138 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



the matter of intelligence, the apes and elephants, are 

 those that can use an artificial instrument occasionally. 

 Below, but not very far from them, come those that 

 recognize a constructed object: for example, the fox, which 

 knows quite well that a trap is a trap. No doubt, there is 

 intelligence wherever there is inference; but inference, 

 which consists in an inflection of past experience in the 

 direction of present experience, is already a beginning 

 of invention. Invention becomes complete when it is 

 materialized in a manufactured instrument. Towards 

 that achievement the intelligence of animals tends as 

 towards an ideal. And though, ordinarily, it does not 

 yet succeed in fashioning artificial objects and in making 

 use of them, it is preparing for this by the very variations 

 which it performs on the instincts furnished by nature. 

 As regards human intelligence, it has not been sufficiently 

 noted that mechanical invention has been from the first 

 its essential feature, that even to-day our social life gravi- 

 tates around the manufacture and use of artificial instru- 

 ments, that the inventions which strew the road of progress 

 have also traced its direction. This we hardly realize, 

 because it takes us longer to change ourselves than to 

 change our tools. Our individual and even social habits 

 survive a good while the circumstances for which they were 

 made, so that the ultimate effects of an invention are not 

 observed until its novelty is already out of sight. A 

 century has elapsed since the invention of the steam- 

 engine, and we are only just beginning to feel the depths 

 of the shock it gave us. But the revolution it has effected 

 in industry has nevertheless upset human relations al- 

 together. New ideas are arising, new feelings are on the 

 way to flower. In thousands of years, when, seen from 

 the distance, only the broad lines of the present age will 

 still be visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for 



