NJ 



INTRODUCTION 



The history of the evolution of life, incomplete as it yet 

 is, already reveals to us how the intellect has been formed, 

 by an uninterrupted progress, along a line which ascends 

 through the vertebrate series up to man. It shows us 

 in the faculty of understanding an appendage of the faculty 

 of acting, a more and more precise, more and more complex 

 and supple adaptation of the consciousness of living be- 

 ings to the conditions of existence that are made for them. 

 Hence should result this consequence that our intellect, 

 in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the 

 perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent 

 the relations of external things among themselves — in 

 short, to think matter. Such will indeed be one of the 

 conclusions of the present essay. We shall see that the 

 human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, 

 more especially among solids, where our action finds its 

 fulcrum and our industry its tools; that our concepts 

 have been formed on the model of solids; that our logic 

 is, pre-eminently, the logic of solids; that, consequently, 

 our intellect triumphs in geometry, wherein is revealed 

 the kinship of logical thought with unorganized matter, 

 and where the intellect has only to follow its natural move- 

 ment, after the lightest possible contact with experience, 

 in order to go from discovery to discovery, sure that ex- 

 perience is following behind it and will justify it invariably. 

 But from this it must also follow that our thought, 

 in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting the 



true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary 



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