited to the unlimited 

 there is all the distance between the closed and the open. 

 It is not a difference of degree, but of kind. 



Radical therefore, also, is the difference between 

 animal consciousness, even the most intelligent, and 

 human consciousness. For consciousness corresponds 

 exactly to the living being s power of choice ; it is 

 co -extensive with the fringe of possible action that 

 surrounds the real action : consciousness is synonymous 

 with invention and with freedom. Now, in the animal, 

 invention is never anything but a variation on the theme 

 of routine. Shut up in the habits of the species, it 

 succeeds, no doubt, in enlarging them by its individual 

 initiative ; but it escapes automatism only for an instant, 

 for just the time to create a new automatism. The 

 gates of its prison close as soon as they are opened ; 

 by pulling at its chain it succeeds only in stretching 

 it. With man, consciousness breaks the chain. In 

 man, and in man alone, it sets itself free. The whole 

 history of life until man has been that of the effort of 

 consciousness to raise matter, and of the more or less com 

 plete overwhelming of consciousness by the matter which 

 has fallen back on it. The enterprise was paradoxical, 

 if, indeed, we may speak here otherwise than by metaphor 

 of enterprise and of effort. It was to create with matter, 

 which is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom, to 

 make a machine which should triumph over mechanism, 

 and to use the determinism of nature to pass through 

 the meshes of the net which this very determinism had 

 spread. But, everywhere except in man, consciousness 

 has let itself be caught in the net whose meshes it 

 tried to pass through : it has remained the captive of 

 the mechanisms it has set up. Automatism, which it 

 tries to draw in the direction of freedom, winds about 



