m THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 279 



it and drags it down. It has not the power to escape, 

 because the energy it has provided for acts is almost 

 all employed in maintaining the infinitely subtle and 

 essentially unstable equilibrium into which it has 

 brought matter. But man not only maintains his 

 machine, he succeeds in using it as he pleases. 

 Doubtless he owes this to the superiority of his brain, 

 which enables him to build an unlimited number 

 of motor mechanisms, to oppose new habits to the old 

 ones unceasingly, and, by dividing automatism against 

 itself, to rule it. He owes it to his language, which 

 furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in 

 which to incarnate itself and thus exempts it from 

 dwelling exclusively on material bodies, whose flux 

 would soon drag it along and finally swallow it up. 

 He owes it to social life, which stores and preserves 

 efforts as language stores thought, fixes thereby a 

 mean level to which individuals must raise them 

 selves at the outset, and by this initial stimulation 

 prevents the average man from slumbering and drives 

 the superior man to mount still higher. But our 

 brain, our society, and our language are only the 

 external and various signs of one and the same internal 

 superiority. They tell, each after its manner, the 

 unique, exceptional success which life has won at a 

 given moment of its evolution. They express the 

 difference of kind, and not only of degree, which 

 separates man from the rest of the animal world. 

 They let us guess that, while at the end of the vast 

 spring-board from which life has taken its leap, all 

 the others have stepped down, finding the cord stretched 

 too high, man alone has cleared the obstacle. 



It is in this quite special sense that man is the 

 &quot;term&quot; and the &quot;end&quot; of evolution. Life, we have 



