282 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP 



of possible stages, corresponding to all the degrees 

 imaginable of intelligence and of intuition. In this 

 lies the part of contingency in the mental structure 

 of our species. A different evolution might have led 

 to a humanity either more intellectual still or more 

 intuitive. In the humanity of which we are a part, 

 intuition is, in fact, almost completely sacrificed to 

 intellect. It seems that to conquer matter, and to 

 reconquer its own self, consciousness has had to 

 exhaust the best part of its power. This conquest, 

 in the particular conditions in which it has been accom 

 plished, has required that consciousness should adapt 

 itself to the habits of matter and concentrate all its 

 attention on them, in fact determine itself more 

 especially as intellect. Intuition is there, however, 

 but vague and above all discontinuous. It is a lamp 

 almost extinguished, which only glimmers now and 

 then, for a few moments at most. But it glimmers 

 wherever a vital interest is at stake. On our personality, 

 on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of 

 nature, on our origin and perhaps also on our destiny, 

 it throws a light feeble and vacillating, but which none 

 the less pierces the darkness of the night in which the 

 intellect leaves us. 



These fleeting intuitions, which light up their 

 object only at distant intervals, philosophy ought to 

 seize, first to sustain them, then to expand them and 

 so unite them together. The more it advances in this 

 work, the more will it perceive that intuition is mind 

 itself, and, in a certain sense, life itself: the intellect 

 has been cut out of it by a process resembling that 

 which has generated matter. Thus is revealed the 

 unity of the spiritual life. We recognize it only when 

 we place ourselves in intuition in order to go from 



