ii.] THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 165 



consider the results. We see that the intellect, so skilful 

 in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches 

 the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body 

 or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiff- 

 ness and the brutality of an instrument not designed for 

 such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches 

 us much in this matter. When we think of the cardinal, 

 urgent and constant need we have to preserve our bodies 

 and to raise our souls, of the special facilities given to each 

 of us, in this field, to experiment continually on ourselves 

 and on others, of the palpable injury by which the wrong- 

 ness of a medical or pedagogical practise is both made 

 manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stu- 

 pidity and especially at the persistence of errors. We 

 may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy with 

 which we treat the living like the lifeless and think all 

 reality, however fluid, under the form of the sharply defined 

 solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the 

 immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterized by a 

 natural inability to comprehend life. 



Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form 

 of life. While intelligence treats everything mechanically, 

 instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically. If the con- 

 sciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were 

 wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off into 

 action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give up 

 to us the most intimate secrets of life. For it only carries 

 out further the work by which life organizes matter — 

 so that we cannot say, as has often been shown, where 

 organization ends and where instinct begins. When the 

 little chick is breaking its shell with a peck of its beak, 

 it is acting by instinct, and yet it does but carry on the 

 movement which has borne it through embryonic life. 



