xii CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



only if it claims, such as it is, to present to us life — that is 

 to say, the maker of the stereotype-plate. 



Must we then give up fathoming the depths of life? 

 Must we keep to that mechanistic idea of it which the 

 understanding will always give us — an idea necessarily 

 artificial and symbolical, since it makes the total activity 

 of life shrink to the form of a certain human activity which 

 is only a partial and local manifestation of life, a result 

 or by-product of the vital process? We should have to do 

 so, indeed, if life had employed all the psychical potential- 

 ities it possesses in producing pure understandings — that 

 is to say, in making geometricians. But the line of evo- 

 lution that ends in man is not the only one. On other 

 paths, divergent from it, other forms of consciousness have 

 been developed, which have not been able to free themselves 

 from external constraints or to regain control over them- 

 selves, as the human intellect has done, but which, none 

 the less, also express something that is immanent and 

 essential in the evolutionary movement. Suppose these 

 other forms of consciousness brought together and amalga- 

 mated with intellect: would not the result be a conscious- 

 ness as wide as life? And such a consciousness, turning 

 around suddenly against the push of life which it feels 

 behind, would have a vision of life complete — would it 

 not? — even though the vision were fleeting. 



It will be said that, even so, we do not transcend our 

 intellect, for it is still with our intellect, and through our 

 intellect, that we see the other forms of consciousness. 

 And this would be right if we were pure intellects, if there 

 did not remain, around our conceptual and logical thought, 

 a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of 

 which has been formed the luminous nucleus that we call 

 the intellect. Therein reside certain powers that are 



