THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 281 



penetrates, man has, doubtless, kept something, but 

 of which he has kept only very little. // is as if a 

 vague and formless being^ whom we may call, as we will, 

 man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had 

 succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. 

 The losses are represented by the rest of the animal 

 world, and even by the vegetable world, at least in 

 what these have that is positive and above the accidents 

 of evolution. 



From this point of view, the discordances of which 

 nature offers us the spectacle are singularly weakened. 

 The organized world as a whole becomes as the soil 

 on which was to grow either man himself or a 

 being who morally must resemble him. The animals, 

 however distant they may be from our species, how 

 ever hostile to it, have none the less been useful 

 travelling companions, on whom consciousness has un 

 loaded whatever encumbrances it was dragging along, 

 and who have enabled it to rise, in man, to heights 

 from which it sees an unlimited horizon open again 

 before it. 



It is true that it has not only abandoned cumber 

 some baggage on the way ; it has also had to give up 

 valuable goods. Consciousness, in man, is pre-eminently 

 intellect. It might have been, it ought, so it seems, 

 to have been also intuition. Intuition and intellect 

 represent two opposite directions of the work of con 

 sciousness : intuition goes in the very direction of 

 life, intellect goes in the inverse direction, and thus 

 finds itself naturally in accordance with the movement 

 of matter. A complete and perfect humanity would be 

 that in which these two forms of conscious activity 

 should attain their full development. And, between 

 this humanity and ours, we may conceive any number 



