142 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



to indicate that this force is limited, and that it soon 

 exhausts itself in its very manifestation. It is hard for 

 it to go far in several directions at once: it must choose. 

 Now, it has the choice between two modes of acting on 

 the material world: it can either effect this action directly 

 by creating an organized instrument to work with; or else 

 it can effect it indirectly through an organism which, in- 

 stead of possessing the required instrument naturally, 

 will itself construct it by fashioning inorganic matter. 

 Hence intelligence and instinct, which diverge more and 

 more as they develop, but which never entirely separate 

 from each other. On the one hand, the most perfect 

 instinct of the insect is accompanied by gleams of intelli- 

 gence, if only in the choice of place, time and materials 

 of construction: the bees, for example, when by exception 

 they build in the open air, invent new and really intelligent 

 arrangements to adapt themselves to such new con- 

 ditions. 1 But, on the other hand, intelligence has even 

 more need of instinct than instinct has of intelligence; 

 for the power to give shape to crude matter involves al- 

 ready a superior degree of organization, a degree to which 

 the animal could not have risen, save on the wings of 

 instinct. So, while nature has frankly evolved in the di- 

 rection of instinct in the arthropods, we observe in almost 

 all the vertebrates the striving after rather than the ex- 

 pansion of intelligence. It is instinct still which forms 

 the basis of their psychical activity; but intelligence is 

 there, and would fain supersede it. Intelligence does not 

 yet succeed in inventing instruments; but at least it tries 

 to, by performing as many variations as possible on the 

 instinct which it would like to dispense with. It gains 

 complete self-possession only in man, and this triumph 



1 Bouvier, "La Nidification des abeilles a l'air libre" (C. R. de I'Ae. 

 des sciences, 7 mai 1906). 



